Missy Wilkinson

As you can tell by the header, my day job is at a newspaper. Which means I’m lucky to get to cover tons of interesting stuff and people here in New Orleans. Most of these stories never make it to the blog, however. Here’s a rundown of features you may have missed if you’re not a Gambit reader. Hope you enjoy… and thank you for being here!

Ten parade tips for walking and dancing krewes // If you’ve never experienced Mardi Gras (or if you’re a parade warrior looking to increase your stamina), here are some insider tips on everything from blister avoidance to alcohol consumption.

How to maintain platinum blonde hair // The ins and outs of caring for the world’s most high-maintenance hue.

What “eating clean” really means // Everyone’s talking about clean eating. But how do you actually do it?

Stripping away rights? // I report on a lawsuit filed against Rick’s Cabaret by local strippers.

How to start a fine linen collection // It’s not as daunting as it sounds (scroll to the bottom for the tips).

Food advice and a recipe by Oprah’s former personal chef // I mean, he worked for OPRAH.

How to exorcise a haunted house // Psychic Cari Roy shares her ghostbusting secrets.

At writers’ conferences, you often have the opportunity to schedule one-on-one meetings with agents and editors who might be interested in your work. But pitching face-to-face is terrifying a challenge. While there are a ton of books, websites and others resources devoted to crafting query letters, very few address in-person pitches. Luckily, I got to hear a number of pros do exactly that at the Writers for New Orleans conference. Here are their tips.

Write down your pitch like you would write a movie blurb. You know, how you go through TV Guide, read a blurb and think, ‘Oh, I’ll watch that movie.'” —Lee Lawless

Know the person who is interviewing you. If you don’t care about them, why should they care about you? Don’t recite the plot of the book. Pre-submission blurbs from a well-known author help.  — Robert Gleason

Practice your pitch with friends, writing partners, family… Try to anticipate questions [agents and editors] might ask you. If you freeze up, my first thought is that’s what’s going to happen when you’re interviewed. —Greg Herren

A pitch is a crafted thing. Describe your work to me in 1-2 sentences. And understand what you’re writing. Most writers don’t understand their own work. —Donna Bagdasarian

 

(They also emphasized that you’ll want to lead with the manuscript’s title, word count, genre and whether it’s part of a series.)

 

The name says it all. I’m giving up booze for 30 days. Laying off the sauce! Hopping on the wagon! Getting dry! Finding my weekends! Today is day one and… it sucks.

I drink at minimum 10-15 drinks per week. Most of that comes from wine. I crack open a bottle while cooking dinner and generally down two to three glasses over the course of the evening. If I’m going out or to a party, I drink more. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, this makes me a “heavy” or “at-risk” drinker.

I don’t think I’m a huge boozer. If anything, I’m on the moderate side for a New Orleanian. I love drinking wine and chopping vegetables and eating dinner. It’s one of the highlights of my day. But I wonder if I’d feel better if I wasn’t getting a little drunk every night. Maybe that isn’t good for like, my liver. Or my complexion. The calories aren’t doing anything for my waistline. I do notice on the rare nights I don’t drink, I sleep better.

So Bryan suggested this 30 day experiment, and I took him up on it. It’s 9:23 p.m. and I am stone-cold sober. I can’t shut off my work brain. Here I am blogging after a full day at Gambit World HQ. I feel so restless. Drinking is a really great “off” switch when it comes to relaxation.

So anyway…day one DONE, 29 to go.

 

Yesterday I floated in a sensory deprivation tank for the first time. I’m writing a longer feature about “float tanks” for Gambit, but I wanted to jot down my experience here, while it is still fresh in my mind.

I have altered my consciousness in a lot of different ways, from distance running to PCP (I did not take PCP on purpose, for the record). I knew float tanks are a tool for that kind of thing, and I’d been interested in them, but not enough to seek one out. So when the owner of NOLA Float Tanks offered me a free float, I said yes with enthusiasm.

