Laundromat Angel | Morgan City, Louisiana

I love a good industrial port city and Morgan City definitely fits the bill. I do some banking and tour around a bit but laundry is critical. The crowded laundromat parking lot is full of homeboys, large families and other rough looking folk loitering outside which has me going into reverse. A lap around town, demonstrates that this is the only option and I return to the same intimidating scene. 

On The Road

I enter and fill two front loaders noticing that it seems cleaner than it appeared from the outside. Thinking that if these folks see my computer they might try to rob me when I’m in doing my laundry, I return to the van to work. Best to get in and out of here. Well, I go back in and find one of my loads sitting in two inches of water. The attendant is nice and helps me get them into another washer but this means I’ll be here another two hours. Annoyed and a bit pissy, I return to the van and work on my now camouflaged with newspaper computer. When finally packed and ready to go, I can’t find my wallet. I search and search and begin to unload the van. A woman, who looks like she has emptied all her polyester bedding from her trailer into her barely running beater, yells “Honey, you lookin fer your wallet?” Stunned, I nod and she says she saw it atop of the washer and turned it in to the attendant. I thank her profusely, feeling the shame of my preemptive judgment of her, this place and its patrons. I’m such a cracker from the north.

On Food & The Art of the Up Sell | Morgan City, Louisiana

April  2012

We spend the night at a truck stop with an adjoining hamburger joint. It is a cavernous space bathed in pink neon lighting illuminating black & white booths. It has the prerequisite 1950’s nostalgia hanging from the walls and an enormous soda fountain counter wrapped around the kitchen like a fist. I have to remind myself I’m in Cajun country and not in California. My server is a robust African American woman with tenacious training in the art of the up-sell. She walks me through the menu of burger choices with such enthusiasm and detail that I am led to upgrading my burger’s ounces, mushrooms, bacon, upscaling my cheese, my fries are curled and made from sweet potatoes to bring the meal to San Francisco prices. I don’t mind a bit, that’s how good she is. The burger comes and it isn’t overdone and of reasonable size. This is the mainstream American measure of a burger outside of San Francisco. It isn’t some amazing Frisco-foraged-find like a kobe beef slider with fried dandelion leaves and French tarragon goat cheese. (I just made that up, call it the Asian Frogman.)

The food scene in San Francisco believes in the basic gospel of the trinity: Organic, Local, and Sustainable. But like any religion it’s the fundamentalists that get the attention. These folks specialize in urban grown, raw, slow cooked, vibrational, foraged, small batch, entrepreneur bred, and a host of other micro attentive endeavors.  Restaurants race to invent the new mashup of ethnic cuisines with reinvented foraged delectables that have been infused with something of pedigree. Here there are no refugees from the Dinner Wars with San Francisco becoming the Vatican of Food and Alice Waters as Pope.  I’m a former foodie practitioner who would rather be served than serve these days. I enjoy documenting how far the SF food fever has flung across the country and am amazed even more to land somewhere it hasn’t yet grazed.

Before I’m even halfway through my burger, I meet my server’s questioning but optimistic smile with an approving nod and she laughs and says “Well we ain’t world famous, fer nothing!  You should try our chocolate milkshake, its outta of this world, you want M&M’s on that?”