Pearl River Champagne – Happy Hour – It’s New Orleans
When Happy Hour photographer Alison Moon went to Paris she was expecting something to go wrong because it always does on her trips. By the time she got to Paris on Friday night November 13th nothing momentous had gone wrong so she thought maybe this trip she’d been spared a disaster.
Then her plans fell through to go see the Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan and the Air Bn’nB she’d booked in Place de la Republique canceled on her the day before she arrived in Paris. What happened next is history, thankfully history that Alison was somehow miraculously spared from. Over 100 people were killed at the Eagles of Death Metal concert she didn’t get to and the neighborhood she was supposed to be staying was the center of other attacks.
New Orleans band The Fixers hail from a nearly invisible town at the edge of Louisiana just beyond Slidell and on the not quite married-to-your-cousin edge of Mississippi. It’s called Pearl River but don’t let the vaguely Asian romantic name fool you.
Dominick Blanda and Ryan Duke met as kids, have stayed friends and today form the nucleus of an impressive and unique hybrid of punk/pop/blues shaken, stirred, and poured over audiences from The House of Blues to Starbucks in Slidell – the one next to the gentlemen’s club Scuttlebutt.
Randy Mack is a prototypical Hollywood success story, working his way up from the mailroom at a big agency to being a trusted script advisor to George Clooney among others. Randy busted out of Hollywood and into the indie film world where he’s written and directed movies you’ve actually heard of. And if you haven’t heard of them, Woody Allen has. Randy’s latest project is an all-New Orleans movie about the real New Orleans called Laundry Day. It’s inspired by a wild fight he witnessed at Checkpoint Charlies one random afternoon. Randy’s insider tales about the Hollywood system are instructive and might lead him somewhere along the path to getting his movie out of New Orleans and into the world. See if you can come up with an idea for him to get people to see his movie: he’s open to anything.
Andrew Duhon celebrates the French aspect of today’s show with a new song about a belle from Lafayette’s romantic misty past called Celia Champagne.
Photos taken at Wayfare by current day belle from Lafayette et la Reine de la Bonne Chance, Alison Moon.