Eight Ways to Stay Sassy in NOLA

Feeling less fierce? Sass levels dwindling? Fix up, look sharp. Here's how we kept the attitude topped up in the US Capital of Sass; New Orleans, Lousiana (NOLA).

1. LIVE SASSY 
Book a bed at the Best Hostel of All Time, the AAE Bourbon House New Orleans run by a peroxide-haired bombshell and Sass Commodore-in-Chief, Jayson. He is the only hostel manager to date to wake me up and drag me to Walmart in search of turducken with all the trimmings for Thanksgiving dinner.
Whether you're in the mood for sass or not, it could be hurled at you from across the garden or handed to you sweetly on a paper plate, alongside your barbecued franks and potato salad. It all depends on the waxing phases of the moon. 

2. DRINK SASSY

Indulge in some of that pre-loading David Cameron is always banging on about by procuring a two-litre bottle of $10 vodka from Walmart. Amatuer Sass Cadets can begin with starter bottles of Bud Light Lime while the more sophisticated and refined have a tasty bottle of wine to turn to. The vodka vanished alarmingly quickly thanks to the obscene measures being poured by the Gassonimator. Before we knew it we'd been vacuum packed into a convoy of taxi cabs and whirled out to NOLA's drinking-and-mugging hot spot Bourbon Street. Here the streets are rained on by alcohol, cheap carnival beads and STDs. Already meatballing around the pavement, a kind soul threw me a Hand Grenade and three minutes after imbibing it, the cocktail shot through my veins and exploded like an a-bomb right behind my eyes. 

3. FIND AND FRIEND FELLOW SASSERS

solid life motto

This was one of those rare fantastic times when the planets align and the cosmos conspires so that we were in the right hostel with the right people at the right time. Our fellow hostellers were all a bunch of right wrong 'uns, a good mix of Australians (all from Melbourne, weirdly), a scattering of American and the rest, British. There was a news editor from the Beeb goading an erotic dancer from Portland Oregon who looked exactly like K-Stew, the Real Inbetweeners (four English boys studying in Illinois had come down to Naaaawlins for Thanksgiving break and they were the living, breathing Will, Neil, Jay and Simon. They hated that we immediately christened them the Inbetweeners, but not more than they hated being called One Direction), a pair of Scottish LADs interning at a Texan oil firm and two Brummie girls, cool in black with heavy eyeliner and tattooed arms.
The evening was young and ours to claim. 


4. FLASH YOUR SASS ON BOURBON STREET

Rules for Bourbon Sass include: partnering your hand with a drink at all times, smearing yours and others' face with gold glitter and Vaseline, administering sass at a bar to cut through the queue, sassing with aplomb on the dance floor, duckfacing those with inferior levels of sass while sucking on a neon jelly shot in syringes, snapping fingers at raasclat bouncers who, though younger than you, still require checking your ID, dishing out some smartass sass to poets trying to sell haikus and ditties on the pavement, withstanding a Hurricane cocktail, hailing a cab without passing out, throwing up without getting any vom on your only Going Out top. All with nothing less than optimum sass.



5. FESTIVE SASS
Thanksgiving in America is up there with Christmas in terms of ceremony, decoration and excessive carb consumption. With our newly formed NOLA Collective, we decided to trawl through the aisles of Walmart to create a feast of our very own. I was tasked with making a carrot and orange salad, which managed to go awry the minute I picked up the grater. However, Leah saved the day with her Mother Hen routine and spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, sweating out her dishgushting hangover over trays of crispy roast potatoes and parsnips.


6. BLACK FRIDAY SASS
Back at Walmart, elbows at the ready and the fire for a true bargain burning in our hearts, we braced ourselves and pushed into the fray. There was a netbook for $188 with my name on it. We got there and Darrell the department manager informed us that all twenty six had sold out. What kind of company stocks just twenty six laptops on a day as serious as Black Friday?!
INITIATE SASS.
'Na uh honey. OH NO. Whaaaaaat, you bein' serious?!' Jayson sassed, hip jutting to one side and hair quivering with rage. He assumed the duckface and went off into one, demanding the number for Walmart HQ, then flirting with him before threatening lesser staff members with letters of complaint at this shoddy display of retail incompetency.
I was glad he was on our side, fighting on my behalf for this  injustice. One Walmart worker, inevitably called Shaniqua, had four gold teeth in the front of her mouth and looked as though she could knock my burgeoning sass right out of the state if I tried it. She and Jayson tangoed in a crazy sass war, but then Jayson got distracted by half price duvets and my netbook was lost forever. 



