Tag: An American Family

I Care

How is it only Wednesday? It feels like it should be at least Friday by now, doesn’t it?This has been the longest week, seriously. It’s cold again this morning–in the forties–and the rain has stopped. The bipolarity of winter in New Orleans is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, no matter how long I live here. I don’t feel tired this morning, but the cold does make me want to get back in bed again and burrow beneath the covers. I was all kinds of warm and comfortable under my blankets this morning when the alarm went off, and by the second beep Sparky was up, trying to get my attention to get up and feed him. I don’t feel worn out, but I don’t think I’ll make it through the afternoon without my energy flagging. Ah, well.

I even left work early yesterday for my podiatrist appointment, and the good news is the toe has healed perfectly and he was most pleased with not only how quickly it healed but how properly as well. His absolute delight when he looked at was very clear. (Apparently, I am some kind of medical marvel of healing; Paul heals pretty fast, too–how many people are discharged the same day they get a hip replaced?) But that’s a good thing, and there was some callus where he’d cut the nail and the scab had been, so he got rid of that with an exacto knife (it didn’t hurt at all) and then I was done and walking out to head home. I wasn’t even super-tired when I got home, but I worked for a while and that wore me out enough to finally put it all aside and relax for the rest of the evening. I hate that I am not catching up as quickly as I would like to, but that’s life, you know?

I also keep forgetting the Super Bowl is here in February, which will make getting around the city so much easier. Yay. And of course, there’s a massive facelift (or at least temporary patchwork) being done to New Orleans to get ready for it, so you never know what detours lie in your future.

I also watched Matt Baume’s documentary about Lance Loud, the gay son of the first reality TV show, An American Family, from the early 1970s on PBS. we didn’t watch it, but everyone was talking about it, and I remember hearing about the gay oldest son, and how the marriage ended in a divorce. I think my parents thought being filmed for a television show was exploitative and kind of gross? My mother certainly wasn’t one to get into reality shows–she even stopped watching soaps about twenty years ago. I was never really sure why, but Dad has told me over and over again about how deeply conservative she was (trust me, I knew but it still came as a surprise–I always thought it was Dad and she was just trying to make him happy. Ah, the things we are led to believe as children but never really give much thought to…Dad became more conservative because she was so conservative), so I have to assume the soap thing (I used to watch them with her when I was still in school) might have had something to do with that? I know my sister stopped watching them because they encouraged you to root for adulterers. My grandmother also used to watch them when I was a kid (I actually think she was the one who got me and my sister started on Dark Shadows), but also stopped. Anyway, it was an interesting documentary, and I learned a lot more about Lance Loud than I’d ever really known before, other than he was the gay son on that show.

The tale of Robin Hoody keeps getting more and more interesting the more information that comes out about him, and I keep being more and more amused at the way the country has almost completely united (see what I did there?) behind him. That really should tell everyone about the mood of the country, shouldn’t it? I keep being amused at how the story is being reported, and how much resources the NYPD expended on searching for this person while no one is even talking about the immigrant stabbed to death by racists on the same day in the same city, and certainly the NYPD isn’t making that a top priority. I’d love to see the price tag for justice for a health insurance executive, and why the NYPD and the media made this into such an insane priority. Yes, by all means, do tell me about how everyone is equal in the eyes of the law! And of course, the more information that comes out about both shooter and victim, the more noble the shooter sounds and the more awful the victim was. The media was certainly unprepared for the way people reacted, and the fact that the media so completely misread the mood of the country makes you wonder, again, just how shitty they are at their jobs; and the right-wing grifters attempt to frame this as a right-left issue blew up their faces…as some angry Americans slowly began to realize the media they consume manipulates them to make money, and people saw it as more of a class war kind of thing that apparently everyone has just been waiting for to happen.

And that’s what has the elites and their puppet media terrified. They cannot allow the country’s division to heal and anyone who is not an elite must be persuaded to fight a culture war when the real problem is and has always been the class war the billionaires have been waging against everyone else since Ronald Reagan was sworn into office in 1981. I also think a lot of the angry people are recognizing that they voted in the rule of an oligarchy and are not very happy about that, either. For the record, I don’t have any sympathy for those who voted for this and now have regrets. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad. You voted to make people suffer, and sadly, you’re also one of those. I can’t even begin to tell you how horrible those people were before the election, and how they absolutely refused to listen to anything anyone had to say.

And the newspaper coverage and most editorial commentary has shown how deeply out of touch they actually are from everyday citizens, and how they prop up the elites at every possible turn. Imagine if the media hadn’t gotten sucked into the cult of Trump in the 1980s and started turning him into a celebrity for no good reason. Seeing them trying to lead ‘the resistance’ after doing everything they could to reelect him (so much for that “liberal media bias,” right, Richard Nixon?) is not only craven, but disgusting and people are starting to see very clearly what our “news media” actually has become: completely incompetent and not good at their jobs. The news shouldn’t be a for-profit business, just like health care should not be.

