Why I Love New Orleans: a cross cultural birthplace

When I got to boarding school in Connecticut, I was completely unaware just how special growing up in New Orleans is to an outsider.  Every introductory conversation went the same:

"I'm from New Orleans.  What about you?"

"You're from New Orleans?!  That's insane!  What's Mardi Gras like? Are there lots of naked people everywhere?"

"My family comes over.  We grill and walk around the corner to the parades."

"Parades?! Is that where the naked people are?!"

"There aren't any naked people.  What are you talking about?"

Lather, rinse and repeat.  I couldn't fully understand the uniqueness of my hometown because the only other places I'd ever spent time were El Paso and Juarez - neither of which were super cool in my opinion as a child.  I didn't realize that my boredom in these other cities were spurred by my spoiled upbringing in the greatest city in the world.

Now here I was in Watertown, Connecticut.  If there's a polar opposite of New Orleans, it's Watertown.  It was only here that I began to appreciate the beauty of New Orleans.  On the surface, it's the food (sorely missed during my time in the Northeast), the music, the parties.  Beneath that, though, there's much more to this city that outsiders just don't understand.  Things that we locals, take for granted.

That first week in the dorm was hard.  I missed my family, of course.  I missed the tree outside my house.  Every Mardi Gras to this day, the kids gather up the beads they don't want to save and throw them into the Crepe Myrtle in front of my house.  It's beautiful.  It's also a huge pain in the ass when a heavy rain falls and drops them onto my car and the sidewalk and I find myself, year-round, constantly throwing them back into the tree, but it's beautiful.

I missed the Crepe Myrtles.  They're everywhere in New Orleans.  Ours is a deep fuchsia, but there are purple, red and a pink so pale it almost looks white.  Don't get me wrong, Connecticut is beautiful - especially in the springtime - but it's not New Orleans.

I missed the neutral grounds.  Everywhere else, they're called medians, but we do things differently down here.  The green, landscaped stretch of land that separates our large streets and avenues is called the neutral ground.  It's where my family stands on Mardi Gras to watch the parade.  We are a strictly neutral ground side family.  Get out of here with that "sidewalk side" nonsense.  Concrete or grass?  No contest.  I could explain the etymology of the term, but in all honesty, I had to Google it to refresh my memory.  You can do the same.  That's another thing about New Orleans.  There are lots of names for lots of things down here and most of us can't tell you why. 

I missed the streetcar.  Not that I've ever ridden it more than five times in my life, but I missed it nonetheless.  The sound of it rumbling down the street.  The hum it makes as it flies down St Charles Avenue, packed with tourists headed for the Quarter.  The streetcar is part of the soundtrack of this city - the white noise like blood coursing through veins.  I get especially nostalgic now because it helped me get home many a drunken night when I refused to call a cab. Not in the sane, legal way you're thinking.  No, no, no.  In the horribly illegal way in which I lived my early twenties ("Streetcar tracks stay on the left, Mia.  You got this.  30 miles per hour").  By the way, don't call it a trolley.  Just don't. 

I missed the humidity.  This may seem like an insane thing to say, but I love the humidity here.  There's nothing like it anywhere else.  Yes, it wreaks havoc on my hair and yes it makes me sweat even more than the unhealthy amount I already do (seriously, I have a problem).  But there was nothing sweeter than the first time I stepped off a plane from the Northeast and felt that hot, wet blanket of humidity swaddle me. I took a deep soggy breath and I knew I was home.

I even missed Jazz Fest.  When I was a kid, I hated Jazz Fest.  Yes, I see the irony because I'm about to play Jazz Fest for the eighth year in a row and I love it, but as a little kid?  It was the worst thing I could possibly imagine.  It was enormous and there was so much walking and it smelled like horseshit.  It was so hot and there was no music I was interested in.  I didn't get in to New Orleans music until I was much older, so I didn't appreciate the fact that I was seeing the Meters and the Neville Brothers and so many other musicians I would come to love and respect.  "Is *NSYNC playing?  No? Then, why the eff am I here?"

I graduated from high school in May 2005.  The three months that followed were blissful.  I was finally home and I could appreciate all that I had missed.  I played tourist and rode the streetcar down to the Quarter, had a muffuletta from Central Grocery and I haggled with a shop owner in the French Market over the price of a SPAM graphic tee.  I was supposed to go to film school in Savannah that fall, but I deferred a year.  It's what all the cool kids from my high school were doing, but they were using their gap year to travel Europe and South America and I was going to be a bum.

Then, Katrina.  Then I really missed New Orleans.  Not knowing whether our house was still standing was the worst kind of hurt I'd known.  There was something beautiful about that time, though.  All of my friends and teachers from boarding school reached out to me through the new miracle of Facebook to see if my family was okay.  Even people I didn't really know who just knew me as "that girl from New Orleans who sings," checked in.  They too were touched by this disaster because of their remote connection to me.

In my very roundabout way, I guess that's what I love the most about New Orleans: the connections.  This city was founded as a connecting point and it continues to bring people together from all walks of life, from every corner of the world.  It's a hub, a port, an epicenter.  It's a cross-cultural birthplace of food, music and me. 

Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, Mia Borders’ original music genuinely reflects the oft-referenced melting pot of her hometown. Her catalogue of nine commercial releases spans from 2007’s pop-rock-influenced “the ep” to 2016’s R&B LP “Fever Dreams.”  Catch her Tuesday, March 14th at 8pm at Chickie Wah Wah's on Canal.