New Orleans: Girlgang Productions Rocks!

In New Orleans, we played an inspiring show put on by Girlgang Productions. We played at The Circle Bar, a beautiful red and homey-feeling bar, a benefit for the Latino Health Outreach Project, an organization providing important medical and holistic health services and outreach to a Latino/a community that's been rapidly growing as a result of post-Katrina rebuilding efforts. The NOLA crew came out to support LHOP and were an incredible and energetic crowd.

We've already been told by several people at this point that we "eat like monsters", and here we really went all out. From a gay diner in the "fuit loop" to fried pickle poboys, beignets, and homemade icecream with flavors like spicy vanilla bean, we really went to town.

Our Girlgang and New Orleans Network friends took us on what they call "the tour of devastation". This was hard, both seeing what had happened to the city itself, and learning a lot about the less-reported-on aspects of Katrina, like the abandoning and trapping of prisoners, and the work of organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities who've been working on fighting the reprocussions of that and also bringing to light police/legal abuses that far predate Katrina. We talked a lot about the "rebuilding effort" that will displace many and slash public and low-income housing, and we were really inspired by the work that all of the organizations I've mentioned are doing.

Also, we learned about a company called Access Denied, who were the ones to provide the metal barriers blocking up all the doors and windows of very mildly affected public housing to keep people from returning to their homes, and were told about how someone living on the richest street in NOLA hired a private Israeli security company called Instinctive Shooting International to hover helicopters over the street to protect the houses from looting. Yeah. I'm not kidding. That pretty much blew our minds.