And on that note, I am bundling up and heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and here’s hoping the rest of this week flies by.

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It Never Rains in Southern California

Less than a week until Royal Street Reveillon is officially out in the world!

And so far, no current labor pains!

But, in fairness, it took me a good long while to write this book. My memory is so bad, and I’m so constantly and regularly busy, that I don’t even remember when I actually wrote it and turned it in to my publisher. I think it was earlier this year? I don’t remember–and that’s kind of sad. This is but one of the many reasons I don’t think I’ll ever write a memoir; my memory lies to me all the time and I never know what I remember correctly, let alone times and timelines and so forth. For example, when I was writing my essay “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” for Love, Bourbon Street, I went into it thinking I spent weeks in Kentucky at my parents’ after the evacuation, when it was actually less than three before I returned to Louisiana. That was a shock, believe me…but it’s true: we evacuated on August 28th, and I returned to New Orleans for good in early October after several weeks on the North Shore at my friend Michael’s. Stress and age and everything else combines to make things seem different in memory; and I’ve also noted, many times, how often people look back through a rosy glow of nostalgia. (I’ve always thought people view the past nostalgically because they aren’t happy, for one reason or another, in the present; they think oh, everything was so much simpler and easier back then. It’s usually not that true.)

So, Gregalicious, why did you decide to write a murder mystery built around a reality television show filming in New Orleans?

I didn’t watch An American Family, the first true reality show, back in the 1970’s on PBS, as the Loud family allowed their lives to be filmed for the entertainment of the masses. The show, which was the baseline for everything that came later, was quite controversial–I remember reading in the newspaper that one of the sons came out as gay on camera, which was kind of a big deal in the 1970’s–but in the 1990’s, I was a big fan of MTV’s sociological experiment, The Real World, and it’s sister-show that came later, Road Rules. But as the shows went on, they went from being a sociological experiment (hey, let’s take a group of seven kids from completely different backgrounds, make them live together and work on a project, and see what, if anything, they learn from each other) to being exploitative (hey, if all of them are young and beautiful and damaged, and we encourage them to drink and hook up, drama will ensue!), which was when I lost interest in watching them anymore. I also watched the game show version–The Challenges–primarily because the young men were always hot, often shirtless, and sometimes even less clad than that, plus watching the competitions was interesting. But it, too, eventually paled in interest to me–they were so repetitive, and the producers never intervened when violence broke out, and that was more often than not–and so I stopped watching.

The Real Housewives was different for me. Back in the day, we used to watch Bravo a lot–Inside the Actor’s Studio, Project Runway, reruns of Law and Order and The West Wing–and when they started promoting a new show they were doing called The Real Housewives of Orange County, I sniffed disdainfully at it. At that time, one of the hottest shows on network television was Desperate Housewives, and this seemed to be a rip-off, an attempt to cash in on the success of another network’s show by copying the title and so forth: “oh, if you like that show, here’s the real women of the area who are housewives, and what there lives are like.” The previews I’d see didn’t really encourage me to watch–the women seemed, for the most part, like horrible people, particularly Vicki Gunvalson–but as the show spawned spin-off shows in other cities and regions, I became more than passingly acquainted with them. They usually ran marathons on Sundays, and when it’s not football season Sunday television was pretty much a wasteland. I’d flip on the marathon for background noise while I read a book and Paul napped on the couch–but I also began to absorb the shows through a kind of osmosis. I knew who the women were and what their lives were like–but still didn’t watch regularly until around 2010, or 2011 or so.

And once I started giving Real Housewives of New York and Beverly Hills my full attention–yeah, I was hooked.

Paul would even watch with me from time to time…and we played a game: if they did a New Orleans version, who would they cast? It was fun, because we also were relatively certain none of the women we thought would kill it on such a show would ever remotely consider doing such a show (Southern Charm New Orleans proved us right), and then I began to think…but such a show here would be absolutely the perfect background for a murder mystery, because of the way everyone here is so connected to everyone else and there would be backstory and history galore.

I always saw it as a Scotty book, but when I turned it into the Paige novella, that changed things. I still wanted to do a Scotty book about a reality show, and I started making notes for one called Reality Show Rhumba. And, if you’re wondering, that’s where the character of Frank’s nephew Taylor Wheeler came from; when I added him to the regular cast of characters for the Scotty series, my intent was to have him eventually be case in a Real World-type show here in New Orleans, and anchor a murder mystery. But then…the Paige novella series went nowhere, and I hated losing such a great idea..so as I went into Garden District Gothic I introduced Serena Castlemaine to the boys, thus planting the seeds for Royal Street Reveillon, knowing I could keep some parts of the story but would have to change others–which was cool, because I always felt that the original novella was kind of rushed, and I didn’t have either the time–or the space (since novellas are by nature shorter)–to make the story what I wanted it to be.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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