Mardi Gras

Jean Lafitte Tickle my feet! I don't recall where this came from but told to a child it comes back to "haunt" you! The link connects to the interesting site Jean Lafitte in Louisiana. The Lafitte Vineyards have a bust of President Thomas Jefferson who visited there while in France (played by actor Nick Nolte in the film "Jefferson in Paris" I write to his "double" in film sometimes, from California, Grand Manan Island, Canada and Rochester, NY). According to a Sunday "Times-Picayune" I read one summer hurricane a-comin' there in 1979, Jefferson was related to the Lafitte's through his wife, so the story went, and General, then Emperor Napoleon was smuggled off the island of exile and is/was buried in the Lafitte cemetery under another name. Some legend! Hmmm... there was a Corsican migration to Puerto Rico... Nearby here, at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution of higher learning, there was recently published an historical study of abolitionist movement against the practice of slavery, and surprising to me, was that how early it started in Spanish North America, Mexico and elsewhere in the Caribbean, etc., which I studied at Stony Brook University. It had an anthropologist from the small island of Dominica. I stayed in the LaSalle Hotel with a friend going to visit the Yucatan, working on the archaeology of now completed Tombigbee Waterway in Mississippi, a canal fed by the Tennessee River connecting with Mobile, Alabama on the Gulf of Mexico, said to have the oldest Mardi Gras celebration in the United States.