About
I’m a thirty-something gal living in Northeast PA and hating it. I hate the cold. I hate snow. I hate winter. I curse my ancestors for settling here and not somewhere warm and tropical.
I am married to a wonderful, very supportive and patient guy, Mike. We have two great kids, Jimmy and Connor, who take up a lot of our time.
We also have a small zoo: 3 dogs and 3 cats. The dogs are Sage, Bayley and Trooper. The cats are Bingo, Voodoo and Gumbo. They live to drive us nuts. They are spoiled and will live forever to spite us.
I work at a local university and for the most part I LOVE my job! I love working with students and being in an academic environment.
I love to travel, especially to New Orleans, the most beautiful city in the world. I never tire of her. I would like to live there when we retire. I wish we could move there now to help contribute to the rebuilding. I love everything about the city and am working on a guide to my favorite places there.
I am obsessed with music (Harry Connick Jr. and Bonerama), books, shoes, jewelry, food, the weather, fleur de lis, Mardi Gras, anything having to do with New Orleans, Christmas, TV, movies, celebrities, and glittery/sparkly/shiny things.
Comments
Comment from Gwen
Time: January 11, 2007, 10:38 pm
Hey girl! I’m heading to Nawlins for the annual girls trip 3/2-3/4 and was looking for info on Bonearama and look where I landed! I see we’ll be missing each other once again. One of these years I’m coming in early so we can finally meet. Miss ya on the lab board.
Gwen
Comment from Charles London
Time: March 1, 2007, 12:26 pm
See You This Saturday!
The Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association is sponsoring another neighborhood cleanup on March 3rd.
Our first cleanup was by anyone’s measure a huge success considering over 60 people came out in the rain to participate.
You can see a short film of the first cleanup event here…
http://www.katrinafilm.com/fsjna.wmv
At the bottom are links to the flyers for the March 3rd event in *.doc and *.pdf format.
Please help promote this event or join us on March 3rd if you can.
Thank you!
Charlie London
http://www.fsjna.org
http://www.katrinfilm.com/March3rd.doc
http://www.katrinafilm.com/March3rd.pdf
http://www.peterzonisny.com/nbcvideo.html
Bob McGuire, who lives across from and promotes Fortier Park, was taking in the sites and sounds of the French Quarter when he stopped to admire the work of one of the many artists who sketch in and around the French Quarter.
This chance encounter resulted in a donation by the artist of one of his works for the March 8th fundraiser. And why is this important?
Click below to see an NBC news report on the man to find out…
http://www.peterzonisny.com/nbcvideo.html
You can bid on this artist’s work March 8th at the Fortier Park Festival
at the triangular park in the 3100 block of Esplanade.
Charlie London
from nymag.com
Painting for His Supper
A Warholian street artist stokes celeb chefs’ egos. “I was just so flattered!” says Rocco.
By Ada Calhoun
‘A fashion designer at Bergdorf Goodman calls me a contemporary Lautrec,” crows Peter Zonis, who has been selling his colorful work outside Barneys for the past two years—and is quite possibly the city’s highest-end street artist. Buyers of his paintings, which run from $200 to $1,000, include Joe Namath, Robert De Niro, and a slew of restaurant owners. Score one for Zonis’s pretty if rather overbearing Aussie manager, Elle Petrincic, who takes full credit for her client’s now making thousands of dollars a week rather than, as in his previous life, $10 an hour at the MoMA bookstore.
“When I met him, he was just a tortured bloody artist,” she says with disgust. “I made him switch to oil pastels.” (She also made him go to a cosmetic dentist.) And when Hemingway winked at her in a dream (don’t ask), she realized Zonis, 45, should sell his stuff on the street.
“It looks like whatever,” she says, gesturing toward the art, “but our client list is this thick.” One collector, Peter Heidt, a senior vice-president at Prudential Securities, says Zonis has all the marks of future fame: “He has this dominatrix-type manager. He’s like the Andy Warhol of our generation.”
Like Warhol, Zonis knows just how to play to his clients’ egos. On Petrincic’s advice, he started painting restaurants like Rao’s, Nello, La Goulue, and Orsay. Sure enough, the restaurants’ owners or their friends—like bears stumbling into so many traps—snapped them up.
A friend of Rocco DiSpirito’s saw a painting of Rocco’s restaurant and called DiSpirito, who bought it right away. (Wasn’t the TV show enough?) “I was just so flattered any artist would want to paint it,” says DiSpirito. The self-titled “restaurant guru of Madison Avenue artists,” Zonis seems quite happy, but as usual, Petrincic sneers at his complacency: “I’ll wring Ben Stiller’s neck if he doesn’t play Zonis in the movie.”
Comment from Denise
Time: April 16, 2007, 11:39 am
I HAVE to show my husband this site. Looks like you are more obsessed with Harry than I am, and he will find that hard to believe. We are going to NOLA next week to help with cleanup/reconstruction and I am hoping to catch Bonerama, Lucien and Leroy at Jazzfest. I am trying to cultivate a Connick buddy and have taken her to two concerts, but I am not sure she wiull be a fellow obsessive like me. My daughter (18) and son(9) have both met Harry. My son always gets the most attention, darn it. He gave him some skittles at the Ames, IA concert and Harry started talking to him in front of the audience. My son did pretty good. He at least managed to utter out his name and age before getting too star struck to be coherent! Harry’s latest albums are just too delicious. My daughter and I used to think “Just Kiss Me” was the greates sone ever written, but LUSCIOUS?!?!?!?! How much better could it get? Even without any Harry vocals, it is a standout!
