Gumbo Lagniappe You Ve Got To Be Kidding

GUMBO LAGNIAPPE (You’ve Got to Be Kidding) contains original plays, many with public health themes, but others dealing with our fascinating current political and social climate. Several plays were written for this year’s Spectral Sisters Productions Ten-Minute Play Festival for which the theme was “You’ve Got to Be Kidding,” thus the second part of the title. A collection of selected recent medical essays, some of which complement the plays, also add to this literary gumbo, as does a new translation by the author of Moliere’s classic, “Tartuffe.” Together, these new plays, an old classic and some assorted medical essays, offer “lagniappe,” a little extra, to the body of world literature. This small town, Alexandria, stuck in the middle of Louisiana and two hours’ drive (at least) from any larger city, has the advantage of being like a tramp steamer isolated in the immensity of the Indian Ocean. We have learned to entertain ourselves on the trip and this unlikely location has produced a host of plays from many other talented, but unrecognized playwrights. May creative energy continue to bubble forth from this curious location, as far off-Broadway as you can get, but perhaps a bit closer to heaven. My thanks to those who want to explore something new while supporting an undiscovered author from Central Louisiana.

GUMBO LAGNIAPPE (You've Got to Be Kidding) contains original plays, many with public health themes, but others dealing with our fascinating current political and social climate. Several plays were written for this year's Spectral Sisters Productions Ten-Minute Play Festival for which the theme was "You've Got to Be Kidding," thus the second part of the title. A collection of selected recent medical essays, some of which complement the plays, also add to this literary gumbo, as does a new translation by the author of Moliere's classic, "Tartuffe." Together, these new plays, an old classic and some assorted medical essays, offer "lagniappe," a little extra, to the body of world literature. This small town, Alexandria, stuck in the middle of Louisiana and two hours' drive (at least) from any larger city, has the advantage of being like a tramp steamer isolated in the immensity of the Indian Ocean. We have learned to entertain ourselves on the trip and this unlikely location has produced a host of plays from many other talented, but unrecognized playwrights. May creative energy continue to bubble forth from this curious location, as far off-Broadway as you can get, but perhaps a bit closer to heaven. My thanks to those who want to explore something new while supporting an undiscovered author from Central Louisiana.

Crayton Breaux makes minimum wage clerking in a French Quarter voodoo shop aimed at tourists. It’s enough to pay the rent and keep him in beer and partying because, in New Orleans, every day is Fat Tuesday, brah! As for the “voodoo”? Well, the shop, with its skull-and-candles altar and clouds of incense, definitely spooks the tourists in from Iowa or Delaware. They clutch their go-cup hurricanes and nervously joke about sticking pins in dolls and gris-gris bags full of REVENGE ON YOUR ENEMY! spell powder. Crayton thinks it’s hilarious. More than a few of these idiots think this stuff’s real … He won’t be laughing long.

Jessica's Song by Virginia Nielsen released on Jan 25, 1990 is available now for purchase.

The Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF) provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings. The new authoritative resource, the DLF not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The DLF features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane .

New Orleans in 1878-1880 was perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in North America. It was a port city of 200,000 inhabitants, open to French, Spanish, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a significant population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of the city. Writing for an English-language newspaper, Hearn presented the speech, charm, and humor of the Creolized natives on the other side of Canal Street, and illustrated his sketches with woodcut cartoons - the first of their kind in any Southern paper

During the Great Upheaval of 1755, the British forced the Acadians to leave their homes in the Canadian provinces and later the American colonies. Fourteen-year-old Marie Landry joins her family and friends on a mass exodus from Maryland to Louisiana 10 years later, where land awaits them. Along the way, she notes her feelings of despair and hope through candid diary entries.