It's New Orleans: Happy Hour

Until we're allowed back into bars in New Orleans and until people feel comfortable coming down and sitting around having a cocktail with random strangers, we're revisiting some our best shows from the past decade. Today Happy Hour Digital Producer, Andrew "C-Rock" Cirac has picked this episode, so here's the Return of the Random All Cajun Happy Hour Special.  Happy Hour is billed as “Random conversation with folks who have nothing in common.” Anything that’s truly random will, sooner or later, appear to us not to be. Like flipping a coin and getting four “heads” in a row. Or inviting random people to sit around a table at a bar in New Orleans and discovering they’re all Cajun. Louis Michot is the fiddle player and lead singer in the Cajun band Lost Bayou Ramblers. You don’t get much more Cajun than Louis and his tales of Petit Paris (aka St Martinville), living in Broussard, Lafayette, and out in the woods of Arnaudville. Louis plays two songs on this Happy Hour, accompanied on one of them by fellow Cajun Andrew Duhon. Here in New Orleans we pronounce Andrew’s name Doo-Hon but if you go a few miles West (just how many is open to debate) it’s pronounced Doo-Yong. Until you get a few miles out of Lafayette, into Texas, where it reverts to doo-hon, as evidenced by Louis’ dog whose name was Clint Duhon, pronounced the Port Arthur way ’cause that’s where he came from. Lizzie Guitreau is a Baton Rouge Cajun who decided that her inspiration from watching the TV show House as a kid should propel her into making TV shows rather than medicine. Lizzie went to UNO for film, started a band (of film makers) and is still working with them today, as Worklight Pictures. Ready for the next weird Cajun coincidence? Worklight Pictures are making a documentary about The Lost Bayou Rambers. It’s called On Va Continuer (we will continue). Brandon Beeyard can’t hide his true identity too long. Yes, it turns out his name is really spelled Bulliard, and he’s Cajun, from, wait for it, St Martinville aka Petit Paris, and his family is related to Louis’s wife’s family. Brandon is headed for self-propelled meta-stardom (no, that’s not a typo, though he might also be bound for mega-stardom) by way of his of his revalatory and inspirational life-story podcast, Dreamster. Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur – yes, that’s a Cajun name! - are at our website.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the Happy Hour annals of "random people who have nothing in common," the day artist Katrina Brees meets Tank and the Bangas stands out to Happy Hour Live Feed Video Director Asher Griffith as the Best Of Happy Hour.  Where's Karina? If you ever wondered what happened to Karina Nathan she’s now Kevin Simons. And Karen Regis. And Krystal Sedona. And Chi Chi the lead singer of the Girl Dawgs, who is actually a dog. Katrina Brees sheds some light on this fantastic array of personalities, and their wardrobes. Go Tank or Go Home Tank from Tank and the Bangas has her own specialty wardrobe and range of personas too. Her wardrobe doesn’t extend to panties (which she has given up wearing) but she does occasionally wear boy shorts to boost her booty. Her personas start out with Terianne Michelle Ball in New Orleans East and extend to the woman sorting through damaged goods on aisle 4 at Walmart. Norman Spence and Merell Burket from Tank’s band, Tank and the Bangas, join the party – but strictly under their own names. Hello, Ricky! Ricky Lemann’s alter ego is Frederick, his real name. Ricky could have gone with alter ego #2, Fred, but he’s keeping it real, pleading “the fifth” on a range of issues. Photos from this show by sunny Alison Moon at the now defunct Wayfare at our website.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Still barred from hanging out in bars in New Orleans, in the interests of public health, we continue to revisit standout shows from years gone by. This show, in which Humidor Saves The World Again, is the first Happy Hour after the election of Donald J Trump in 2016. Even then we knew things were going to go to Hell. If only podcasting was as popular in 2016 as it is today. Maybe somebody in DC would have heard this conversation and we could, indeed have saved the world. For now though all we can do is look back and laugh, and try not cry in our beer.  