Here is the 5th and final installment of my daughter Emilia’s series of blog posts on her recent trip to Brazil to cover the story of how the government is dealing with the slums of Rio in advance of the Olympics. (It’s also about the need for sunscreen.)
“Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.
I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97:
Wear sunscreen.”
I would like to take this moment to inform my e-audience that, before I went to Brazil, I’d read that speech. Several times. I thought it was funny. Now I know it was serious.
After 5 whole days in Brazil, and only three left, Roshan and I finally made it to the beach—we made a day of it. We’d go to both…
Won’t you come with me?Down the Mississippi?We’ll take a trip to the land of dreamsGoing down the river, down to New Orleans
From the time that I was old enough to understand it was my father’s birthplace, New Orleans has always held a special place in my heart and my imagination.
Before I ever set foot in the Crescent City – or even knew it was called “the Crescent City” — my grandmother’s annual Mardi Gras packages aroused a fascination with my dad’s exotic hometown. Grandma’s annual package included three essential items: her homemade fudge (maple and chocolate), Mardi Gras beads and doubloons, and a couple weeks worth of Times Picayune front pages.
Incredibly, I still haven’t been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
I was somewhere around 6 or 8-years old when we made our first family pilgrimage from Cleveland to New Orleans to visit Grandma Barrosse and the rest of my dad’s family. We went by train. It was the biggest adventure of my young life – and the moist summer evening heat, the scent of magnolia and honeysuckle, the little Confederate flag some relative gave me, and my terror of voodoo queen Marie Laveau are still among my most cherished childhood memories.
I was around 12-years old when we returned to New Orleans – this time by car. I remember that trip in sharper focus because I was old enough to appreciate taking in the wonders of the French Quarter, City Park and the Chalmette Battlefield, site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
That second trip was also memorable because of my determination to capture green anole lizards (the dime store chameleons of my youth) in my Grandma’s backyard. I captured more than a dozen of them among the honeysuckle vines before my grasping hand, plunging into the vines after my prey — got stung by three wasps at once. Though they laid me low for a full day, I survived those stings – and most of my lizards survived the drive home to Cleveland.
Ross Salinger, the author, and John Goodrich at the Renn Faire in Metairie (1984)
A couple decades later, I returned to New Orleans for two years in a row to perform at a Renaissance faire in the suburb of Metairie.
Those two working trips to the Big Easy were a chance to reconnect with my nonagenarian grandmother, my aunts and uncles, and my father’s amazing hometown with its unique history, music, food and culture.
(Left) Doing the Sturdy Beggars Mud Show. (Center) The author and Ross Salinger in the French Quarter. (Right) John Goodrich relaxes in the courtyard of Napoleon House. (1984)
With Victoria at Napoleon House waiting for a Pimms Cup.
On the second trip, in 1985, Victoria (now my wife) joined me to work at the Renaissance Faire, meet the Barrosse clan, and enjoy the pleasures of the French Quarter.
But, until this year, I’d never taken any of my three daughters to New Orleans.
Well, I wish I was in New Orleans,I can see it in my dreamsArm-in-arm down Burgundy,a bottle and my friends and me
Tom Waits
My youngest daughter, Evangeline (a good Louisiana name) applied to Tulane University in New Orleans – and this spring, we were delighted when she was accepted with an academic scholarship. So, a 3-day father-daughter trip to my dad’s hometown was in order. The choice was between UCLA and Tulane – and this trip would help her decide.
Eva is a songwriter – and New Orleans is a musical melting pot unlike any other, where jazz, blues, big band, marching band, rock and roll, Zydeco, and all the rhythms of the Caribbean and Mississippi Delta come together in the streets, restaurants and bars.
On the day we arrived in town, we were delighted to discover that the last day of the French Quarter Festival was still underway and the Quarter was jammed with musicians and bands on nearly every corner — including this dynamic face-off between brass bands on Decatur Street.
We also went to Preservation Hall. My daughters had seen the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in concert at The Gainey Vineyard in Southern California’s Santa Ynez Valley – but to see these wonderful musicians playing their hearts out as we sat on the worn wooden floor of that modest, intimate musical temple in the French Quarter is a whole different experience.
There’s music on just about every block of the Vieux Carre.
And then there’s the food. Nobody should visit New Orleans on a diet. Our first restaurant experience called out to us from its sign: Evangeline.
The food at Evangeline was superb.
Here’s just a sample of the many spicy and tasty delights we consumed at Evangeline and at other French Quarter eateries, including The Gumbo Shop, during our visit…
Jambalaya at Evangeline. Perfectly wonderful.
