'Love Is Love' by Jeff Beninato, a benefit track for Dan Savage's It Gets Better project fighting against bullying of LGBT youth, was inspired by the sea of humanity passing under the balcony on Mardi Gras Day. It was like a Where's Waldo of loved ones, and the...

"Blogger Karen Dalton-Beninato sent me this beautiful picture of the project Brad Pitt is working on..."

Five years ago, Arianna Huffington posted my husband's photo of pink tents in a planned green community in New Orleans. That was two years post Hurricane Katrina levee failures, and it often...

If this is the year you were thinking of spending Mardi Gras in New Orleans, New Orleans hotels are ready for the influx as more and more are reopening, rehabbing, or starting out entirely new.

The stock of French Quarter hotels now includes the fully...

When it comes to topping best of lists, New Orleans is the tops. We're the city with a chunk of the Eiffel Tower. Cole Porter could have written a song about it, including the Eiffel Society which has a section of the Eiffel Tower encasing a cocktail lounge. The past...

I keep feeling like I should be buying a holiday present that my mother neither wants nor needs; first because we didn't celebrate Christmas, and second because she died last month. We had the most Christian of all reasons not to celebrate the holiday: a faction of Evangelicals took to...

Bryan Batt is so stylish, the Hotel Monteleone Carousel Bar's newly slate gray walls match the accents in his vest. It's just a style coincidence, but it's perfectly in tune with what the author of Big, Easy Style recommends.

"I think in your home, you should only...

New Orleans has long been a top holiday travel destination, and a key element of return visits are the only in New Orleans traditions in French Quarter hotels. From the little white owl that appears in the Hotel Monteleone lobby's grandfather clock to the naughty-and-nice holiday burlesque show...

My mother, whom I'll never get used to writing about in the past tense, lived the American Dream trajectory. Raised on a Minnesota dairy farm, she was a student teacher in the bare schoolrooms of the Dakotas. Finishing her degree, she ended up teaching in the Prairie State. She fell...

If a Giant Golden Lucky Dog; Glass Ladders to Nowhere; Revolt in the Factory of Pants; and the Goddess Fortuna played by Bounce Diva Katey Red is up your alley, then The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces, in an Attempt to Make Sense of It All by artist...

Six years ago after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the levees in New Orleans failed. Many areas of New Orleans have not completely moved on, but the city is in motion thanks to volunteers and many high profile boosters here in the Hollywood of the South.

There's...

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but...

Sorting through a never ending storage unit I found a photo in a box marked Important. It was a high school portrait of my mother, and she wrote on the back:

Don't I look sad, though.
Don't let it scare you.

Author Amanda Eyre Ward writes in the language of families, capturing their penchant for loss and possibility of redemption.

I read "How to Be Lost," overcoming my local's fear that a novel set in New Orleans will feature crime solving magnolias. Thankfully, I found the main character Caroline, a...

My mother has fallen and is in the hospital again, mostly because she has forgotten how to sit. Late stage Alzheimer's Disease has made any extreme measures too confusing, too painful to expose her to in the long term so our family has decided on hospice treatment. No daily pain,...

Steve Earle played "This City" for a New Orleans audience last night, telling us a song is done when you play it for the people you wrote it for. "Now it's done."

He wrote "This City" for HBO's Treme, and...

"If things are really this bad, why wouldn't you tell me?" That's the line, from a child to her parent, that I found most haunting in an avalanche of them in Cara Hoffman's novel, So Much Pretty.

It's spoken by a girl in an era where young women...

The season two finale of HBO's Treme highlights the Jazz Fest reunion season. New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, like Mardi Gras, is when we take stock of who has come home and who's going away, and old friends meet in front of some of the best music...

Dave Walker, the New Orleans Times-Picayune television critic, has been following HBO's Treme for two seasons, documenting the show's cultural references with his weekly Explainer and interviewing the cast including scene stealer Elizabeth Ashley and musician Steve Earle.

Walker was kind...

"What is New Orleans," tonight's episode of HBO's Treme, was a barn burner. It's best that I didn't get a DVD review copy this week because it's not that I can't keep secrets, it's that I don't.

An early recap is already available by Dave Walker, so...

Following the news about the Gulf of Mexico one year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster can be like reading "A Tale of Two Places." The ocean, the wetlands, the fish, and the birds are recovering, according to some. Others say...