Anniversary Getaway Day Two

We woke up late with a plan. We were going to take the RTA (Regional Transit Authority =  trolley/bus) to the French Market. Then we would walk from there back to Canal Street and catch the trolley to the World War II Museum. The best laid plans of mice, men, and senior citizens...

We decided to walk to the French Market. Then we went to the Jazz Museum to find a nonexistent recording of my boyhood jazz hero trumpeter Al Hirt playing Sleigh Ride. His New Orleans roots inspired my learning to play trumpet at a young age. I was a second grader when I started with horn and music theory lessons. The museum didn't have what I wanted but informed us that perhaps the National Park Service office might. It was on the way to Aunt Sally's and Cafe Dumonde. We didn't find Al Hirt's album, but we sampled pralines and ate beignets. Powdered sugar was everywhere.

We also found the perfect souvenir of this trip. We purchased a tray at Aunt Sally's Praline Shop. We made a further deviation from our opening plan by walking back to our resort to rest, eat lunch, and rethink the afternoon. On the way I made an error of several blocks when my memory of street layouts in the French Quarter took a wrong turn. This increased our state of tiredness and shortened our time left in the day. The WW2 Museum was no longer an option. That would have to wait until tomorrow.

We decided to take the RTA to my favorite place in New Orleans during my time growing up there. We went to City Park. We started on the trolley, transferred to a bus, then back to another trolley. There was an impenetrable barrier across the entirety of Canal Street because of last October's collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel. We made it to the park for an hour walk-about. We saw the bayous, water fowl, giant live oak trees, Sculpture Garden, Storyland, and other spots I frequented as a boy.

When we were finally settled in to the trolley for the return trip to our resort, we thought the day's surprises were over. That was until we transferred to the bus which almost immediately broke down. We waited about 20 minutes before we got off to walk "home." That uneventful last mile was only interrupted by a brief sojourn into a corner Starbucks for a couple of scones.

Fifteen minutes later we were in our room relaxing and getting ready for supper. It had been another long day. It was worth it. Tomorrow will either go as planned...or not!

Dueling

Recently I watched one of my favorite movies about music, The Five Pennies, detailing the life and struggles of Ernest Loring “Red” Nichols, cornet player and Big Band leader extraordinaire. As you may never have pondered, there is a difference between a musical and a movie about music.

The former takes a possibly otherwise music-less plot and characters and puts lots of songs at strategic points scattered appropriately throughout the scenes. Examples of musicals are The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Brigadoon, The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma…the list is almost endless including good and bad renderings. I love many musicals, some just for the music, others for the storyline as well. One highlight of our mid-life travels included our staying at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. That’s where the Sound of Music family settled after immigrating to America to escape the spider flag people that made everyone so cross with one another during World War II. That vacation was a picturesque and memorable experience.

The latter, movies about music, would include the aforementioned Pennies, The Glenn Miller Story, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, just to name a few. Those usually include great music with a better-than-average plot involving the lives of real characters who loved music and made it a top priority in their lives. In the three named above, Danny Kay, Jimmy Stewart, and James Cagney all do remarkable jobs of portraying Nichols, Miller, and George M. Cohan respectively. I enjoy both types of movies a lot.

So if you’re still with me and haven’t as yet escaped back into your real, music-less world…you may be asking yourself what in the treble clef this has to do with the title of this blog…Dueling? It just so happens that Red Nichols hooks up with Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong in Pennies to engage in what I like to call dueling brass. Red’s cornet begins a jazzed-up version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which is joined by Satchmo’s trumpet in true Dixieland style. They “duel” together on screen while ad-libbing and echoing each other as the tempo brightens and the pitch soars. As a brass lover who played trumpet for 10 years from grade two until high school graduation, I love watching and re-watching that scene. It also helps that I have fond memories of my son Daniel who became quite a good trumpeter in his teen years.

That made me ponder other “duels.” Of course, historically, there was Burr’s outshooting Hamilton in that episode from early U.S. History that we all studies in junior high and high school classes. Several movies and television shows about duels come to mind as well. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmund Dantes and his “son” discover the truth before they shoot it on the “field of honor.” An episode of my favorite TV show, all about Andy Griffith and life in and around the peaceful town of Mayberry, has the Wakefields and Carters performing their version of the Hatfields and McCoys as Sheriff Taylor takes a side-trip to ponder the goings on of the Bard’s Romeo and Juliet. With Andy’s well-scripted guidance, the feud ends and a happy marriage commences.

Two other musical “duelings” come to mind. Of course there’s the famous and infamous “Dueling Banjos” in Deliverance; and more dueling banjos picking at top speed to win a coveted prize and title in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Those boys were smokin’! (Exactly what I'm not sure?)

The “real” dueling that comes to mind however has nothing at all to do with music. I don’t even remember Dennis Weaver or the my-face-can’t-be-on-film truck driver ever singing, playing, or even humming or whistling anything. The movie was Duel (1971 – year of my marriage – no I wouldn’t dare blog about that 39+ year dueling – just kidding, honey, it’s been wonderful). It was one of creepiest films I’ve ever seen. I think my wife would agree. Dennis Weaver is driving an old, broken-down, barely alive automobile cross country on a business trip in the daze before GPS and cell phones. He gets in a periodic duel with a tanker truck obviously driven by a terrorist (one bent on terrorizing others – in this case Weaver’s character – for no apparent reason that the script dictates it) played by famous stunt actor Carey Loftin. It gets dangerous; it gets scary; it gets intense. Choose your weapons? Not swords or clubs or even pistols at 10 paces (certainly not musical instruments)…count, walk, turn, and fire at will with your carefully-chosen seconds poised to enforce the rules and assist the wounded. Not this flick. These two “stars” get in their respective vehicles and stalk each other on the highways at high speeds with evil intent. I trust that’s just enough of the plot to whet your appetite.

So my mind foggily blogged from the serene and entertaining musical brass duel of The Five Pennies to the intensely powerful, dramatic vehicular “war” of Duel. Such is the nature of blogging…at least in my cranial cavity.