New Orleans Memories: Peter Bennett

This time next week we'll be landing in New Orleans for our first family vacation, avec Lenny.  It will be my fourth visit since Katrina.  Each time I have the opportunity to visit I fall a little more in love with the place. We were there last Easter and I talked a little bit about the trip here, but there was so much going on a year ago with the house and the pregnancy and the fact that it was right on the heels of my first trip to New York in over a decade that I didn't take the time to share many of my pictures with you guys.  In an effort to rectify that and to get myself pumped for the trip I'm going to share some of my favourite shots from the last trip every day until we take off next Saturday.  

Think of it as the blogging equivalent of listening to that Dave Matthews record every day for the week leading up to the concert in Buffalo that you drove to in the pouring rain with your friends crammed into a Ford Taurus.  Everyone did that at least once in 1995, right?  Right?!

This Gent had a table set up near Jackson Square after midnight on a week night where he had an elaborate display of twinkle lights and goblets filled with water.  He was playing beautiful music on the "glass harmonica" and engaging everyone who passed by in conversation.  His willingness to take requests and his efforts to encourage his audience to try their hand hand at his instrument only added to his charm. 

See that wagon behind him?  That's what he uses to cart his glass harmonica home in, hitched to the back of his bicycle.  He works all day, almost every day.  And he loves it.

His name is Peter Bennett, he's a retired teacher (from the Midwest, if memory serves) and a true entertainer, living his dream in New Orleans, the only place I can think of where this lifestyle is an acceptable and attainable dream for one's retirement.

I hope we can visit with him and enjoy his renditions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Stairway to Heaven again this year.