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Night of the Iguanas at Birchmere
"I've never had a mailing address outside of New Orleans": Bassist Rene Coman, far right, and sax man/pinch-hitting singer Joe Cabral, center, playing their hearts out Saturday night.
(By Rich Lipski -- The Washington Post)
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You'd hardly know anything was amiss, save for a bit of banter: At one point, Cabral asks the audience to pray for Hodges, and he later suggests that ticket-holders support the relief effort, noting the Red Cross donation bucket at the back of the room.
"I'm sure," he says, "that anything will help."
Cabral, though, is much less certain of what he'll find in New Orleans when he pulls on a pair of shrimping boots today and returns to the city to inspect his property.
The Iguanas were touring in New England when Katrina hit, and nobody's been home since -- save for Coman's quick mission to fetch his dog, Dindi, whom somebody had been feeding through a mail slot. The band has temporarily relocated to Austin, and Cabral, for one, thinks he may be there for quite some time, given the information that he's pieced together about his house: The satellite image online that showed a guy rowing down Cabral's street in a boat; the TV video of a submerged shopping center two blocks from his home; a report from a friend who'd been by Cabral's property.
"He said, 'Joe, wow, I'm really sorry.' I guess it looked pretty bad. I took in a lot of water."
Garrison, too, has studied satellite images, and he's seen a water-depth survey that showed his place under five feet of water. But, he says, his home is on three-foot piers, and there's a bit of elevation in the yard and, well: "It could be okay," he says. "But it could also be totaled. I won't know until I see it."
Coman isn't sure what he'll find. But as a New Orleans native -- a guy who went to high school with Wynton Marsalis and studied music under the jazzman's father, Ellis -- he vows to move back no matter what. "I've never had a mailing address outside of New Orleans; it's an essential part of my identity," he says. "I don't know that I can sustain myself long-term if I'm not there."
Says Cabral, a Nebraska native who moved to New Orleans in the 1980s: "I know that I definitely want to return. There's no place like it."
For now, the band will play on in Austin. Sort of. Because the full group won't be together (saxophonist Derek Huston has relocated to a town near Lafayette, La.), the New Orleans exiles are adopting a temporary name for gigs in their adopted city. Introducing . . . the Texiles!