7. CASUAL SASS
I managed to meet up with a super-stylist chum who was in NOLA on fashion business. Unfortunately this was the morning after the night before and I was accessorised with bits of glitter in untamed hair and gloopy eye bogey. I stumbled out of a cab at 10.55a.m, feeling like my internal organs had been blow dried, by a mile-and-a-half long queue outside Cafe Le Monde in the French quarter. Alcohol still seeping out of my skin and sticking to my frock in the warm November sun. I found Buntface and we ran into each other's arms by a street performer in the middle of yowling to Michael Jackson's BAD. Then we went to a record shop and got clawed by the owner's kitten before falling into a pub for burgers and bread and butter pudding. Casual, like.
On the walk home I watched a woman strangling a fish on the banks of the Mississippi and found five hundred rupees in a park. Moral of the story: Sass is as sass does.

christmas tree merboy sass

8. DILUTING SASS DURING CRISIS-TIMES
Once upon a time a douchebag came to Nawlins for his 21st bday. He was the kind of livelong moron who hunts down a party with ferocious hunger and the gleam of embarrassing desperation in his eyes. I BETTER FIND SOME FUN OR FUN'S GONNA BE IN TROUBLE. Birthday Douche drank all day. He drank all afternoon and into the early evening. By 7pm he had completed his transformation into a fully developed douchebag and could barely stand. Still, he drinky, raising the odds of getting punched in the face as the minutes slipped by. Oh, Birthday Douche was in for some ass-whoppery tonight.
New Orleans tradition dictates that birthday boys and girls pin a dollar bill to their top and people give them money to celebrate, so Birthday Douche does this. But Twattiness is a stench sniffed out and avoided by humans and dogs a mile off so no  $$$ for him, yo.  We shed ourselves of him and his insufferable ilk and headed out into the warm Friday night, dancing gleefully in a Bourbon whirl before very nearly setting my hair alight in a candle-lit, firehazard-worthy bar. I later found Birthday Douche, on his knees in the hostel bathroom, full blown crisis raging in the middle of the night.  He had fallen out of the cab in front of the hostel and cracked his jaw on the pavement. Now blood was gushing profusely from his douchey chin. Somebody had rung for an ambulance. Everyone had come out of their dorms to watch his pitful mewling and highly public meltdown. ENTER SASS. He twitched while I talked, trying to dial down the sass and calm him down while still taking the piss as much as I could. 'It's okay you massive vagine, that's not the real Grim Reaper you're seeing', I laughed at his falling-down-drunkeness 'No mate, no. No one's laughing at you. That's from inside your head. Twat'. He looked confused, unsure. HAHAHAHAAHHA. He deserved no mercy. Earlier in the evening he had chest-bumped his friend in the middle of chugging his Modelo beer and screamed  'PARTTTTEEE' into the sweet Lousiana sky. I had simply shared a look with Leah and Goodluck Jonathan, our favourite of the Australians. 'Someone concuss this guy, please' the look had said. He should have been issued a detention slip and been sat facing the corner wearing a Dunce hat instead of allowed out with the grown-ups that evening. 
Birthday Douche caught the word 'ambulance' and bolted like a disabled gazelle into the street, flailing and wailing at the intersection where the bored paramedics were parked. Costs around $7k to call out an ambulance in these parts, if you don't have health insurance. SUCKA. I should have sold popcorn, it was such a great show. After about ten minutes, I tired of watching him run away in pathetic slow motion from the medics (who admirably crawled behind him at 0.3mph rather than running the imbecile over) and clambered into bed, falling asleep in my mascara and strands of Mardi Gras beads.

DOUUUUUUUUUCHE

p.s - Stay sassy.

Down the River Road Without a Paddle

Earlier this year, ITV broadcast a documentary showing Sir Trevor McDonald (one of my guilty crushes) voyaging up the great Mississippi, absorbing the history of this diverse slice of America. Hillbillies, ghostly plantations, fishermen, funnel boats and Huckleberry Finn, they were all here, somewhere. 

