There was also a great atricle in the paper a few weeks ago. I'm including the text of the article below, as I've had problems before trying to find things that used to be there, and I'm sure I will want to read this again.
Weathering the storm
TV actor Harry Anderson comes full circle with his Katrina experience
Published: Sunday, September 16, 2007 - 2:00 am
By Ann Hicks
STAFF WRITER
ahicks@greenvillenews.com
Seeing him in person, as opposed to on television, you get a better appreciation of the full stretch of 6-foot-4 Harry Anderson. The magician, comic and star of ’80s and ’90s sitcoms such as “Night Court” and “Dave’s World” stands tall.
That description fits Anderson in another sense, too. He stood tall, indeed, in New Orleans after the levies broke and “a flood of biblical proportions” engulfed the city.
Anderson uses the latter description as a backdrop to his one-man show, “Drowned and Quartered: How History, Hope and Alcohol Failed to Save New Orleans,” which makes its world premiere Sept. 21 at Furman University’s Playhouse.
“Lack of communications continued to be the city’s greatest problem,” says Anderson, who lived in New Orleans and owned a nightclub there when Katrina hit.
It was the storm’s tragic aftermath that brought out the civic leader in him.
Enter the tall man
Shortly after the mother of all hurricanes lost its wind, Anderson began informal meetings at his French Quarter nightclub to assist with knuckle-busting survival issues.
Answers had to be found, and information was as rare as a dry spot of land. Who had food? How seriously was the curfew being enforced? Where was water being dispensed?
Citizens needed a forum to vent raging frustrations, Anderson says.
These gatherings soon grew into town hall meetings attended by federal and city officials. However, the city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, was very hard to find, Anderson says.
“We nicknamed him ‘Car 54’ (‘Where are you?’)” — a take-off on a 1960s TV police comedy.
“We were pretty much the only organized group in the city for months.”
It was at these nightclub-cum-town hall meetings that the macabre turned to irony.
When residents asked the police chief why 2,000 of his officers didn’t show up for work, for example, he replied that the numbers were actually much smaller because 600 of those officers never existed. As if that were an acceptable explanation, Anderson says.
And those living in the city found it incredible when the EPA told people the vile piles of accumulated trash couldn’t be removed until it was determined that it was safe for the workers to remove them.
“Mind you, this was the trash we were living in every day,” Anderson says.
Now, it’s a couple of years post-flood, and once again Anderson mounts a stand for the Big Easy. This time, it’s on stage, and 1,600-plus miles removed.
He describes his comedy noir as part diary and part essay — two years in the making.
“But I’m a performer and realized after I wrote it, it would be funnier said than read,” he says.
Why perform it now?
“Why not?” he says. “I think it will be helpful to clear the air about what happened to New Orleans two years ago. Help may come quicker if there is better understanding by people of the real situation and what actually happened in that city.”
Anderson’s words do more than ring the alarm bells, though. His intent meets the eye as you watch this big, affable man, generously covered with tattoos, fight hard to tamp down the emotions welling to a lump in his throat.
And while you can expect his solo show to be full of chuckles, belly laughs and satiric asides, there will be that certain burden Anderson must unload. “It’s therapy,” he admits with a smile.
You can never go home
Anderson recently moved to Asheville. But from 2000, when he left Hollywood, until 2006, he lived in New Orleans, the place where his career got its start.
He says he left Hollywood and “hightailed it back to New Orleans,” where as a 22-year-old in 1974 he made his living as a street busker doing magic tricks. His luck and talent in that city eventually led him to a two-decade career in Tinseltown.
Upon his return, financially well off, he purchased a nightclub in the French Quarter, Oswald’s Speakeasy, where he entertained nightly with his one-man show, “Wise Guy.”
He and his second wife, Elizabeth, also owned a magic shop and a curiosity shop in the French Quarter and made their home on the top floor of the building. “We were very invested in the town,” he says emphatically.
That building is where they rode out Katrina’s 140-mile-per-hour winds, a decision he now calls “a very bad idea.”
They hunkered down for the eight hours it took for the winds to subside. “It was ungodly,” he says. The couple’s two dogs, Selma and Dugal, burrowed deep; only the pet turtle, Umlaut, didn’t seem to care one way or another.
Dawn rose and soon did the waters, along with suffering and lawlessness.
There was plenty of it, Anderson says. Among the first things he witnessed was the looting of a Pottery Barn. It seemed tragically absurd that such a place would be the first thing people would choose to loot, he says.
“It was creepy to see,” Anderson adds. “What was even creepier was seeing the police do nothing to stop it.”
Soon people started to come by the French Quarter with stories that initially sounded outlandish, Anderson says. One of those “stories” was that there were thousands of people stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center.
“We thought it was nonsense. For God sakes, this is America, such things don’t happen here, we said. If that would be the case, rescue would arrive at once.”
As to what possessed the Andersons to hang around for Katrina, he blows by a list of reasons: 2004’s Hurricane Ivan, predicted to be a monster storm, never arrived. In fact, he says, “we had the nicest day of the year, so we learned the wrong lessons.”
Add to that not wanting to leave his recently remodeled nightclub to looters, and “a certain feeling you harbor living in the French Quarter,” he says. “It has to do with its age and invincibility. It’s been here for centuries, so long you can’t imagine it going away.”
But permanence turned to paradox as he and his wife watched the city drift for a full year without effective leadership and much-hoped-for recovery.
In the meantime, he was physically attacked, his wife became inconsolably depressed, and his business took a dive as the tourists went elsewhere.
Mayor Nagin’s 2006 re-election was the final event that floated the couple out of town for good — all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
“Only 30 percent of the eligible voters turned out to vote for the most important election of their lives,” he groans. “That really took the wind out of my sails.”
“As we knew New Orleans, it’s gone,” he says. “In time, it will have to come back much differently from what it once was.”
As for the more immediate message in “Drowned and Quartered,” Anderson says it’s important that we know that we’re falling away from each other. That we’ve become a society where everyone wants to be the dealer and no one wants to be a player.
And there’s that rattle and lump in his throat again as he says that “what this incident shows us is that we need each other more than we offer to each other.”
What happened in New Orleans, he says, didn’t have to be as bad as it was, and what happened there happened to all of us, not just to “those people.”
Look at us today, Anderson adds. We believe we can fight a war without sacrifice, we can consume without cost, and we can hold a childish view of how the world is going to be.
Does he feel hopeful at all?
“I’m 55 years old,” says the illusionist bereft of illusions. “I don’t need as much hope as I used to.”
1 comment:
Wow! Thanks for posting the article - I hadn't heard anything about this. The Katrina aftermath is one of those things that our country should be ashamed of its response. Politics shouldn't, but often ties up so much work that could be done. I'm hoping that this changes soon, but it doesn't seem likely. Good article.
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