by Julia Reed
We were pumped. It’s hard not to be when Howard is your benefactor. He is a man who gets excited by pretty much everything. Growing up, I spent the night in the Brent house more times than I can count, but Jessica and her siblings and I rarely got a full night’s sleep. Howard was forever yanking us out of bed: “Y’all get up, let’s play the guit-tar”; “Y’all get up, there’s a rodeo in Monroe.” His enthusiasm is invariably infectious, and his family has been in the towboat business for generations, so he was a natural to go on the local radio to promote the fest.
After some amusing and semi-sexist innuendo about the importance of getting your strokes in sync and your rhythm right (which, I found out, happens to be true), Howard got around to talking about his classmates at Greenville High: “I graduated with Paul Chu Lin and Shirley Wong. I used to try and sit by them, see, because the Chinese were real smart, but they wouldn’t let me copy off their papers. So I had to go and find another dumb son of a gun like me to copy off of.” He went on to say that sponsorships benefited the Chinese American Cultural Alliance (CACA) scholarship fund and other worthy causes, and that “folks need to write some checks, because we need some more boats out there. They’re beautiful. Got a dragon on the front.”
Now, you could not find anyone more well intentioned than Howard if you looked hard. Plus, he was really mostly talking about two classmates whose individual smarts he had seen for himself. Also, now that I’ve been a dragon boat competitor myself, I can back up this particular stereotype with some actual statistics. For example, the number of Chinese-American teams came to exactly one, and it was sponsored by CACA, which sorta had to do it.
The day I turned up for practice at the appointed hour of 11:00 A.M., it was about ninety-eight degrees with no shade in sight. My teammates demonstrated their own good sense by being almost entirely absent. There were five of us, plus two employees of Harlow’s casino hotel who had missed their own practice (and who, after all, were being paid to be part of their company’s team) and an unsuspecting acquaintance we pressed into duty after he made the mistake of walking his dog within our line of sight. I had on my usual uniform of black pants, black shirt, and black ballet flats because I’d erroneously figured “practice” would consist of eyeballing the boat (a terrifyingly narrow vessel) and maybe testing my grip on the oar. Instead, a very stern woman with a crew cut (who was among the coaches who fly around the country to supervise these races) got us out on the water and forced us to paddle away—very badly and not remotely in sync—for a full hour. Back on shore, one of our group dropped to his knees on the cobblestoned embankment; another threw up. This did not bode well, but on the day of the race, we managed to come in at a respectable fourteenth out of twenty in the first trial and thirteenth in the second.
A team of typically competitive cardiologists came in first, but they didn’t seem to have nearly as much fun as we did. Our viewing tent featured a bar complete with Southsides (in keeping with the regatta spirit of things), plus platters of tasty snacks like pimento cheese sandwiches, the enjoyment of which was aided by the fact that we didn’t have to stay in fighting (and relatively sober) shape for the finals. In retrospect, I’m a tiny bit bitter that we didn’t win for best team spirit, because we certainly had it, but we are not giving up. Our next theme will be Polynesian so we can keep the wigs and add grass skirts—and mai tais, of course.
On my way back to New Orleans, I drove past the small metropolis of Louise, Mississippi, where Hoover Lee still owns and operates his store, Lee Hong. Hoover was mayor of Louise for eighteen years, during which time he visited Reagan in the White House, and he was an alderman for six years before that. His sons Stan and Tim pretty much run the operation now, but Hoover and his wife still live in the house he built in the back, and he still makes his superlative (and secret) Hoover Sauce, which is excellent on wild game and a key ingredient in my friend Hank Burdine’s tasty duck poppers.
