When I Grow Up...

I wanna be Uncle Lionel.

One of the honorees at the Best of The Beat awards last night was "Uncle" Lionel Batiste, the co-fonunder, bass drum player, and grand marshal of the Treme Brass Band, and general all around lady's man and man about town. The picture here really doesn't come close to doing him justice because it doesn't have him dressed in the perfectly presented suit and derby hat that he was wearing. It doesn't show the beautiful gold watch he almost always wears across his knuckles, and it doesn't show him sandwiched between two lovely women 1/3 of his age. You don't get the sense of the way all activity stops when people see Uncle Lionel walk in to a room, and you can't see the way he lifts the front of his trousers, perches himself on his toes and taps his feet to the beat.

I had the honor a couple of days ago to work with Al "Carnival Time" Johnson and Pat Jolly to move a bed into Uncle Lionel's new room at The Chrisopher Inn on Frenchman's Street (Katrina left him, like so many others, without a home) and the joy of watching him walk out on stage last night, accept his award and dance with the band.

I'm not joking when I say that I want to be him when I grow up, for to be so completely and universally loved, to be an icon of the city where you live, and to be so dapper, charming, humorous, and, let's face it, down right sexy at 76 seems like the way to live your life to the fullest.

Lionel Batiste IS New Orleans and he would not exist anywhere else in the world. Lionel Batiste is just one of a million (at least) reasons why New Orleans must, can, and will be back.