I watched avidly during my 4am lunch break at work, wishing I was with Trev, delighting in the weird and wonderful. The river trail looked particularly enticing.

When planning Operation U S of Heeyyy!, Leah and I were in agreement that the Mississippi would feature prominently. We hoped to pick up a car in Memphis and take it down to New Orleans, stopping at towns along the way. 

Our first port of call was Holly Springs, MS, about an hour south east of Memphis, to the home of an Elvis SuperFan who turned his house into an insane, ridiculous shrine to the King himself. 

Graceland Too was at the bottom of a quiet street, rubbing shoulders with otherwise normal looking residential properties. We spotted it instantly - you'd have to have a severe fungal eye infection not to. From the gate to lion stone statues to the roof and Christmas trees on the lawn, everything was a searing shade of cobalt blue. It was like that scene from Mr Bean when he redecorates his living room by igniting a stick of dynamite attached to an open can of paint. 

 We parked up and walked over to 200 East Gholson Avenue, leaves crunching loudly under our All Stars as we tried to set our cameras to the right instagram filter to capture the madness that lay just metres from us. Unfortunately, SuperFan didn't appear to be home - his driveway, filled with rusting old iconic automobiles that no doubt would have gotten the nod from the King in their heyday, was devoid of a normal everyday vehicle. 

I rapped on the metal door until my knuckles turned bright pink but no cigar. We decided to break for tea and came back in a half hour. There was no way we could leave without trying our hardest to breach the Graceland Too barriers. 

I scouted the perimetre, looking for a point of entry, spotting a glint of light near one of the barricaded up back windows. All of the windows were nailed shut with planks of wood. From the inside. 
Hmm. 

We were either about to enter a world of sweet Elvis drenched madness or on the precipice of a brutal and horrific butchering to death by a manic fan dressed in a white, diamante-festooned jumpsuit. 

Even so, I was still desperate to see the inside. The website claimed the house was open 24/7. So what the hell? 

Was it rude to knock on the window, hinting at someone home? Would SuperFan be irked at two girls hammering on his door or would he be charmed by our Queen's English? 

I clawed at the door one final time, pushing open the letter box and shouting 'PAAAAUL! PAUL. OPEN THE DOOR, PAUL!' on his front step before admitting defeat and shuffling mournfully back to the car.

I sulked for about ten minutes then got on with the business of navigating us to Clarksdale, MS, the original home of the blues and Ground Zero Blues club, owned by none other than gravelly-voiced actor extrordinaire Morgan Freeman. We dropped our stuff off at a motel on the edge of town and parked up, walking cautiously around the windswept empty streets in a mission to find the watering hole of the local townsfolk. There wasn't a soul to be seen. It was eerie. 

Clarksdale had all the usual landmarks of an everyday town - petrol station, local craft store, Greyhound stop, post office. Just no people. The odd car would go by, slowing in amazement to watch these two out-of-towners actually using their lower limbs and WALKING along the pavement. I had a feeling we'd find an unassuming shack somewhere, push the door open and discover a wild and hedonistic party thriving inside. It hid from us for a good half hour, like an expert hide and seeker, until the wind carried over a snatch of music and we raced towards it, desperate for a drink and shelter from the chilly Mississippi night. 

The neon sign in the middle distance of Delta Avenue told us we'd found Ground Zero. And when I pushed opened the heavy wood door, I'd found what I'd hoped to - every man and his dog having a wild old time inside. 

Saturday evening in Clarksdale was held at this one spot. I ordered a Southern Pecan beer at the bar which was scrawled with sharpie messages from previous patrons and clambered into a stool, smiling at the barflys next to me. 

A father from Alabama, on his way back from a music festival with his son, caught my accent and once again, we were off, discussing what I was doing here so far away from home in this quiet corner of Mississippi. He told me to have some catfish - fried in a sandwich and bought from a roadside garage - and to keep my wits about me when we got to Bourbon Street in New Orleans. We failed to spot the Freeman, but it was a superb night all in all. I managed to beat a brother-sister team at a game of billiards and drank enough Pecans to sink a Mississippi steam boat.

