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Helen Hill: An Unfinished Story
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 By JASON BERRY, ILLLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH DANIEL FIEDLER
They got up before dawn, put on costumes he can no longer remember and set out on foot for the parades, several miles from their apartment in the leafy Carrollton neighborhood. Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas, both Harvard graduates, had just moved to New Orleans after six long winters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he had completed his medical degree and residency. “Some people romanticize the green, overgrown shabbiness” of New Orleans, Gailiunas said later. “Helen loved the city so much, she couldn’t allow herself to see beyond that.”
Hill had light brown hair, a full-jawed smile and a radiant optimism. Gailiunas, slender and quiet with a mop of black hair, was a young doctor and her soul mate. He made cameo appearances in several of her experimental animated film shorts, played guitar in a local rock band and wrote music tracks for her visual stories. (More)
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Good News: Schooling is Improving
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 By Dawn Ruth
While much of the rest of the country braces for more bad economic news in 2009, New Orleans has reason to celebrate: Its schools are on the rise.
It is too early to pop the expensive bubbly, but there are plenty of indications that the past three years of effort to improve schools is paying off. The improvements are the result of strong new leadership combined with federal and private sector funding, volunteerism, non-profit alternative programs for teacher and principal training and a strong will to succeed.
While it’s true that a huge number of students are still failing the standardized tests that officials use to determine if they are learning basic skills, test scores have shown some dramatic increases in some schools and a steady incremental upward climb in many others, especially in elementary schools. The greatest gains are among children attending charter schools, but state operated Recovery District schools are also showing slow signs of improvement.(More)
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New Orleans' Best
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 Now that the business of electing a president and a new Congress are over, we can hunker down to tallying the votes that count the most – our readers’ selection of New Orleans’ Best.
To further exercise democracy, self-addressed, postage-paid detachable ballots were included in our September and October issues. Ballots were also available online. We tabulated the results from more than 650 ballots and have declared the winners according to the following rules.
* Anyone designated as a winner had to have a significant cluster of votes based on the total votes cast in each category.
* In those cases where the votes were so dispersed in so many ways that there not any clusters, the categories were eliminated.
* In those cases where several names fell above the cluster line, finalists were listed in rank order.
* Whenever there was evidence of ballot-box stuffing, those votes were eliminated.
* Ballots with hanging chads were sent to the U.S. Supreme Court for review.
Finally remember these are readers’ choices, which aren’t necessarily the choices of the editorial staff. Because of that, winners may include franchises and other places not usually reported on. Readers did the voting; we did the tallying.Here then are our readers’ picks of New Orleans’ Best. If you have any comments please send us a Letter to the Editor c/o New Orleans Magazine, 110 Veterans Blvd., Suite 123, Metairie, LA, 70005. We remain in awe of the wisdom of our readers and appreciate that they have the wisdom to be our readers.(More)
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Master Pieces
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 By Dale Curry
It had been a long time since I pulled from the bookshelf my copy of the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by the master herself, Julia Child. There was a time when it was the bible of all special meals and certainly of any experimental challenges. My copy of the 1961 masterpiece is yellowed with age and dabbed with a few sauce stains.
But at a recent food writers conference in Houston I was reminded of the genius of that cookbook when Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, spoke about her years working with Child. A single recipe, she said, such as beef bourguignon, was a lesson in itself in French cooking. How true, I realized. A simple beef stew prepared in the French style becomes a magnificent meal, and cooking it by Child’s instructions takes you from boring toil to creating a work of art. (More)
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Flipped Over a House
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 By Bonnie Warren
After a series of moves this Victorian mansion is the final stop … maybe.
Imagine owning five houses in five years. Bryan Francher, a realtor for Prudential Gardner, and Daniel Brockhoeft, Regional Sales Manager for Omni Hotels, did such a thing. Though Francher says he occasionally felt like a vagabond, he also says the properties were great investments. “We knew each time that we had made a good investment, and that we would flip each house when we finished making it picture-perfect,” says Francher. “When we moved into our current home in the Marigny just before Christmas 2007, I knew our moving days were over.” (More)
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Persona: Bryan Batt
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 By Sue Strachan
New Orleans’ Best Mad Man
It was no doubt a cold winter night in 1972 when the curtain rose on the third-grade Christmas play at the Isidore Newman School theater. Amongst the cast, one boy was nervously adjusting his costume, one that included a bright red nose, as he was portraying Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer – everyone’s favorite overcoming-the-odds character. It is apt then, 36 years later, to notice that Bryan Batt – Rudolph, 1972 – is now on a sound stage in Los Angeles, portraying Salvatore Romano in the award-winning and critically acclaimed TV show, Mad Men.
From Rudolph to Romano, Batt has done something very rare in the acting world – he succeeded – and he managed the feat in three different acting outlets: theater, TV and movies. (Note: He can sing and act, dance reasonably well but alas, cannot play an instrument, according to him.) (More) |
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