Comment from Lyn LeJeune
Time: September 24, 2007, 9:46 am
Here is an excerpt from the supernatural novel, The Beatitudes, by Lyn LeJeune, now available at amazon.com and all booksellers around the world. Lyn is donating ALL royalties to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help rebuild the public libraries of New Orleans. If you like what you read here, order the book, enjoy, and help NEW ORLEANS. (blog is http://www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com- come and join The Beatitudes Network – Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans) “BUY A BOOK, BUILD A LIBRARY,” AS QUOTED AT FREAKONOMICS, NEW YORK TIMES, 8/14/07.
Again the dream: Pinch smiling, her skin glistening, her smile solemn. The pliant light of dusk folds over her body. A deep purple cloak spreads white, colors like a kaleidoscope ripples at its heart, red, blue and pale white. A hand moves out of it’s chest and swiftly, before I can wake, before I can scream, she is run through with an instrument that flares gold, blood bubbles and a whiff of vapor coils across the scene. A voice that is me but not me calls out a truth that I have known for too long: that when I wake to the soft shadows of dawn, she will be no more. They say that cops routinely dream about their partner’s death. So why should it be different for social workers? This is my dream of Pinch’s murder. It is as clear as I see myself in my bathroom mirror, in the soap and grease-encrusted mirror at work, and in the mirror that is Pinch’s eyes. I had told her about it, about how sometimes what I saw in my mind came true, how other times I just couldn’t know because it happened in places far away. She said she understood. Her grandmother had practiced voodoo. “Perhaps you’re a Gran Met. A voodoo guide or something,” she had laughed. It wasn’t until a week later that I remembered to look up the term in a history of voodoo in New Orleans. Gran Met: intermediary between the living and the dead. A priestess. Mildly shaken, I had gone to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and watched as tourists with cameras hanging from their necks scratched three Xs on Marie Laveau’s crumbling tomb. Mold and soot attached themselves to the stucco encasement no matter how often it was cleaned. Admirers and sycophants had cluttered the area with tokens, most of them trinkets that symbolized appeals for a better life. And then I heard children laughing, a sonorous but faraway tinkling, like a bewitched wind chime. There are times when we scoff at what we perceive as the irrational, brushing away stentorian alarms; and we pay dearly for that foolish action. I had done that most of my life, hushing the voices that begged for validation, closing my eyes to the pulsating shapes that followed me. As I surveyed the gaggle of tourists on that now far away day, I saw no children. Gran Met with two souls, one the gros bon ange which gives her the will to live and survive and connects her to the living and should she wish, if good works are done, she may return, I guess be reincarnated, for a better life. Soul number two: our personality, the face we see in the mirror, our earthly essence: ti bon ange. I walked away shaking my head and thinking perhaps it was time I paid another visit to the department’s psychiatrist. I had watched my mother sit at our kitchen table talking to people who were not there, soothing their fears, understanding their pain. The year before she died, she stared at me as though I had become air; the night she died, I was but a ghost in her life. My mother died a madwoman and that was something I never wanted to tell Pinch. Better a voodoo princess than the madwoman of New Orleans.
I woke on the first morning of my suspension just as the sun crested the rim of the world. City noises reverberated and called the people to work. But I would not answer the call today. I dressed quickly, washed, pulled on my boots and headed out for coffee and a big breakfast. I stumbled along Royal Street, sensing rather than seeing my trilling reflection in the show windows. Antiques, shadow, paintings, shadow, an undulating form sparkling. I stopped abruptly, turned, and looked at the glass. I hadn’t realized that I had dressed in complete black. A black turtle neck sweater, black jeans, black leather boats with steel toes. My face was devoid of makeup; my skin was pallid, as though a vampire had taken my substance during the night. I turned sideways; I had become almost stick-like except for my protruding breasts. A very tall form moved into the picture, an older man some two heads above me with a mane of white hair. Some doll, uh? He asked. I turned, fully expecting to have it out with him, but there was no one there.
I finally made it to Café du Monde and sat as far away from others that I could get, against a wall that hedged on an embankment. Beyond the embankment was the Mississippi River; already horns from freighters split and cracked the air, gulls circled overhead in search of garbage. In front of me, I could see St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square amassed with tourists, vendors and natives heading for work. A young man approached me and I bought a Times-Picayune, knowing my face would be spread across the front page. I waited for my espresso and beignets before opening the paper, before confronting the fact that I had been made a fall guy in the press.
Comment from Beth Arnette Wade
Time: December 17, 2007, 2:36 am
I know you love your job, but have you tried to get jobs in NOLA? Then you could live there. I love NOLA too, that’s how I came across your blog.
Comment from barb
Time: January 11, 2008, 11:17 am
Hi Lisa,
Through a google search for warped wood I found this link. Do you know how I can get a 300dpi image of this Warped wood photo? I’m a graphic designer.
Thanks,
Barb
952-540-1005
Comment from barb
Time: January 11, 2008, 11:18 am
oopps. here’s the link.
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