Austin Alward, aka Aus-T the Franco rap star, has a plan to save the country and the world from rampant Trumpism. It involves the internet, a Cuban cigar store owner, and a bunch of New Orleans actors and musicians. It might have been just crazy enough to work. Jazz great Mitchel Forman, and singer-songwriters Sam Doores from The Deslondes and Andrew Duhon have their own plan. It involves a searing rendition of I Shall Be Released, a tribute to both Leonard Cohen and the nation. Actress Teri Wyble made it out of dance school in Lafayette to become a critically acclaimed actress, a go-go dancer at Harrah’s Casino, and an international body painting sensation. This really is one of the greatest Happy Hours in the history of the show. When we first published this show we sent an admonition with it: "If you were thinking of leaving New Orleans this will make you stay. If you are thinking of moving here, call U-Haul, this will tip you over the edge." Photos from the now defunct Wayfare are by Alison Moon. For more Best of Happy Hour, try this.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's nothing more totally "New Orleans" than poboys, drag queens, and Cowboy Mouth. That's why, till we can go back in bars and hang out, Happy Hour photographer Jill Lafleur picks this show as her favorite from the past few years to revisit. Drag Queens Poppy Tooker is New Orleans first lady of food. From her weekly TV appearances on Steppin’ Out to to her weekly radio show and podcast, Poppy is the best known foodie in the city. Poppy’s latest venture is a collaboration with a large group of drag queens to produce a strong of drag queen brunches around town, culminating in her 6th book, simply called Drag Queen Brunch. You could have found out any of this information in any New Orleans publication. What you won’t have heard anywhere but here is the explanation to this sentences Poppy utters by way of her current situation: “I’m not dead and I’m not knocked up.” Cowboy Mouth Fred LeBlanc is the larger than life front man of the band Cowboy Mouth. If you’ve ever been to a Cowboy Mouth show or heard any of Fred’s media appearances you have probably thought Fred’s life is an open book. Well, there might be a couple of chapters of the book you hadn’t heard about. Probably doubtful that you’ve heard Fred’s opinions on marriage or cross-dressing anywhere else. Or known anything about his relationship to the Poboy shop, Melba’s Po Boys. Poboys Scott Wolfe Sr is the owner of Melba’s Po Boy Shop, on the corner of North Claiborbne and Elysian Fields, the busiest Po Boy shop in the world. Scott is also the owner of the wildly successful local New Orleans grocery chain, Wagner’s. Yes, he’s the marketing genius who came up with the slogan “You can’t beat Wagner’s Meat.” Scott’s extraordinary flair for marketing can be found in full display at Melba’s where they’re open 24 hours a day, have a giant laundromat where each machine is named and themed for a local New Orleans celebrity – you can wash your clothes in the Fred LeBlanc machine for example – and a 24/7 daiquiri shop.  This Happy Hour is a classic no-holds-barred conversation with people who are comfortable in their own skin and not hesitant about telling it like it is. If you’d like to see Jill Lafleur’s photos from this show recorded live at Wayfare,  you’ll find them along with much more right here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the annals of “You never know what the hell is going to come up in conversation,” this Happy Hour would have to rank at the top of the list. That's why, till we can go back into bars in new Orleans, Happy Hour producer Graham da Ponte has chosen this as her favorite show of the past 5 years - yes, it's the return of Clit Sit Meditation. Aidi Kansas (her real name) left behind a career as a pet portrait artist to pursue her abilities as a psychic energy healer and has stumbled into the world of getting women to reach spiritual enlightenment by stroking their own clitoris. Aidi calls it Clit Sit Meditation. Masturbatory meditation is only able to be practiced by people with a clitoris, in other words not men. Men, however, can have their own problems with too little ejaculation that can lead to porn and all manner of bad behavior. Talking of badly behaved men, Hitler, according to John Hebert, would have been a nicer person if he’d stayed off of the crystal meth. Apparently only the 1930’s equivalent of Photoshop saved Adolf from being portrayed as the meth-head he really was. Atoning for his owns sins, and some of his family’s (“My mother and I were bar fighters”), John is the guy behind all the red and white signs that say “LOVE” nailed to phone poles all around New Orleans. John Lisi makes a welcome return visit to Happy Hour with his shiny Dobro, a fistful of stories, and a song. Andrew Duhon starts things off on the good foot with a bit of beard oil that was produced by a prisoner friend of Aidi’s. The hour goes by way too fast. If you start listening to this make sure you can listen to the whole 60 minutes because you won’t be turning this off.  Photos at what once was Wayfare by Alison Moon are at our website.