Then I set about Googling. One of my first search results came up on Erowid.org. I haven’t frequented that site since the rave days, but I remembered it as being a bunch of trip reports. That hasn’t changed since 2002. And apparently, float tank experiences are included alongside reviews of substances ranging from amanita to zopiclone.

That led me to what’s supposedly one of the Bibles of sensory deprivation: The Book of Floating: Exploring the Private Sea. I’m not done with this book, but so far, I really dig it. Sample quote: “To be human is to explore and make use of altered forms of consciousness.”

My sister floated once. She called the experience “really boring.” So I went to NOLA Float Tanks, a squat ranch house of white-painted brick, expecting the float to be a total mindbender or a total bore. In short, I didn’t know what to expect.

Owner Spencer Fossier was unfazed by the fact that I showed up an hour early. “I can come back,” I said, apologizing. He said we could go ahead and do the float now. He led me to the Samadhi* model: a closed, 150 gallon tank. It looked like a space pod that would conduct me into hyperspace. I regarded it with a kind of awe while Spencer placed his hand on it with love and pride, like a prize sheep.

“If it gets too stuffy in there, prop the door open with a rolled-up towel,” he said after showing me how to turn off the interior light. Then he left me to shower and hop in.

The water felt warm and slick thanks to the 800 pounds of dissolved salt. I closed the hatch, turned off the light and leaned back, bumping around against the sides of the walls for a while. Every tiny scratch, abrasian and nick came alive with fire, itching due to the extremely saline water. That died down soon, but the tiny blue cabin light was still on.  I sat up and fumbled for the button. That’s when I realized the visual hallucinations had begun. Cool.

I watched purple clouds for a while, but it got boring fast. It was just the kaleidoscopic interplay of colors that greet closed eyelids. The tank experience wasn’t all that different from lying in a bathtub with the lights off. I could do that at home, and it wouldn’t be humid and increasingly stuffy, like in the tank. Plus it smelled a little mildewy. My senses were deprived, not gone– and the small amount of stimuli they had was unpleasant. My breath was as loud as waves crashing on a shore, and if I listened for it, I could hear my heart beat. Every so often there would be a juicy peristalic squirting sound that I can only guess was my lunch being digested.

I was bored. I waited for my thoughts to change shape, but it was just my usual feedback loop. I thought a lot about Jonah and his family, because he’s been on my mind. No breakthroughs, no emotional release or heightened empathy.

And now it was stifling in that damned water box.

I opened the hatch and savored the cool, fresh air. Only 22 minutes had passed. Would it look bad if I aborted this attempt? Should I just hang out in the pod room until the time was up? My sister was right: this was beyond boring.

I compromised by keeping the hatch open, flipping my head around to be closer to the fresh air, and closing my eyes. It wasn’t total sensory deprivation. But it was something.

And it was enough. I was awake and asleep at the same time, in a kind of anesthetized slumber. I don’t know how else to explain it. When I fall asleep each night, my boyfriend tells me I twitch, groan and grind my teeth. I never feel any of those things. But in the tank, I felt the occasional, uncontrolled hypnic jerk propel me ever so slightly across the water. Relaxed isn’t the word from it. Embraced in a warm, amniotic unconsciousness is closer. Deep in an opiate dream works only as a metaphor.

I had no sense of time. I got out when the tank switched into its self-cleaning mode. That was a fucking trip. I showered and dressed. I still felt high. I thanked Spencer, not sure what to say. “It was very…languorous,” I said, but that doesn’t come close. The floating book says you can’t understand sensory deprivation without doing it, which is really true.

I did feel high though, almost like I shouldn’t be driving. The cars hurtling down Veterans Memorial Boulevard were so intense about not letting me merge. Cars are monsters, I thought, watching their mean headlights and metal bodies. A very tripped-out thought.

I went back to work, but that wasn’t the best idea. I was only up to getting a massage or eating a sandwich, not replying to email and writing fashion news.

So yeah. That was my experience in the float tank. I will definitely go back, because I think it might be a good tool when it comes time to actually write this feature.

