One more quick note on a Letters From New Orleans-related topic: Another essay in the book was about Zulu, and there’s a a piece about the famous social & pleasure club’s 100th anniversary in the NYT. It’s written for people who don’t know a thing about what a parade of costumed Zulu members is like, and includes this amusing bit about how it might seem to such an observer, at first glance:
The scene looks like something from an old social studies filmstrip about stereotypes and how to avoid them, the kind of thing that crops up today mostly in news accounts involving students being expelled from school.
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a 