Anyway, when I stopped in to replenish my sauce stock, I reflected on the fact that when I was a kid, Hoover’s store, like most of the rest of the Delta Chinese groceries, still sold live chickens in cages. Which leads me to one of my father’s favorite stories, about a stunt pilot named Gaston Hunter (pronounced “Gastone”). Well into the 1960s, the Delta played host to frequent weekend air shows. Apparently Gaston had seen a rather more accomplished pilot whose act consisted of throwing a trained hawk out the open window of his plane. The hawk would glide through the air beautifully, executing a few loop de loops, and when the pilot landed, the hawk would come light on his wrist. Gaston did not have a trained hawk; instead he stopped at what was then called (really, really politically incorrectly) “the Chinaman’s store” and bought himself a rooster, which are not renowned for their flying abilities in the first place and which at any rate had clipped wings. As he was executing his last big move, he threw out the rooster, which, naturally, went into a long, sickening spiral, one that makes me cringe to think about, even now, and it hit the ground with a big splat. Gaston was so embarrassed he didn’t land and flew all the way to Memphis instead. As for the rooster (and to continue along this increasingly incorrect vein), he did not stand a Chinaman’s chance.
And here’s where we might possibly have evidence of another stereotype that could just be more or less accurate. There’s a reason, after all, that everybody laughs at those “Hey y’all, watch this” jokes. Because we know that in the hands of some of our, um, more redneck brethren, the equivalent of a rooster is going to land at our feet.
Belle of the Ball
I have loved Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski, the New Orleans überchefs whose empire includes Herbsaint, Cochon, and Cochon Butcher, for a very long time for lots of good reasons. They fill my plate with delicious food and my glass (all too often) with fine wine. They’re smart, they’re generous, and they never fail to make me laugh. If all that weren’t enough, in January 2015 they enabled me to fulfill a decades-long dream: to attend a masked ball dressed almost entirely in feathers.
The occasion was the first annual Bal Masque, held at the brilliantly renovated Orpheum theater to benefit the Link Stryjewski Foundation, formed to help at-risk kids in our city (of which there are far, far too many). Some of my favorite chefs (including Mike Lata, Frank Stitt, Suzanne Goin, and Nancy Oakes) came from all over the country to cook. John Alexander and William Dunlap made gorgeous paintings that were auctioned off for the cause, and Jimmy Buffett provided typically swell music. I went as a Grand Palm cockatoo, complete with tall crest and orange face. It was a perfect night.
I love a ball, especially one involving masks and costumes, which is ironic really, since I am fairly hopeless on the dance floor. It’s not my fault. Girls generally learn to dance by box stepping in time with their fathers, but mine was more of a solo act—he dances as he does pretty much everything, primarily to entertain himself. My mother, who is a phenomenally good dancer, grew up in Nashville, attending Fortnightly Club dances. My generation’s versions of Fortnightly were excruciating events at which girls draped their arms around the necks of acne-faced boys and shuffled around in a tight circle to the strains of “Colour My World.” As a result, I’m more of a postmidnight kitchen dancer, jumping around solo to, say, Del Amitri on the antiquated boom box. I dance like no one is watching because no one ever is watching.
Back to balls: My first experience with the form was at the annual coming-out party put on by the Delta Debutante Club in my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, where I served as a page at the age of thirteen. The decor that year featured birdcages containing hot-pink parakeets hanging from the ceiling of the country club ballroom. My father and I posed beneath one of the beribboned cages for the photographer Arthur David Greenberg, who had come all the way down from New York for the occasion. Despite the fact that I was dressed in a hideously unflattering white dress complete with a lace bertha collar, it was fun. In the photo, we are trying hard not to crack up at the absurdity of it all, and I cadged lots of contraband champagne. But w
hen it came time to make my actual debut, I politely declined on the grounds that it would’ve been redundant. I’d already come out to at least one version of society (the one my father invariably referred to as “riffraff”) while drinking a series of flaming drinks atop the bar at the late and much lamented One Block East. Also, a few years before what would have been my year, the ball’s emcee, a local doctor who was a sweet, sweet man but clearly a little carried away, announced that the debs had “achieved social attainment in the eyes of the Lord.” I was not at all convinced that the Lord approved of my shenanigans during that particular period of my life, and I felt it wouldn’t have been in the best of taste to pretend.
