Before
that happened, though, the three of us worked in the book shop together,
separately, and on and off, and there were some pretty wild times.
It often seemed, in fact, that the shop wouldn't survive us. During
one period, our days began with the landlord, Mr. Applewhite, bringing
us Tom Collins drinks from Bruno's, and the crowd that congregated
on the side porch started scaring off customers. But Mary, who was
off being a political activist, came back and saved the store.
Then Marigny, Rhoda, and I went our
separate ways for a few years, Marigny to the Northeast, while I
went to California and Rhoda stayed in New Orleans, though eventually
she spent part of a year in Okinawa.
I was in San Francisco for my last
year of college when my mother wrote and enclosed a Times- |
 |
Picayune article
about a Mardi Gras ball, and there was a picture of Rhoda as one
of the maids of Momus! Rhoda, you have to understand, personified
"hip" to me in those days. She was a rebel, a female James
Dean – and now a Momus maid? I couldn't believe it and immediately
sent off an expressive letter of my disbelief. Later I found out
that Rhoda had failed to attend the Queen's Supper – an egregious
insult to Mardi Gras royalty. Now that sounded like the Rhoda I
knew, the Rhoda who eventually made sandals and peace signs at the
first Love Shop in the French Quarter, and became a successful hippie
entrepreneur, a total contradiction in terms, but Rhoda is very
much like the city where she grew up, full of contradictions. After
college I lived in Los Angeles for about a year, but my roots called
me home, and I packed up my VW bug and trekked across the Texas
desert one |
