Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

I've been to New Orleans a number of times (pre-Katrina; is it even the same city now?) but oddly enough, the enduring images I have of what the city was about come from a short-lived TV show called Frank's Place. The show starred Tim Reid (who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati if you're old enough to remember that) as a Harvard professor who inherits his father's New Orleans restaurant and decides to try to make a go of it.

One of my favorite episodes is the one in which bartender Tiger and his friends want to have one last drink at the restaurant with a fellow member of their social club who has passed on--they are honoring a promise made to him. The slapstick of the hide-the-body schtick (the health inspector shows up while their late companion is still on the premises) is balanced by the bittersweetness of friendship and loss.

There's no humor about the loss so many people in New Orleans and surrounding areas have suffered, just the sadness of loss--along with the love that causes hope to spring eternal for some who still don't know the fate of their loved ones, even in spite of all odds and evidence against. Just reminds me that the city depicted in that brilliant TV series may have been destroyed, but its soul has not.