Gumbo at — where else? — The Gumbo Shop.
Eva enjoyed her muffaletta on Decatur Street.
And, of course, we had to have our beignets at Cafe Du Monde.
So long mom.So long pop.I’m goin’ to New Orleans or elseI’ll drop deadDown in New OrleansYou know I love it thereAnd I ain’t been there yet.
The Rockme Foundation
The second day of our trip was the reason we were in New Orleans in the first place: my daughter’s visit to Tulane University.
Tulane is a beautiful place.
I could imagine Eva attending class among the spreading trees, draped with Mardi Gras beads.
Perhaps she could even take James Carville’s political science class someday.
On weekends, she could take the St. Charles street car to the French Quarter and soak in music and culture that would inform her songs.
After our visit to Tulane we hopped that street car and returned to the French Quarter. The streets weren’t as crowded as they’d been the day before for the French Quarter Festival — but the the mood was still celebratory and the music was still playing.
Here, Eva is caught up in the New Orleans blues and the fancy steps of a veteran swing dancing devotee.
Dad and daughter at UCLA.
Ultimately, my daughter Eva chose to attend UCLA instead of Tulane. (Go, Bruins!) She’s a California girl — and we’re perfectly happy with her choice.
But on our father-daughter trip she fell in love with New Orleans.
And my love affair with my dad’s city was renewed.
We’ll be back in the Big Easy, the Crescent City, the Land of Dreams.
And New Orleans – as it has for centuries – will be waiting to fascinate and delight.
What follows is a photo essay to further celebrate the wonders of my father’s wondrous, historic, culturally resplendent hometown…
Dad poses across the street from our temporary home, The St. James Hotel on Magazine Street.
Dad gazes upward toward Jackson Square in the French Quarter.
Magnificent trees rise above the artwork hanging on the Jackson Square fence.
The street scene on the east side of Jackson Square.
Local legend has it that Napoleon Bonaparte’s friends provided this house for his exile.
Eva in the courtyard of Napoleon House. Her dad’s Pimm’s Cup is on the way.
The aforementioned Pimm’s Cup. I already ate the traditional cucumber slice.
Classic, lovely New Orleans decay in the Napoleon House courtyard.
Eva in front of the house where William Faulkner lived and wrote while in New Orleans.
You’re not allowed to take photos at Preservation Hall. So, I don’t know what this is…
Eva poses in the gaudy costume of a Mardi Gras Indian.
The French Quarter House with the famous cornstalk gate.
The cornstalk gate.
The Andrew Jackson Hotel — where Victoria and I stayed in 1985.
A French Quarter door.
Typical French Quarter architecture and porch gardening.
Evangeline looks at home in the Vieux Carre.
One gorgeous building after another…
New Orleans is a taste of Old Europe in the New World.
For the past month, I’ve been re-posting my daughter Emilia’s blog posts about her travels in Rio de Janeiro. Those posts cover her experience as a college girl in Rio — but Emilia did not go to Brazil on vacation. She went there to report on what the Brazilian government is doing to clear the slums of Rio in advance of the Olympic Games.
Here’s a link to her article, which was just published on the Huffington Post:
The film “42” is in theatres, celebrating the transformational story of how Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Today, 66 years later, professional basketball player Jason Collins overcame another taboo in pro sports by announcing to the world that he is a gay man – becoming the first openly gay man active in a major American professional sport.
A first round pick in the 2001 NBA draft, Jason Collins is a 12-year NBA veteran. An All-American center at Stanford, Jason and his twin brother Jarron both enjoyed decade-long careers in the National Basketball Association. Jason’s dozen years in the NBA are further proof – as if needed – that it’s not if there are gay men in pro sports – but how many pro athletes are gay? And why should we even care?
The New Jersey fans that cheered for Jason Collins during seven seasons with the Nets – and the ticket buyers who rooted for him in his NBA stops since leaving New Jersey – weren’t cheering for a heterosexual man or gay man. They were cheering for a talented and durable big man who fought for rebounds and scored consistently in the paint. Team player Jason has also always been considered a good guy in the locker room.
Trivia note: The Dodgers played in Brooklyn NY when Jackie Robinson made history in 1947. The Nets, the NBA team that drafted Jason Collins in 2001, is now playing its first season in Brooklyn. (Significant? Probably not. But us sports fans love us some trivia.)
Jason’s revelation regarding his sexuality reminds me of the silly debate over gays in the military. There have always been gay men in the military – and there have always been gay men in sports. From the first moment men clashed in battle – whether in war or on the playing field – a percentage of those men have been gay. That’s only natural. Completely natural.