 

*Definition of samadhi according to Wikipedia.org: “Meditative absorption, attained by the practice of dhana. In samadhi the mind becomes still, one-pointed or concentrated while the person remains conscious.”

A week ago my ex-boyfriend died. It was and wasn’t a surprise. Wasn’t because I knew he was sick. I touched the outline of his pacemaker on our first date. On our second, he told me he needed a a new heart. The doctors said he wasn’t a candidate for a transplant. “For muscular dystrophy patients?” said one with a strong French accent. “We do not do.”

His body wasn’t built to last. Still, it was shocking to discover his heart had really, truly failed once and for all, and that he was being kept alive by a a respirator, heart pump, drugs and God knows what else they have in the ICU. “His spirit was so invincible, I thought his body might be, too,” my mom said when I told her the news.

I’m trying to write about this, because I need to blog, and any other topic feels fake. But I am not ready. Everything I write feels dumb and wrong. It’s like after Hurricane Katrina. All these people came down here and made art out of the gutted houses and wreckage, and spun their observations into essays for the New York Times and stuff. While I sat in a sterile room in my sister’s Baton Rouge apartment, alone with my laptop. I was a writer granted a front-row seat to a national tragedy; it was my duty and privilege to write about it– but I couldn’t. I was completely blank, wiped clean, stripped bare.

That’s how I feel now. Also sad and angry. Grateful to have known him, pleased by the recognition he’s gotten for his activism and comedy.  Rejected because I wanted to be closer to him in his death, more involved in his dying process, but I had also wished I could have been more involved in his life. His death felt weirdly like being dumped all over again.

I feel alone in my grief. I am not close to his family, though I once considered them part of my own. At work, nobody acknowledged my loss (except for my editor, who wrote the obituary). I wasn’t expecting a sympathy card or a day off. But I wish just one person had asked, “Hey, are you doing OK?”

And then I feel angry at myself for being so selfish. He’s dead at 28 and here I am feeling sorry for myself. I’m a real asshole.

He planned his funeral. He wanted to have a party at his family’s Uptown home, then to second line to a comedy club where he was a fixture. Everybody’s going to roast him. I don’t know what to say or even if i will say anything at all. I’m planning an outfit though. I bought new shoes for the occasion. I want to look good, even though it’s not like he’ll be there or anything.

I did visit him in the ICU. I am glad I did. I probably wouldn’t have if not for our mutual friend. I’ll end with the email she sent me.

My grandmother turned 88 last month. Cora Wilkinson is a  silver-haired, sapphire-eyed jewel of a woman. The oldest of eight children, she grew up picking cotton on a sharecropper’s farm in Arkansas. She didn’t know she was poor, because it was the Depression and she was hardly the only one wearing cardboard shoes.

She moved to New Orleans at age 17 to become a shipyard welder. At age 20, she married my grandfather, a handsome soldier back home after 42 months in a Japanese prison camp. In the 1960s, she worked for a Baton Rouge news station. Her title was secretary (every woman was a secretary, regardless of what she did), but she was really the assistant program director. She canvassed for the National Organization for Women. She’s the only octogenarian I know with active Twitter and Facebook accounts. She’s pretty kick-ass, is what I’m saying.

Every Thanksgiving her kids, grandkids, great AND great-great grandkids rally at her house. In the back of all our minds is the thought that each Thanksgiving could be her last. This is the only explanation I can come up with for these cornball themed Thanksgivings my family is coming up with.

The first one wasn’t too bad. Everyone had to wear white shirts and jeans. Whatever. I’ve seen plenty of family portraits and engagement photos where they’re doing the white-shirt-on-a-beach thing.

This year, the concept is “hoe-down.” Plaid shirts. Bales of hay. I shudder to think what else they’ve concocted.

But my friend Elizabet had a genius idea: “If i were you I would be practicing my square dancing moves from youtube tutorials right now, planning to go so hard no one ever suggests a ho-down again…”

So that’s what I’m doing. Poring over square dancing outfits, lessons and wondering how I can wrangle eight people for the square.

