one year ago today …

One year ago today, my now-husband and I went to the movies. We do that sometimes, just for fun. Here’s the ticket stub (although Alamo’s receipts aren’t all that ticket-like):

We’d been waiting a long time to see The Aristocrats — I wanted to see it at SXSW in March, but knew there was little chance I’d get into the midnight screening and didn’t even try. Then it took forever for the movie to reach Austin, and I think we actually waited a week or so longer after its release until it got to Alamo Drafthouse, because we prefer seeing movies there. And on August 27, I was feeling a little nervous and thought I could use a distraction.

I’d been on the phone with family on and off that day. My parents were boarding up their house and heading for my sister’s house in Covington, to wait out a potential hurricane hitting New Orleans. My grandparents were refusing to leave, because everyone knew the drill: a hurricane threatened to hit the NO area, it was a pain in the ass to evacuate, and in the end the hurricane always, always turned aside and the area suffered nothing more than a little flooding (so maybe you got a new carpet) or some trees falling. The hurricane always swerved at the last minute. I’d heard dire predictions about what would happen if a hurricane directly hit New Orleans since I was a little girl, but no one actually believed it. It was the natural-disaster version of the boy crying wolf.
But I was a little nervous anyway. The hurricane really did seem to be aimed directly for the city, it hadn’t swerved yet, and I was worried about my grandparents. What if something did happen and they were in the middle of it, with the rest of the family far away? The predictions from the weather service were starting to sound scary. No one had officially called for evacuation at this point, but I still wished my grandparents would stop being so damned stubborn, get in the car, and at least drive over to Covington, which stood less chance of being hit than New Orleans.
So we went to the movies, to watch the documentary about the dirtiest joke ever. I didn’t think I’d see or hear anything that would remind me of the situation in New Orleans. And at first I did not. I just laughed a lot. The Aristocrats is not the world’s greatest documentary, but it’s funny as hell, especially if you’re in the mood to be amused and aren’t easily offended. I thought that my dad would probably like the movie, but only if he didn’t watch it with my mom … maybe if he and my brothers watched it, perhaps with a certain uncle who would also appreciate the humor.
Near the end of the movie, the film focused on comedian Gilbert Gottfried, whom I usually find irritating. A clip played from an event (a roast, I believe) that took place in New York a few weeks after September 11, 2001. The comedians were having trouble — no one knew what kinds of jokes to tell, what might be inappropriate. Gottfried took the mic and cracked a joke about 9/11 that had the audience booing at him and shouting “Too soon!” So he launched into an outrageously filthy rendition of the joke that is the subject of The Aristocrats. He told the joke in such an over-the-top way, everyone was laughing so hard they were practically on the floor. And you could tell that people needed that kind of release — they needed to laugh like that, to forget about the horrible thing that had happened to them. I stopped being irritated with Gottfried at that moment.
But I also felt a small sense of foreboding. Of course, the hurricane would miss New Orleans. But what if it didn’t? Would we all be so devastated that we wouldn’t know what to say, how to laugh — would we be shouting “Too soon!” at someone? Would we need the filthiest joke in the world? Could something as awful as 9/11 happen in New Orleans, to people I knew?
It was a fleeting thought, and I forgot about it for a little while. Until Hurricane Katrina did in fact hit New Orleans, and although we thought it hadn’t hit hard enough to do much damage, it turned out that the levees couldn’t hold up under any level of hurricane. My grandparents had been convinced to leave town at the last minute, but their Lakeview house was near the 17th Street Canal, and when the levee broke there, their house was submerged in water. Covington wasn’t that safe, so it was a good thing my family left — my sister’s house sustained about $30K worth of damage, maybe more, when trees fell through the roof. You’ve seen photos of Lakeview, of the Lower Ninth Ward, of the other areas that flooded and were devastated. You saw footage of the Superdome. I don’t have to give you the gory details.
I was reading about The Katrina Dinner a couple of weeks ago, and asked my husband what he thought about maybe having some people over the following weekend, cooking up some jambalaya or something New Orleans-ish. Maybe watching a movie, too?
“Which movie?” he asked.
“The Aristocrats,” I said, as though it were obvious. It wasn’t. I had to explain and I’m not entirely sure I explained it clearly. I realized that no one else was going to make that connection, so maybe it wasn’t the best choice for a film.
I never reviewed The Aristocrats after I saw it last year. Once Katrina hit, I wasn’t interested in writing about movies, and I had trouble focusing on any kind of serious work for awhile. I wrote a breezy-yet-worried entry on August 28, and tried not to get too upset on Aug. 30, was comparing my brother to Owen Wilson by Sept. 3, and was touched by people’s kind responses by Sept. 7. But I was hurting a lot more than those entries show, and having a lot more difficulty in getting through the day. By Sept. 12 I had quit my job. In retrospect, I’m surprised that I posted as many entries as I did — I couldn’t write about anything non-hurricane-related. Any kind of review of The Aristocrats, objective or subjective, was out of the question.
However, a year later, it’s one of the tangible things I remember about that first week of pre- and post-Katrina hell: those two glorious hours at Alamo on South Lamar, laughing our asses off, on the brink of disaster. I’d like to see When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary, on Tuesday night, even though I might have to quit in the middle and yell “Too soon!” But we don’t have HBO, so it’s not an option. Instead, I think I should rent something completely escapist, something that will make me laugh, like The Aristocrats. Because even a year later, I could still use help from someone like Gilbert Gottfried, distracting me with the most amazingly filthy humor.