LAT/AP: New Orleans Remembers Katrina With Style

[DeepModem Mom]

New Orleans Remembers Katrina With Style
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer
August 29, 2006

NEW ORLEANS -- The first anniversary of the biggest calamity to befall this city was marked Tuesday with a moment of silence, wreath-layings, the tolling of bells and, in true New Orleans fashion, a wailing jazz funeral through the potholed streets for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Jazz musicians marched ahead of a horse-drawn hearse, a symbol of the city's watery death. They played a dirge for the more than 1,800 people killed when Katrina came ashore. But the ensemble soon exploded into a joyful rhythm, the marchers opening colorful parasols and hoisting them toward the hot sun as they danced the city back to life.

Sandra Brown has made a point of wearing a black skirt or top since the hurricane, but she was shimmying behind the musicians on the roughly one-mile procession from the city's convention center to the Superdome -- both scenes of the storm's misery.

"I mourn for the lives lost. I still cry when I see the footage of last year," she said. "But you have to be hopeful."

Residents held vigils in pockmarked neighborhoods choked with weeds, in church pews and in gutted community centers. They rang bells to mark the collapse of the city's biggest levee and laid wreaths at the site of each successive break in the cement structure protecting the city....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/ats-ap_top11aug29,0,4905182.story