FOC's special tours inner circle

I went to FOC's super committee meeting this morning re: the Ken Burns Jazz Event coming up in October.  I'm thrilled, there will be 3 fantastic tours (Roots of Jazz, Jazz in the Quarter, & Treme: Jazz and the Story of Survival Today).  I've signed up to be one of the tour guides for each one! FOC has been contracted by Tauck, a major international tour company, to handle local coordination of the tours for the big event.  There's a lunch at Commander's Palace, a jazz brunch at Court of Two Sisters, a private concert at Preservation Hall, key note address by Ken Burns, just to name a few things...& I get to enjoy all of it along with the participants!  Again, the tour guide license brings me some pretty damn good perks.  Plus, we'll get official training for the tours, so I'll be learning a lot more about jazz.  I could definitely use the lessons & I'm certainly a fan of nola jazz!  The training for all these tours is just weeks away, so we'll being getting into full gear very soon.

In the meantime, I'll still be on the streets doing french quarter tours...in the heat, rain or shine.  I've started reading, It Happened in New Orleans, by Bonnye E. Stuart, to collect some fun anecdotes to tell on my tours.  I'm also working on some visuals...you gotta have a good map to give people a feel for where the city is on the Mississippi River & in relation to the Gulf, plus Lake Pontchartrain.  I also have a replica of a dixie note, there's a fun story to go along with that...& the real thing used to be printed at the Old U.S. Mint right here in nola (now another Louisiana Sate Museum site).  I also quite like some of the cartoons from John Chase's Frenchman, Desire, Good Children & other Streets of New Orleans (originally published way back in 1949).   Plus a small compass to demonstrate how kooky our direction are...no one in nola uses north, south, east, west...it's either lakeside or riverside, upriver or downriver.  Thanks to a friend all the way up in the Finger Lakes, I have my very own compass & it even has a fleur de lis on it (thanks, Beck)!  Now I'm working on a little flood map form Hurricane Katrina, we get a lot of questions about it & it's most definitely an important topic...especially as we approach the 6th anniversary of Katrina (August 29th, 2011). 

I've also got tons of photos I want to upload to my tour guide facebook page: www.facebook.com/nola.leah
That's my way of sharing a personal side of my hometown with those outside nola.  Please friend me if you're interested in checking it out!