I could tell my mother was secretly relieved, but my father, awash in misplaced sentiment, called me up in my Georgetown dorm room and asked me if I was sure of my decision: “We could get our picture taken underneath those birds.” But then he has always been amused by the decor of the deb ball, which is always held just after Christmas. One year, in the sixties, the ceiling was hung with Spanish moss and the girls’ hairdos were especially high. Santa had just brought me a Troll Village, and when Daddy walked into the ballroom, he announced that he felt as though he were inside of one.
There was also the unfortunate year of the Debutanks, in which most of those being presented were a tad on the chubby side. To be fair, it’s hard to look svelte when draped in yards of taffeta or tulle or both. When I was a writer at Vogue, Jenna and Barbara Bush graciously agreed to pose for us on the occasion of their father’s second run for the presidency. It was a coup—they’d never before agreed to do any press—but a fashion editor with an obvious agenda chose to dress them in poufy white Vera Wang gowns. I have never loved Laura Bush more in my life than when she took one look at her daughters and politely remarked that they looked exactly like cupcakes. She was right, of course, and the rack of bouffant frocks was immediately sent packing. Unlike a lot of girls from their home state, neither twin had opted to make her debut, and who can blame them? Such an outing requires the famously extravagant (and body-contorting) Texas Dip, a maneuver that involves nearly touching one’s forehead to the floor with gloved arms akimbo, as one’s ball dress rises like a giant marshmallow (or, indeed, an elaborately frosted cupcake) from behind.
The lesson here is what I already knew, that it’s a whole lot more fun to make like an exotic bird than a cupcake. I achieved my avian look on my own—what I lack in dance floor moves, I more than make up for in glue-gunning skills. (People are always surprised that I’m crafty, which I find a tiny bit offensive.) Before the recent Bal Masque, for example, I purchased $450 worth of feathers online and set up a veritable cottage industry on my living room floor creating looks for my fellow attendees. For inspiration, I turned to the three great balls of the twentieth century at which the guests paid elaborate attention to their masks and headgear. (At one, Salvador Dalí designed Christian Dior’s costume and Dior designed Dalí’s.) The first, thrown in 1951 by the Mexican silver heir Carlos (Charlie) de Beistegui at his Labia Palace in Venice, featured a troupe of giants, two jazz bands, and a thousand guests, all of whom arrived by gondola, cheered on by hundreds of onlookers lined up along the Grand Canal. Described as the first “mass media” event, it was photographed by Cecil Beaton. In one of the shots, commissioned by Vogue, Orson Welles sports an enormous feathered crown not unlike my own Bal Masque crest.
The second “ball of the century” was the Bal Oriental thrown by Baron Alexis de Redé in 1969 at his Paris residence, the exceedingly grand Hôtel Lambert. Here, the giants were replaced by dozens of torch-bearing “Nubians,” bodybuilders procured from assorted local gymnasiums and painted black. Clearly, this was long before the era of political correctness, or animal rights awareness either, since one guest arrived toting a baby panther. At least the elephants that greeted the four hundred guests weren’t real. Instead, they were constructed of papier-mâché and straddled by live riders beneath ornate gilded canopies. In his memoirs, the baron rather drily describes a guest who came as a pagoda: “She had to be brought to the ball in the back of a truck, as her costume was made out of metal. She could not sit down in the truck and she could not sit down at all until she took it off. You have to make a balance between enjoying the evening, or the impression you want to make. I am not sure she got it right.”
Far less restrictive getups were worn to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, thrown in 1966 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel in honor of Katharine Graham. Newlyweds Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow turned up masked as cats; Candice Bergen wore white bunny ears constructed by the young Halston. As at the other two soirées, the guests looked seriously fabulous, but it doesn’t sound like they had all that much fun. Bergen later reported that she was so bored at Capote’s affair that she left early. Sinatra and his entourage decamped for his favorite dive bar, Jilly’s. None of de Beistegui’s guests professed to even like him much.