 

 

New Thanksgiving slogan: Ho hard or ho home.

Morning show hosts amaze me. When I arrive to my monthly WWL-TV gig at 7:30 a.m., they’ve already been awake for almost five hours. They’re bright-eyed, perfectly coiffed, and they’re the friendliest people with the whitest teeth you’ll ever see. Anyway, I’ve picked up some tips from the over the years. Below are tips for looking polished on T.V.

1. Use Crest Whitestrips the night before. Add red lipstick and your smile will blind passersby.

2. Spanx. The camera really does add 10 pounds.

3. Wear solids, not patterns. Brighter is better.

4. Sparkly earrings or statement necklaces look fantastic on camera.

5. Closed-toe shoes look better too. Nobody really wants to see your toes. High heels are a must.

6. Put on more makeup in darker hues than you would normally wear. The lighting can wash you out.

7. Structured clothes (blazers, tailored dresses) show up better.  I swear by dresses from Trashy Diva and Stop Staring!

That’s all I can think of for now. Here’s a link to my appearance from this morning. (I ignored a few of these tips at my peril.) Enjoy!

 

Holy cow. Sorry for the radio silence. This website has been trapped in a Byzantine and baffling underbelly of the internets for more than a month now. It started when I decided to give it a pretty upgrade with a fancy custom theme from 17th Avenue Designs. That’s when I learned the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Only the latter allows custom themes. And I had the former.

So I switched (or rather I hired a freelancer in India to switch) my hosting to Godaddy.com. Then I had 17th Avenue install the custom theme. Bingo! Pastel prettiness all around. Immoveable, unalterable pastel prettiness.

My updates to the site weren’t posting. There was some disconnect between the admin panel and the actual site. In other words, I was in website hell. HELL. And if you’re a Mercury Retrograde-believing type (which I am), you’ll understand what it means when I say that planetary snafu was happening at the time.

The issue is finally, FINALLY resolved thanks to a programming genius named Ahmed, who I love for solving the problem noone else could.

Anyway, the BIG news (aside from the fact that MY FREAKING SITE FREAKING WORKS AGAIN): I have a release date for my novel! Prizm books will release it on July 8, 2015. Sound the trumpets! Also, I have been assigned an editor (Nicole Angela at Angel Edits) and she is so, SO detail oriented and amazing.

Last of all, it’s PIZZA FRIDAY! Soon I get to go home and eat pizza. Current mood: PUMPED AS HELL

There’s an invisible stream of money flowing through the city,” my friend said. We were at a party, guzzling sangria. “You just have to find a way to tap into it.”

He was right. My hometown, New Orleans, gets nine million tourists per year. While they’re here, they need places to eat, visit and sleep.

So I decided to put my place on airbnb.

I’d used airbnb before as a traveler on a trip to Toronto because it offered a cheap, personal alternative to a hotel. While the bed was comfy, the hosts hadn’t bent over backwards to accommodate me. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and their living room was trashed. Like, couch cushions removed and flung across the room and everything buried under clutter. I felt empowered by the low standards. My impression was, “I could easily make money doing this.” Several of my friends admitted to paying their rent with airbnb income. So I tidied my house, snapped a few photos and wrote up its key features.

I emphasized a few words: “spacious,” “private” and “your.” I was super honest about the place’s up- and downsides. We set our rates at $69 a night, a competitive price for the neighborhood. But days went by and nobody inquired. Was my house not good enough? Were travelers deterred by my lack of references on the site?

That’s when I saw airbnb offers free professional photography. I submitted a request, and within a day, a purple-haired, fae-like photographer named Kerry had gotten in touch. “I’m looking forward to photographing your Airbnb listing and helping you showcase your space,” she wrote. She came the next day, snapped photos and was done in 15 minutes. The next day, the set went live on airbnb. And bam, the floodgate opened. Within a few days, we had our first request: two young women from New Jersey stopping in New Orleans on a road trip to Austin, Texas. Pretty soon, every weekend was booked.