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After making Happy Hour for nearly 10 years and meeting with random folks in various bars around New Orleans, this is the very first show where we just turn on the mics, put the Zoom link out on the internet and sit back and see who shows up. Predictably, we get a bunch of people trying to hack the show down and hijack us with a bunch of porn, but other than a few salacious moments, our Digital producer Andrew “C-Rock” Cirac manages to run a tight ship and let in a few folks from around the country. One of them is David Wilkins, who is calling in from a small town just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. David lives with his wife of 35 years – they got married at 18 right out of high school – and for company they open their home to folks who pass by on bicycles. These are all members of a community of cyclists united by their membership of an organization called WarmShowers.org Asher Griffith is Happy Hour’s Facebook Live director, currently hunkering down with his mom in a small town called Greers Ferry, which, apparently, would have been spelled with an apostrophe if it wasn’t in rural Fox News-driven Alabama where niceties like grammar don’t matter that much.  On this show we learn that Asher has a secret life as a musician, that started with his first band Love Hog, and only terminated with his most recent band, Grass Mud Horse. Asher plays a song on this Happy Hour that manages to combine two of America’s rural ways of life: cowboys and masturbation. Other guests on today’s show include Thomas Walsh, Graham daPonte, Monique Pyle, Christopher Roth, and a guy playing an accordion player whose identity remains a mystery. Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur are at our website.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Matt Haines went to school to learn to become a classical trombone player with visions of playing trombone in an orchestra. But plans change. Initially Matt started teaching people to play in marching bands, which lead him to Thailand, not necessarily known for its place on the brass band pantheon, and then to new Orleans, the home of the hippest trombone players on the planet. That’s when Matt quit playing trombone. He’s now a writer. Ashley Herbert is the CEO of a company called Bart’s Office. They are office workspace professionals. They set up offices, move offices, and facilitate every aspect of commercial office space. So now what happens? Now everybody’s working from home and too frisked out to go back into the office? Take a listen to Ashley’s hands-on analysis of what’s going on in the world of office work. It’s sobering, even for Happy Hour. Jay Winfield was too preoccupied by people falling ill around him at the beginning of the pandemic to think about music, but things are better now and he’s back into the swing of playing. On this Happy Hour he plays a Stevie Wonder song to celebrate Stevie’s birthday, and a Nora Jones song to temp fate and see if he can get Happy Hour sued. Seeing we’re still not allowed back in bars, this Happy Hour was conducted on Zoom, so we were able to be joined by a bunch of folks who dropped by. That’s the one upside to not being in a bar, but it’s the only one. Things are opening up in New Orleans but if this collection of people is anything to go by, nobody is going out. See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur on our website. Look back at a happier time when we used to hang out in bars here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Isaac Toups is one of the most talented and celebrated chefs in New Orleans. Isaac was a finalist on the TV show Top Chef and he’s currently a finalist for the prestigious James Beard Award for Best Chef South, which is the food equivalent of the Oscars. But before all that, Isaac was a winner of the Tadpole competition in his native Rayne, Louisiana. Rayne bills itself as The Frog Capital of the World (no kidding, look it up) and Isaac was the winner of the baby competition there, back when he was a baby. The best bay in Rayne, therefore, is the winner of the Tadpole Award. You can’t make this stuff up, and you can’t do justice it in writing, you need to hear this in Isaac’s own words, here on Happy Hour. Sara Lewis is running for Judge. The court she is looking to preside over is New Orleans First City Court. It’s a small claims court where there no jury. As somebody mentions on this show, it’s kind of lie reality TV court, except it’s actually reality. You can vote for Sara if you live in New Orleans, on July 11th if the election isn’t postponed again as it has been twice already. Sara doesn’t have a campaign slogan, yet, but today’s suggestions from the assembled Happy Hour guests and crew include “Lewis will do us,” “Small Claims Sara,” and “Sara is Fairer.” Lori Tipton and Andy Overslaugh might be New Orleans’ most interesting couple. And in