The Death of "K-Ville"
It looks like another great New Orleans institution is gone for good.
You had to be here to appreciate "K-Ville". Everyone got together on Monday nights to laugh at what they got so wrong about New Orleans, and praise what they got right.
I got to meet up with a lot of old friends that I hadn't seen in years, especially since the big storm diaspora. My old friend Skip Bolen, with whom I'd done music shows many years ago, a very talented graphic artist and photographer, came back from years of self-imposed exile in L. A. recently, and did the production stills for "K-Ville".
In my little backwater neighborhood in New Orleans, Hollygrove, I became a celebrity as "the guy from 'K-Ville'"; although half of the artistic people in NO worked on K-Ville, I was the only one who lived in Hollygrove, so I got a lot of attention while pumping gas and buying cigarettes
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At the Gas-n-Go on Claiborne Avenue, just before the Parish line, I'd get a lot of fan attention. The guys who run the bootleg movie DVD business out of the back of a van in the parking lot liked me to hang around and be their resident star. I always wore my old Fox logo baseball jacket, with black leather sleeves and grey flannel body. And of course my alligator shoes, which everyone recognized from the shots of dead bodies that I was standing over in my brief flashes on K-Ville as the coroner.
Dave Walker, TV critic for the Times-Picayune, did a wonderful week-by-week analysis of "K-Ville" and its effects on our lives here. But as I said earlier, you had to be here to appreciate the phenomenon.
The wardrobe misstress on "K-Ville" was a woman I've worked with before on a few movies. I won't say her name, but I want to give her this plug. She knows who she is. She's good at her job, of course, but I want to say that additionally she is cute enough to melt Antarctica. Oh, yeah.
Spring is just a few weeks away here in New Orleans, but the buzz was that "K-Ville" was doomed if the writer's strike wasn't settled by last year's end. And it wasn't. I know that most of you are worried about the Oscars, but "K-Ville" was more important.
While working on "K-Ville", I met a homegirl, Cynthia, who is from my old home town of Cleveland, Tennessee. We spent many hours on cigarette breaks together.
In case you have actually watched the show, and are wondering, people here do put Tabasco on a lot of things, but not oatmeal.
I don't think Dave Walker is from New Orleans; I may be wrong about that, but if he is in fact not he has developed a real sensitivity to what rings true about New Orleans (other than his kicking Bunny Matthews out of TV Focus, which may not have been his decision). Dave's coverage of the K experience was very cool, but the same cliche holds true: you had to be here. It was a planetary alignment that will not be seen again for a millenium or two.
Some of you may know that I used to be a lawyer, so you have to accept the fact that my best "K-Ville" stories will have to be heard in person.
My job on this show was to zip up dead bodies. Here's one.