http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/arts/television/30harr.html?ex=1314590400&en=136a77321f48bbb8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssOne reason they were leaving, they said, was that the tourists were few and even fewer were coming to see “Wise Guy,” Mr. Anderson’s engaging one-man show at Oswald’s. “I had more people in my car last night,” he said to his piano player during a performance in May. More significantly,
Mr. Anderson said, he and his wife had become captives of the depression that grips many in the damaged city. “Elizabeth is by nature kind of an agoraphobe,” Harry said, looking across the table. After the beginning of the year, as the city’s ordeal ground on, she became increasingly withdrawn and unwilling to leave the house. A bad sign, he said, was “when she had groceries delivered from a couple of blocks away.”
“It was an empty time,” Ms. Anderson recalled. “I was getting farther and farther away from other people, and happiness.” She would go downstairs to open their shop each day, she said, “but the passion for it was gone.”This spring, the local power company, Entergy, which is in bankruptcy and has instituted rate increases that have mystified many residents, sent a $900 bill for an apartment in the club building that had no electricity. (Later a monthly electric bill for a small shop space that had been shut up with the lights off came to $7,339.)
The city tried to more than double their $17,000-a-year property taxes. A lawyer had the amount reduced, but “that just meant that the lawyer got the money instead of the city,” Mr. Anderson said. Then, in May, there was a repeat of an attack that had occurred more than a year before, when a stranger had approached Mr. Anderson, slammed his face into the side of a building and cursed him, saying, “You killed the Matador.” That was the name of the bar he had replaced with Oswald’s.
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