So, congratulations, Jason Collins!
I’m honored that Jason attended the same San Fernando Valley grade school that my daughters attended. Sierra Canyon School should be prouder than ever of Jason.
His college and NBA basketball achievements have been laudable.
His honesty and courage today make him an American hero for the ages.
Once again, if you take anything with you from this blog, it should be this: When traveling in a place you’ve never been before, ALWAYS. HANG. WITH. LOCALS. Seeing a city with alongside a person who understands it and has lived in it opens the city for you in a way it never would if you’d stayed behind the plexiglass barrier that is being only a tourist. Because we made a point to run with as many Brazilians as possible, Roshan and I understood more truly than ever, what a Brazilian life means.
As it turns out, what does it mean to be a Brazilian?: To enjoy yourself.
Rio de Janeiro is a throbbing city—and when I say throbbing, I mean it in all the senses of the word. Rio is like a throbbing, open wound, a throbbing heart, a throbbing headache, a throbbing longing, a throbbing reverberation of music…
Even though Roshan and I went to Brazil first and foremost as journalists, we made sure to be tourists on our off days.
The most incredible thing about Brazil and Rio de Janeiro—especially with the experience we had there being journalists and tourists—is the massive range of emotions that consumed us depending on which mode we were in. As journalists, it was high stress, high emotions, high functioning trying to process the misery and the majesty we were seeing.
But as tourists, when your express purpose is to enjoy your surroundings and not necessarily to make moral sense of it all—Brazil can be one of the most calming, cathartic places you could possibly go.
You’ll see when I go through the main tourist destinations we hit.
Sugarloaf Mountain
On our first day of tourism, Roshan and I wanted to go to Sugarloaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer. We wanted to…
My daughter Emilia will graduate from Northwestern University”s Medill School of Journalism this June. She spent her spring break in Rio, getting the story on how the government is clearing slums in advance of the Olympic Games.
Because we were in Brazil for the express purpose of reporting, that is what we did. Without giving ourselves more than a moment to adjust, we grabbed our cameras and tripod and met up with our translator, Thiago.
Thiago is awesome. It is because of him Roshan and my trip was one of the best weeks of our lives. It is because of him I now understand more than ever that being in a new place with a local is a must. I will detail the adventures we had more thoroughly in a different post, but if I have one word of advice for the hopeful traveler, it is this: spend as much time with locals as possible. They open the city for you like it’s an oyster, revealing a pearl you’d never have been able to find on your own.
One of the glories of life in Southern California is the ability to quickly escape to the wilderness – whether it’s the ocean, the desert, or the mountains.
From our home at the southwestern end of the San Fernando Valley, we can reach the beach in less than a half hour, the high desert in a little more than that. And in about fifteen minutes, my family and I can be exploring the Santa Monica Mountains at Malibu Creek State Park.
We’ve been coming to Malibu Creek since we moved to Woodland Hills twenty years ago. We go several times a year, and we’ve enjoyed it in all seasons. Each season has its own beauty — but of all the seasons, Malibu Creek shows itself best in the spring.
Located just south of the junction of Las Virgenes Road and Mulholland Highway, the place is a nearby paradise. After you paid the $12 vehicle fee and parked the car — within minutes you can hike to vistas where it’s impossible to tell whether you’re anywhere near civilization. You can almost imagine what the Chumash saw when they settled among these live oaks and sycamores 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
When we first brought our daughters to Malibu Creek State Park, the length of our family hikes were largely determined by our little girls’ enthusiasm for the expedition. We had to carry them along the trail sometimes, but eventually they became just as excited as their parents about spending some quality time at Malibu Creek.
The chaparral-covered mountains that dominate the park are green in the spring and golden by fall – and have been coveted by Hollywood for decades: 4,000 acres of beautiful scenery within an hour of downtown Los Angeles.
They’ve been shooting movies at Malibu Creek since the silent film era — and in 1946, 20th Century Fox bought 2,000 acres of what’s now the park to shoot movies like How Green Was My Valley, Love Me Tender, Viva Zapata, and Planet of the Apes.
But the production for which the park is most famous was shot for the small screen. And that is why, the Barrosse family sets off along the trail to the M*A*S*H site: where from 1972 to 1983, the Santa Monica Mountains stood in for Korea on the classic sitcom, starring Alan Alda. When the girls were young, a couple of rusting Army vehicles were all that indicated you’d reached your destination.
Father Mulcahy at the reunion.
But once you arrived at the M*A*S*H site, if of a certain age, you could easily recognize the jagged hills through which the helicopters passed and the plateau where they landed. You could even see the path that Captain Hawkeye Pierce climbed to meet the incoming wounded.