The guests have so far been incredibly pleasant, giving us everything from artisan chocolate chip cookies to art lessons, in addition to paying our nightly rate. Some like to hang out and join us on trips to neighborhood bars; other times, we hand them the keys and then never hear from them again. So far, the biggest inconvenience is lack of access to space. The house is only 1,000 square feet, and sacrificing the master bedroom and front porch take a bite out of the living area. It’s also a hassle to sleep on the twin bed in the spare room with my boyfriend. But overall, this is an easy way to make money literally in my sleep. Aside from the hour spent cleaning the house, washing sheets and towels and making sure there are empty drawers in the bedroom, it requires no effort.

There are some added expenses: greater utility use, more toilet paper. And then there are the hidden temptations: I’ve spent more than a small chunk of the income on improvements to the house, adding faster Wi-Fi service and upgrading our bedsheets, mattress cover and patio furniture. I’ve got my eye on a $300 set of Turkish towels, but the line must be drawn somewhere.

While short-term rental offer a great side line of income, I would never want to become dependent on it. First, tourism is very seasonal. Second, I worry that there will be legislation passed that puts a damper on the site. And third, I don’t want to always feel like a guest in my own home. I like having the ability to turn down requests because I feel like binge-watching Netflix in my underwear.

But for now, this is an easy way to pay the mortgage while meeting an interesting stream of international and national travelers.

Last weekend I went to a barbecue in a weird little nook just off Franklin Avenue, tucked by railroad tracks and an interstate on-ramp. I’d lived a few blocks away in 2002 and 2003, when I rented a shoebox-sized apartment on Jonquil Street. But I’d never visited this little patch of ground.

The host, a PhD student my boyfriend knows from LSU, called it a farm, but there wasn’t much by way of agriculture. Some chickens sleeping in their coop. A trailer. A warehouse collapsing on itself. The host said some dude had hidden a bunch of heroin in there. The dude wound up going to rehab, but he wanted one final bender before sobering up, so his dad went out to the warehouse to find his heroin. The host said the dad had a lot of compassion. I said he sounded like an enabler. So, we had different ways of thinking about things.

But I got past the rough patch and was having a pretty good time chatting with the host and his girlfriend about their black bean burger recipe. Other people started to arrive, people with names like Rotten Milk and Arrow.

Arrow had long blonde hair braided under a baseball cap. She was from a small town in upstate New York. I told her about my sister, who lives in Rochester. She told me about her aunt, who owns orchards and wineries. Then she asked the host how he was doing.

“So you’re liking your program?” she asked. “You said there’s a lot of international students.”
“Yeah, there are.”
“That makes sense,” Arrow said thoughtfully. “I mean, who else is going to go? Honky Louisiana people?”

It pissed me off. And I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone much after that. Part of me is still angry, part thinks I’m being too emotional, and part feels relieved. Because I know that’s how a lot of transplants see Louisianans: backwards, hopelessly bound by their own prejudices. A Southern accent conveys stupidity. Denham Springs is the heart of darkness. At least this particular Northern white girl was upfront about it. But I suspect she might not have been had she known I was from Baton Rouge.

Louisiana has a lot of problems. There are racists, sexists and homophobes here. It’s also impoverished, diseased and murderous, plus it has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And yeah, the education system is troubled, especially in Baton Rouge, where failing school districts have prompted “a new apartheid.” Also, there was that hurricane not so long ago. So when I go to a party and I hear Louisianans are too dumb to go to grad school? That just feels like being kicked when we’re down.

I would suggest, to anyone moving here, before you accuse Louisianans of being backwards, stupid or prejudiced, ask yourself why? Why do you think that? And what historic, economic and geographic factors might have conspired to make Louisiana’s parishes bloodier, sicker and poorer than the counties you came from? Ask yourself, ask other people, learn about the place you’ve chosen to call your home before you insult its people. Because to do otherwise, well, that’s prejudice, plain and simple.