Lyndsey Beaulieu was born and raised in New Orleans but moved away to attend the University of Virginia. After college she lived in Los Angeles where she became part of the HBO family as an assistant at the HBO offices, then as a Writers' Assistant on ‘Big Love.’ She has been with ‘Treme’ since the pilot and currently works as the Writers' Office Coordinator.
Friday, September 28, 2012 at 8:45AM By Lolis Eric Elie
Deadlines are usually on Mondays, which means that work doesn’t really start to get done until Sunday afternoon. Invariably when I find myself working on one of those do-or-die Sundays, a second line parade will pass in front of my house and tempt me to madness.
I curse New Orleans then.
Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 3:58PM By Lolis Eric Elie
Knowing I’d be interviewing Clarence "Frogman" Henry, I asked my mother if she could tell me anything about him. I thought she’d remember some song she particularly liked, or some dance or some night club where he performed. Turns out what she remembered was a talent show at L.B. Landry Senior High School in Algiers many decades ago. She did a recitation. Clarence sang. You can guess who won: The singer.
Not many years after that, Clarence Henry was recording"Ain't Got No Home" and making his way up to No. 3 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 20 on the pop chart. It was from that performance and its frog-like vocal stylings that the Frogman got the nickname that would stick. That song has also stuck, but it wasn’t the last time a song by the singer would make its way up the charts. In 1961, "But I Do" made it up to No.4 and "You Always Hurt the One You Love" made the Top 20. On the strength of such hits, he was the opening act for the Beatles for several weeks on their first U.S. tour.
Frogman was in residence for 20 years on Bourbon Street, back in those long ago days when there was a lot of good, live, local music in the French Quarter. He's since retired from performing, but his music lives on. You can hear it in a lot of unexpected places, from 'Forrest Gump' to the 'Rush Limbaugh Show.'
I was born in the city part of New Orleans in the 7th Ward. And I was going to a music teacher, Miss Jones, on Columbus and North Claiborne streets. We moved into Algiers in 1948. What happened was I was banging on the piano at L. B. Landry and the bandleader Mr. Houston asked me to play trombone. He put me in the band and I didn't even know how to hold a trombone. I played third trombone when I joined the band. Then for three years I played first trombone. I used to play that song by Paul Gayten called “Ooh-Boo" and when I played that, look like the football team would start winning.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 12:13PM By Lolis Eric Elie
Nelson Hidalgo (Jon Seda) is quite impressed with the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone Hotel. It rotates every 20 minutes, he tells Loretta Mortenson (Susan Gallagher). And it does, offering a view of Royal Street (one of the best streets in the French Quarter), the lobby of the Monteleone Hotel (a venerable hotel in the old style) and other patrons (who tend not to be the drunken denizens of Bourbon Street).
Mortenson is unmoved.
Normally, I wouldn’t offer advice to Nelson on how to pick up women--or contractors. But, in this case, I may take liberties and offer this advice: She might have been more impressed if Nelson had introduced her to Marvin Allen, bar professional extraordinaire, and one of his signature cocktails.
In this era of the cocktail’s renaissance, there’s a rush to celebrate the newest, most unusual drink ingredients. What is sometimes forgotten is that we have a whole cocktail history’s worth of ingredients, techniques, combinations and inspirations to choose from. That’s where a man like Marvin Allen comes in: He’s spent decades tending bar and is just as knowledgeable as his older peers and just as creative as the younger professionals aspiring to his mastery.
We feature recipes from Marvin in our forthcoming cookbook, 'Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans.' If you're looking for a little libation now, here’s a recipe for a drink that isn’t in the book, the Criollo Cocktail. It’s named after the hotel’s new restaurant, Criollo, the Spanish term for Creole.
