If you’re a person of a certain age, you can amuse children by telling them stories of what it was like growing up in the pre-helicopter-parent era. Nobody took you anywhere in an SUV. If you had to go to soccer practice, you found your own way there. And during lunch and recess at school you could climb around on the jungle gym which was a set of steel bars set into concrete. If you fell off of the jungle gym and broke your arm, leg, or teeth – well, that was just what kids did and nobody seemed to care too much.

This is the point where you might want to stop and admit how stupid that last part of your childhood story is. Everybody knows kids are going to fall off of playground equipment. Why wouldn’t you put something other than concrete underneath it? Today, we do. One of the products that kids fall off of playground equipment onto today is called Jelly Bean Rubber Mulch.

Nic Campesi, founder and CEO of Jelly Bean rubber mulch, joins Peter Ricchiuti on this edition of Out to Lunch.

Like play, another thing that comes naturally to all of us is dance. (If you’d like proof of that, go to YouTube and search “toddlers dancing” – you’ll find endless variations of little kids moving in time to music.) As we grow up, we learn to refine these movements into sequences depending on our generation and culture. If you want to take that one step – pardon the pun – further and get really good at dancing, you can join a dance troupe, or take dance lessons.

Here in New Orleans you can do that Uptown, at Dance Quarter, or downtown at the Rhythmic Arts Center. Both of these dance studios are a part of a business called NOLA Dancing.

The Owner and Director of NOLA Dancing is Katarina Boudreaux.

Photos over lunch at Commander’s Palace by Jill Lafleur.