South Toward Home by Julia Reed

Author:Julia Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

A Tasteful Send-off

In April 2014 in New Orleans, Mickey Easterling, a woman described in various obituaries as a “philanthropist and party giver,” attended her own funeral. I realize it’s true that we all, in one form or another, attend our own funerals, but Easterling was not lying quietly in a coffin or residing in a tasteful urn. She was sitting upright, on a platform erected for the occasion, decked to the nines in a big black hat and a hot-pink feather boa, a cigarette holder in one manicured hand and a Waterford crystal flute of champagne in the other.

The event, held in the grand Italianate lobby of the newly restored Saenger Theatre on Canal Street, was attended by more than a thousand people and made the news as far away as Ottawa and London, where people were riveted by the details, most of which had been carefully planned by the, um, hostess. Among the tidbits reported: the items atop the wrought-iron table next to the garden seat in which she sat (champagne bucket containing an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot, coffee-table book on hats, pack of American Spirit cigarettes); the ferns and pots of white phalaenopsis orchids flanking the “stage” to approximate her own backyard pool patio; the fact that she wore her favorite jeweled brooch (spelling out the word bitch); and her age, eighty-three, which seemed a tad unfair since most of the articles also quoted one of her trademark lines (“Age is a number, and mine’s unlisted”).

There was no program, just a jazz combo on a balcony above and a whole lot of people approaching the “garden area” and raising their glasses (and their camera phones) to the figure before them. “It was a very pleasant effect,” her friend, the Tennessee Williams scholar Kenneth Holditch, told a reporter with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “At first I hesitated to even go look, but when I did … it was not unseemly.” Sammy Steele, who did her makeup, went further: “She looks wonderful. She is a living legend, even in death.”

I will have to take their word for it, though the large color photo on the front page of the New Orleans Advocate, the city’s new daily, was perhaps a tiny bit jarring, if not flat-out grotesque. Still, Easterling was not the first New Orleans “legend” to make a splashy exit. When Ernie K-Doe (the rhythm and blues singer most famous for the 1961 hit “Mother-in-Law”) died in 2001, his widow, Antoinette, commissioned an effigy, made from a department store mannequin, so that he could remain a presence, seated on a throne in their nightclub, the Mother-in-Law Lounge. Dressed in an ever-changing selection of his former performing outfits, the look-alike K-Doe—in real life he had often referred to himself as the Emperor of the Universe—was also occasionally taken out for public appearances by his wife before she died, in 2009. Then, two years ago, there was Lionel Batiste, the bass drummer of the Treme Brass Band, who attended his wake leaning against a street lamp, wearing a hat and suit and his familiar watch, whistle, and rings.

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