The next morning, we headed south to the state capital, Jackson. But before doing so, I indulged in a hearty Sunday meal at Abe's BBQ where the sauce changed every view I'd previously held on barbecue sauce. Instead of a treacle-like suffocatingly sweet sauce, the condiment was watery with a greater spice to sugar ratio. The 'comeback' sauce (because once you try it, you're guaranteed to come back for more) was perfect on its own or thickened with hot sauce and Offish Delish smothered over chicken tenders. It was the best breakfast I've had. No, okay, in the top three at least.

Seltbelt fastened and sat nav programmed, we headed south to the state capital, Jackson. We'd heard from various people from night before that Jackson was a bit sketchy, advised not to go out at night and, 'be careful girls!' so we headed straight to a motel and settled in for the evening, entertaining ourselves with the excellent selection of reality TV on offer. Extreme Couponing USA is my favourite, while Leah is partial to a bit of Teen Mom 2. We both love Jersey Shore with a depth that rivals a toddler's affection for her first Cabbage Patch Doll. 

We left Jackson to be explored the next day and headed out bright and early to the town centre. On the advice of two rotund visitor centre ladies, one of whom failed spectacularly in polite social conduct by reaching out a padded little paw and stroking my hair mid-conversation, we headed to Fondren, a hipster neighbourhood on the edges of the downtown area. 

Here was Brent's Drug Store, the set of a scene from the motion picture The Help starring the lovely Emma Stone. I's interior stays true to the film's era - the civil right heavy 1960s - and still offers thirsty customers fountain sodas, malts, grilled cheese sandwiches and birthday cake ice cream. 

I gorged on a retro burger and fries before taking a quick turn around the block. Dotted with pastel coloured charity shops and craft boutiques, its a cute little slice of town that reminded me of pony-tailed cheerleaders and slick haired, letter jacket wearing quarterbacks of yesteryear. 

We left Jackson and 1965 behind as we continued our drive south, this time heading to the town of Natchez, slap bang on the Ol' Mississippi. It's shameful to say, but until now we still hadn't laid actual eyes on the famous river. Memphis had kept us occupied with her history of musical legends and delicious chicken, and Clarksdale and Jackson veered away from it's banks. But Natchez clung to the river like this charmer suckling at this cow's teet.

After getting the balance between cheap and clean motel room right, we directed our GPS to Under-The-Hill saloon. This is another bar recommended by my America Addict chumbawumba back in the UK. It is run by a professional leprechaun. He wasn't as cheery or as charmed by our English accents as his Southern fellows. This threw me. 

I expected genial conversation, followed by hearty laughter and an offer of adoption by last orders. What actually happened was me shouting my head off at the deaf, and incredibly drunk, old fella for a Pecan Beer, an offer of homemade gumbo from a Louisiana visitor (this disappointingly never materialised), playing darts with a girl called Britney and her manfriend Kelly and being bought rounds and shots by the Drunkest Man in Existence, Pat. 

oh Pat. He meant well.

Pat had been stumbling around in our direction for a good hour, mumbling about his miserable 35-year marriage and telling us he was a 'good guy, really, have a drink on me'. Once his invitation had been accepted, he clearly felt so emboldened by our hesitant friendship that he felt comfortable enough to stroke Kelly's muscles - 'Ah'm nat gay man, but you got amazin' arms!' and tangling his grubby fingers in Leah's and my hair. I am, apparently, good-looking for a Mexican. 

Cheers, Patrick.

The next day marked our exploration of Natchez. We high-tailed it to the visitor's centre after perusing the antique shops (antique in America means barely 200 years old. She's still a young pup) which pointed us in the direction of antebelleum houses (much like mama Gump's house, but each cost $15 to visit. Just to have a look around. Jog on) dotted about the town, an old Indian village and a burnt out nightclub. 

The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians turned out to be pretty cool. It was free and also educational - the best type of daytime activity. I learned that Indian males once sacrificed a child from their clan to move up the social order in the hope of one day becoming Chief. A bit severe perhaps, but I feel this tradition could be exported and enforced on council estates and Chicken Cottages throughout England. Boost your CV, sacrifice a chav today! 
Farewell Broken Britain.