Nannerl Mozart at Royal and Desire

This is a thing that just happened, and these are words I need to see together:

Tonight I  saw a performance by a woman channeling Maria Anna Mozart (“Nannerl”) at a house named “Wonderland” at the corner of Royal and Desire streets in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Of course, she wasn’t really channeling Nannerl, or at least she didn’t claim to, but in a city full of ghosts it is so easy to believe Miss Mozart herself was present.

(Can I call her Nannerl? We certainly weren’t acquainted. Is that disrespectful? Maria Anna, then.)

But I have to talk about this show. I expected that a performance about the younger Mozart’s lesser-known sister would have to be good. That they even knew Mozart had a sister spoke volumes. I couldn’t have expected what I got. The young woman performing the lead (and only) role embodied Maria Anna so well that it could only have come from a deep pool of admiration and some connection to the real person she sought to evoke when she put on that dress and pouffed up that hair. After the show I asked her fellow player (who switches the role with her at different performance times) who wrote the piece. The actress, Sylvia Milo, was the writer, her partner told me, and she’d “been playing it for years.”

Be still, my heart, another nerd of the 18th century variety.

You can see it, too, if you’re in New Orleans for this year’s Fringe Fest, but be quick, for it’s only got the lifespan of a weekend. If you have the misfortune to be in some other, frozen clime, then look to http://www.theothermozart.com/upcoming-performances for your next best chance. It would appear she travels all over.

Like all savvy modern artists, she and her co-conspirators have a crowdfunding site at https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=4624#giving_levels, and at one level you receive a handmade music box with original music from the play. May I remind you all that Christmas is upon us, and that music box would look and sound nice in my home…

The SomeDaily – 2013-08-14

A not-every-daily feature to help keep track of the days…

New Orleans City Council prepares to discuss a report on the city’s “soundscape” and recent bizarre enforcement of sound ordinances on places like Frenchmen Street. Suggests requiring permits for street musicians.

Oh, and the powers that be are trying to do away with go-cups.

If you haven’t already seen this (and it’s been linked about everywhere by now), Todd Andrlik has compiled the 1776 ages of all your favorite American Revolutionaries at his excellent site Journal of the American Revolution.

And, returning to the dirty south, another article in the same Web journal specs out a meal in Bernardo de Galvéz’s New Orleans (complete with recipes).

Onward and upward.

While America is on the topic of political movers and shakers…

A few years ago, before she lost control of her memory, she was rich in interesting reminiscences of the early history of this city [….] She spoke sometimes of the strange little man with the wonderful bright eyes, Aaron Burr, who was so polite and so dangerous. She loved to talk of Lafayette, who visited New Orleans over half a century ago. The great Frenchman came to see her at her house and kissed her on the forehad at parting.”

– Times-Picayune (New Orleans, La.), June 17, 1881, “Death of Marie Laveau”

 

YOU GUYS.

I CAN’T EVEN.

I mean, I know, it’s 19th century journalism, so who knows if it’s really true, but politically she was certainly one of the most important people in town. Maybe not at THAT age, but STILL.

Lafayette and Laveau. They fight crime.

I’m writing this.

… and Aaron Burr? What was up with that? I need to know more.

Public Transport Limbo

“They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields!”

– Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

And, you know, once upon a time you really could take all those streetcars – from sin to death to the afterlife – one right after another. Now they’ve mostly been replaced by buses, and if you’re me, they’ll likely leave you stranded somewhere along the way. To be fair, the last time I was stranded, I was actually on Elysian Fields, and my destination was Metairie which in many ways is a kind of suburban hell, so… I think I’ve stretched the metaphor too far already.