Disaster Dan and photos of me
Here’s Disaster Dan — we asked him to shut the door gently and this is what happened…
Disaster Dan was pretty impressive, mostly because he was a teenager. You know how drinking’s no big deal most of your life, but when you’re under 21 (Reagan’s fault — I wonder if I hate conservative presidents so much because Reagan forced states to raise the drinking age and I’m slow to forgive, or because they seriously damage the country for their own profit) it’s a status offense. It’s the same with disaster relief. Dan was likeable, smart, handsome, and all sorts of wonderful things, but mostly he was 19. There was a small group in their early 20s, me, and a bunch of retired people, but Dan was easily the youngest.
Disaster Dan was doing Disaster Relief, the sexy job. You’d go to people’s homes and see how damaged they really were — quite varied, and somewhat dangerous and unpredictable. When people were upset that Red Cross wasn’t coming through with checks, it was Dan they threw stuff at.
But, anyway, that’s Dan. The main thing about Dan was that he took pictures of me. So, here two of them are; these were taken as I was heading out to go back home. DD also took some photos of me in New Orleans, but they don’t have a lot more information that the one from Nance, already posted.
These are the two women with whom I went to Baton Rouge. We’re arranged in order of height. Kathy, in the middle, was great to hang out with as we drove back to Baton Rouge to outprocess, which, again, we stand here about to do. She’s from Nebraska, somewhere near Omaha. There’s a lot to say about Kathy, but mostly we just had a nice drive, and lunch — two meals if you count coffee. Having stood on corners in New York to watch all the girls go by, and having had a girl in a flatbed Ford slow down to take a look at me when I stood on a corner in Winslow, AZ, I felt I should, as a city boy, stand on a corner in Lafayette and wonder where I could go. Kathy indulged me, which was pretty cool.
Nance was from Iowa. There was a town called Iowa on I-10 just ouside of Lake Charles, which I must have pointed out to her 14 times, which I mostly did by referring to her state as I.O.A., which is how the Iowans of Western Louisiana pronounce it. Nance and I by the time of this picture had already had our fun. We and Disaster Dan had accompanied another DR (Kathy and Nance were both Disaster Relief) Toni to BR to get her outprocessed on our way to New Orleans for Hallowe’en. Without Nance, I wouldn’t have done a disaster tour in Chalmette, and wouldn’t have gotten my fine Burger Orleans picture or gotten to wave my Red Cross ID at a National Guard checkpoint. Irish Bayou, I have to say, is one pretty badly damaged town.
Another 11/3/2005 picture. Brian was one of the four staff shelter managers. Lord knows what they did; swept mostly, and compained about being unappreciated. I’m just bitter because Brian’s partner came down on me for having liquor in my bag. But, Brian was always helpful,and friendly. He was a deputy coroner from Kentucky. I’d never hung out with a coroner before (and yes, he had a story about accidentally bagging and tagging a living person, so hold on to those neuroses!) so I can finally cross that off my list. You would think that Brian would get me talking about the racial mix of the Red Cross volunteers — they were almost all white. However, Brian insisted that he, himself, was white and had a paternity test to prove it. So, he doesn’t provide the easy entree you’d think.
Well, if I don’t blog again in the next couple of days, have a Happy Thanksgiving!
