What is the video about?
This video is about life and love and fun and hope and faith
back home... it's a story of people set on coming home...
hell or high water... folks who have come back home to
way down yonder... to New Orleans.
Why was this video made?
Here's the answer to that, in Terry Fletrich Rohe's words...
People have often asked me about the genesis of this little DVD, which is part mini-doc and part love letter to a city and some of its people, produced by "an unlikely trio"...
It begins with an eighty-nine year old great grandmother who came to New Orleans in 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, having fallen in love with jazz, growing up in Shanghai, China and going to tea dances at the Park Hotel, across from the Race Course, where they had an excellent jazz band. Fast forward to 1976, when as a widow of six years she comes to the peace and quiet of Maine to write(the great American novel) and support herself with a bit of radio and television(having started in both in the forties).
Enter character two of the "unlikely trio"... Kim Mitchell, Native American son of a chief of the Penobscot tribe, who has just graduated from the University of Maine in broadcasting... the local public television station matches them up to produce a series about the Acadians, starting in Nova Scotia and ending in Louisiana(the station ran out of money for the series after only two half hours were produced), but the "unlikelies" continue working together through thick and thin, for NY´s WPIX-TV, ABC´s Good Morning America, etc.
Thus, after Katrina struck, and two New Orleans grandchildren had produced great-grandchildren, "unlikely #1" turned to old friend "unlikely #2", and said "if I find you a clean floor in New Orleans and you have a sleeping bag, might you bring a camera and let’s see what we can see." "Why not?" said "unlikely #2".
And then enter "unlikely #3", Carey Haskell, a good buddy of "#2", a media person, a shooter and an excellent editor, and already a lover of New Orleans. Who, as a teen-ager in the piney woods of Maine, had read a book that told him "you’ve got to go to New Orleans" and he did twenty years later, two weeks before Katrina.
And so, the "unlikely trio" traveled to New Orleans in March ´06 and, six months later, this DVD was born.
Who appears in this video?
Well, we talked with a wide variety of New Orleanians about why they have returned to New Orleans at a time when living in the city can be difficult. Here are some of them.
Jim Amoss
Editor, the Times-Picayune
Wayne Baquet
Owner, Little Dizzy´s on Esplanade
Anthony Bean
Actor, teacher, Community Theater Director
Kari Borg
Actress, French Quarter resident
Charlie Bosworth
Songwriter, interviewer, financial advisor
Bob & Jan Carr
Long-time New Orleans broadcasters
Heather Elizabeth
Photographer, New Orleans jewelry designer
Rhoda Faust
Owner, The Maple Street Book Shop
Bob French
Leader of the "Original Tuxedo Jazz Band"
Doug MacCash
Times-Picayune Arts Writer
Linda Mintz
Actress, former host of "Romper Room"
Dr. Lynne Nietzschman
Counselor, The Academy of the Sacred Heart
Eva Perry
Owner, Tee-Eva’s on Magazine Street
Paul Prudhomme
Chef, restauranteur , entrepreneur
Margie Simon
Long-time 9th Ward resident
Ronnie Virgets
Writer, commentator, journalist
Marva Wright
Singer, "Blues Queen of New Orleans"
Home About Links Ordering
Website design by Carey Haskell
Fleur-de-lis painting by Lindsay Weirich
Video and website contents ©2006 Digital Workshop
For more information, comments or just to say hi email us at:oldfriendscominghome@gmail.com
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