New Orleans that’s saying something. Lori and Andy have both been on Happy Hour previously, but as Lori says, “We don’t usually do much together.” Two of the interesting aspects of their life is (a) they date other people and (b) they’re both exponents of various forms of therapeutic psychedelic exploration. So you think you’ve had it tough being cooped up in your house for the past 8 weeks? Imagine what Andy and Lori are going through. Lori and Andy have both had a long career in the New Orleans service industry, and Isaac is fighting to keep his restaurant open. If you’re interested in a front-line report and prognosis of the future of the service industry in New Orleans, take a listen to this conversation. Photos by Jill Lafleur. Lori’s super-popular previous appearance on Happy Hour, is here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you’re in a relationship, sex changes over time. Sometimes it goes from being good to being great. Other times, the fabulous person you fell in love with appears to change completely and turns into a person who is batsh*t crazy and completely unlovable.   We’re summarizing here, but this is pretty much how Andrew Duhon describes the possibility of the trajectories of love in the modern era.  The reason we’re having this conversation on Happy Hour is because Tracy Carlson is a sex therapist. It’s not every day you get  to meet a sex therapist, especially after you’ve already had a couple of drinks in the middle of the afternoon, and well, you’ve got questions, right? The good news is Tracy has answers. Jonathan Freilich raises some pretty good and searching questions about sexuality and fantasy, while he's taking some time off from making his own podcasts to drop by and say hi. Joshua Summey drops by too, from his home in San Antonio, Texas. Josh was the songwriter and singer and front-man for the band Hazy Ray and a favorite on Happy Hour when he lived in New Orleans, so the Covid-enforced Zoom format has its upside in as much as we can reconnect with people far flung across the country. Closer to home, Kimya Holmes is trapped in her apartment with her two highschool age kids. On this show we opened the floodgates to talk to anyone who wanted to join and this time we did not get bombed by Russian porno trolls but we did have a couple of very nice drop-ins. Including David who is calling from his code-atorium in Birmingham Atlanta. We’ll do this open-invitation style show again next week. You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur on our website. Last week’s quarantine happy hour is here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Seriously, you have no idea how easy it is to be a best selling author. When you see a book on the best seller list of Amazon, don’t you assume that it must be selling hundreds of thousands? Try 800. Not 800,000, just 800. That’s what both the authors on this Happy Hour tell us. Dr Chris Yandle gets up around 6AM. By around 7AM he’s jotting down a clever line that he’s dreamed up since 6AM. He puts the clever line on a piece of paper and slips it into his daughter’s book bag. (This is not the plot of a novel, btw, this is what actually happens in the Yandle household in Mandeville.) So, anyway, after Dr Chris has a bunch of these notes he writes them up into a book called Lucky Enough, which turns out to be a prophetic title ‘cause he’s lucky enough to sell out of the whole run and be a big deal in the non-fiction world and seriously that’s only about 600 books later. You’d be forgiven for not believing these numbers could possibly be true, but then Fermin Ceballos confirms them. Fermin is also the author of a book called Pisadno Mi Sombra, which you have probably already gathered is in Spanish, and there’s some English in there too. Fermin is also shocked at his successful book sales of around 800 books – and both of our authors are working on their second books! Fermin also happens to be a talented musician, which is his primary job. There’s a parallel world of Latin music in New Orleans and the South in general in which Fermin is a star, and deservedly so. You can also catch him online on the Band Together benefit concert to raise money for Covidly-unemployed musicians. Connie Bellone is not an author or a musician but she does live on the Northshore, in delightful Madisonville. However, most of her work is done on the Southshore, brightening the lives of under-privileged children with her Health & Education Alliance of Louisiana, aka HEAL. Just as an aside, she is not killing wild turkeys over there in Madisonville, though there is apparently no good reason not to. Andrew Duhon and Fermin Ceballos team up as best one can on Zoom on a beautiful Andrew Duhon tune, Promised Land. Photos by Jill Lafleur.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.