Since former cast and crew celebrated the 25th anniversary of the series’ last episode in 2008, the M*A*S*H site has gotten a facelift.
There are now signs that explain various features of the site, markers that lay out where the tents and buildings stood – and a freshly painted vintage ambulance offered up to the ravages of nature.
Along the trail to and from the M*A*S*H site, my wife Victoria, daughter and I were delighted to see the wildflowers starting to bloom. And we kept our eyes and ears alert for wildlife.
These geese weren’t that hard to track down. In fact, they just swam right up to Eva as though they were expecting her.
Can you see the well-camouflaged critter in the photo below?
And do you know what this nasty-looking insect is?
It’s a Jerusalem cricket. They’re not really crickets, and they’re not from the Holy Land, but you might find one at Malibu Creek State Park.
Yuck.
Quick. Let’s have another pretty picture.
And another. Love those wildflowers. (That reminds me: I’ve got make sure to get out to Lancaster to see the poppies this spring.)
Malibu Creek State Park is a large slice of heaven waiting just next door. I’m already looking forward to my next visit.
In November 2013, my roommate Roshan, who is originally from Florida, suggested that for New Year‘s, all of our college friends meet at her place in Ft. Lauderdale/Miami Beach to bring in 2013 together. This is Roshan:
Because I’d already had plans to fly from LA to Cleveland to celebrate my grandma’s 80th birthday, to make both trips, I just exchanged my ticket from LA to Cleveland for 2 cheaper tickets: One from LA to Ft. Lauderdale, and another from Ft. Lauderdale to Cleveland. I was stoked. I was overwhelmed. I was counting down the days. And, as it turns out, I was the only one of our friends who was going.
Of course, neither Roshan nor I cared. We we’re excited. First of all, I felt like this would just be a preview of what it was going to be like when we take Rio…
Okay, last week I admitted that my head was buried in the NBA season as it drove toward the playoffs — and that my favorite teams were the Los Angeles Clippers featuring Blake Griffin and Chris Paul, and the defending NBA Champion Miami Heat, led by LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.
Well, on a night like tonight – March 20, 2013 – it’s easy to see why I’m captivated by the drama playing out on the NBA hardwood.
By the time my Western Conference team, The Clippers, walked off the court after trouncing the Philadelphia 76ers at Staples Center in downtown L.A. by 29 points, 101-72 – my Eastern Conference team had already come back from a ridiculous, impossible-to-overcome deficit to earn its 24th consecutive victory.
LeBron James and The Heat were playing The King’s former team, The Cleveland Cavaliers (my hometown franchise). LeBron & Company were behind by 27 points with about 7 minutes left in the third quarter – and still managed to pull out the victory to extend the second-longest winning streak in NBA history, surpassing the 2007-08 Houston Rockets.
With a roaring, rabid, sellout Cleveland crowd of 20,562 taunting their former hometown hero at the foul line — with the game on the line — a cold-blooded LeBron, the reigning NBA MVP, drained two free throws to win the game 98-95.
The moment was ridiculously dramatic. The irony was exquisite. That LeBron should cap such a furious, historic comeback cooly at the foul line was one thing — but that he should do it against the team that he left so infamously a few years ago was the final scene of an almost preposterously perfect script, played by the greatest actor currently performing on an NBA court.
Even though I’m a proud Clevelander, I gotta give props where they’re due.
Now, LeBron and The Heat are within nine games of matching The Los Angeles Lakers’ record of 33 consecutive wins during the 1971-72 season – a mark of excellence once thought to be untouchable.
“This was one of the most bizarre, unique days of my life with everything that happened,” said James, referring to the fact that a fan ran onto the floor, wearing a t-shirt encouraging him to re-sign with Cleveland next year. “It also was one of the best comebacks I’ve ever been a part of. The streak wasn’t on my mind, but us getting blown out was.”
LeBron, of course, scored a triple-double — with 25 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists.
Miami’s 27-point comeback was the largest collapse in the Cavaliers’ 43-season history. Miami, down 23 points at intermission, set a franchise record for its largest halftime comeback.
How special was Miami’s comeback?
ESPN just informed me that in the long history of the NBA — in games where a team was behind by 23 points or more at halftime — the team that was losing lost the game more than 2,000 times.
![photo[2]](https://pab58.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/photo2.jpg)
![photo[1]](https://pab58.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/photo1.jpg)
![photo[8]](https://pab58.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/photo8.jpg)
Paul's Voyage of Discovery & Etc. 