This is a shame because one of the many pluses of a masked ball is that if you are in disguise, you can get up to all sorts of no good with impunity. At the first ball I ever hosted, one of the guests pointed to his camouflage bow tie and cummerbund and announced that he was in hiding from his wife. He was making a joke, and a corny one at that, but I got it. A ball is for dancing with multiple partners, flirting with strangers, trying on one disguise after another even if you don’t happen to be in costume. The ball in question, cohosted by my dear friend Jessica Brent, was not, as it happens, a masked occasion. I had recently canceled a wedding and was feeling exuberantly unmasked. (Not long after the cancellation, a friend gave me a birdcage with the door ajar—in retrospect I should have hung those from the ceiling.) Still, like the aforementioned party givers, we had a fantastical theme—just one slightly more in sync with our Mississippi Delta locale.
Instead of life-size elephants, a taxidermy deer welcomed our guests at the front door of the (sadly now burned-down) antebellum house Mount Holly. Inside, wild geese flew above the dance floor, beavers gnawed on logs, and a gigantic loggerhead turtle held a bouquet of wildflowers in its mouth. No one brought a live panther, but a stuffed one crouched on a mantel. Music was provided by Terrance Simien & the Mallet Playboys, a terrific zydeco band from Louisiana that at the time featured a washboard-playing midget who did backflips across the stage. (Let the record show that we were not being remotely politically incorrect—he was an honest-to-God member of the band, not a prop.) Most of the people who would have been at my wedding (except, naturally, for the groom) turned up, and it was exactly as we’d hoped. People danced like crazy and necked on the staircase. My father, true to form, borrowed the washboard and took to the stage.
Jessica and I called it the Last Annual Hoodoo Mamas Ball and Gumbo a Go Go (don’t ask us why), and we’ve about decided we’re due for another, perhaps the Next to Last Annual. In the meantime, I’m already planning my costume for the next Bal Masque. I’m thinking along the lines of some sort of mythical triple-hybrid creature that will allow me to use both horns and feathers. My glue gun is ready.
The Ultimate Party Stop
It all started when my buddy the writer Hartford Gongaware turned up in my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, with some filmmakers who were documenting life in towns along the river. Greenville is a river town (well, sort of—a while ago the river changed course and now we’re technically on an oxbow lake called Lake Ferguson, but if you get in a boat at the foot of Main Street, the Mississippi’s only about six miles away). Anyway, the camera people needed some footage on the water, and my friends Hank Burdine and Howard Brent offered up their boats for an outing. Because it was the day after the first annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival, there were a lot of people in town, including Roy Blount, Jr., and his wife, the painter Joan Griswold. Naturally, we all decided to go along.
Now, that in itself is not unusual. Pretty much everyone I know in Greenville grew up on a raft or a speedboat or both—we even have a Yacht Club, though to my knowledge only one yacht has actually docked ther
e in its seventy-some-year history. Hank is a commissioner of the Mississippi Levee Board (founded in 1865), and Howard once ran one of the biggest towboat companies in the country (founded by his father, Jesse, a former deckhand, in 1956). We’ve all spent countless hours water-skiing, tubing, drinking, fishing, and generally engaging in the maritime version of that eternal high school preoccupation “riding around.” But this time, we had a destination. We loaded up the boats with buckets of chicken and lots of beer and Bloody Marys and headed straight for an enormous sandbar Hank had found just under the new Jesse Brent Memorial Bridge that connects Mississippi to Arkansas.
Everyone agreed it was magical. On our own private island, we had the freedom of Huck and Jim without the bad guys—if you don’t count the evil Asian carp that jumped in the boat and slimed one of the cameras. We ate and drank, and Joan made really cool sculptures out of driftwood. We took dips in the river and lay in the sand and headed back just before sunset beneath a buttermilk sky.
It was already pretty perfect, but since then, our outings have gotten a tad more grandiose. In our second year, we were joined by Bo Weevil, aka Sid Law, who has a welded aluminum boat custom made with a flat bottom, high gunwales, and an eight-foot beam on which he has run the entire length of the Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Atchafalaya rivers. “Like mine,” says Hank, not entirely tongue in cheek, “it was designed exclusively to run safe in the river carrying lots of people, whiskey, and fried chicken.”
