Today's subject line is from Catie Curtis's People Look Around (link is to a video of a live performance in Nashville).

I didn't see much of the Oscars, but I heard a Studio 360 interview of Philippe Petit while driving to Cookeville (interesting guy, especially when he's telling Kurt Andersen he'd rather be called an alien than a hero), and his little sleight of hand on the podium was my favorite moment of what I did see (so to speak) of the telecast. (Also, on a completely shallow note, James Marsh is hot. Yowsa!)

Coffee hour after Sunday's service was a pleasant mix: the postlude was a recording of Cailen Campbell and Laurie Fisher playing "John Brown's Dream/Cluck Old Hen," and after the first verse or two, Ivan and Susan started dancing and pulled me in for a couple of chains and swings. Susan taught me a same-sex hold for the swings (where the hands are joined equally at the waist, so that it doesn't matter who's technically leading).

It was my first time dancing since New Year's Day, so even that little bit got me dizzy and I had to sit down before the song was done. Several people came up to me to chat about the sermon -- one reminisced about attending Berea College, which had been his introduction to more liberal views (he'd come from a tiny rural community near Somerset), and another spoke about his own desperation to escape his too-small town when he was a boy ("I had every freight train schedule memorized..."). And in the kitchen, there was homemade king cake (the woman in charge of refreshments attends both UUCC and Hadassah, and she mentioned that she baked for both).

From Roy Blount Jr.'s Feet on the Street:

I know of two places where the Marseillaise was sung in defiance of an occupying power: Casablanca, in the movie, and New Orleans, under Union control.

I am not a New Orleans expert. If I'd lived here long enough to be that, I'd be dead, because New Orleans never closes. But then New Orleans has not generally been a place where creatives...put down roots. It has been a place for reorientational interludes. ... Charles Bukowski [stayed just long enough] to acknowledge that "being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that."

I spent one summer here, in 1963, working as a reporter at the Times-Picayune and living in a converted slave quarters, on St. Philip Street, around the corner from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. I was twenty-one and shy. I have returned, to the best of my recollection, thirty-eight times, for anywhere from two days to three weeks. I'll bet I have been up in N.O. at every hour in every season. It is not a town, in my experience, where a person takes meticulous notes, over the years, or keeps assiduous track of every note he does take. If this were school, I'd say the dog ate some of my research. But I can bring the dog to class and show you how fat he is and how apologetic he looks.