urban bicycle journeys

My readers may know Lyman from his years of accompanying me on bike trips. Living in Austin TX for thirty years he was originally from New Orleans where he maintains family connections. His partner Gillian whom he met in Austin coincidentally grew up in Durham NC and we have found we have mutual acquaintances. Gillian and Lyman have been living together for way more than a decade without being legally hitched. Both were previously married and Lyman has been a great second Dad to her accomplished son Nathan who is now in his mid-twenties.

Last Sunday night Lyman and Gillian were having dinner with Tootie and me at our New Orleans condo when someone brought up the subject of marriage and whether they should do that. I take credit for suggesting in jest a place called French Quarter Wedding Chapel, which I pass almost daily cycling my usual bicycle loop out to City Park and the Lakefront. I assumed the “chapel” would sleazy. I could not have been more wrong.

A day and a half later Gillian called me on the phone and announced she and Lyman were getting married the very next day at that French Quarter Wedding Chapel! I later learned that Gillian had found a friend who went to a wedding or got married at that chapel and had given it good reviews. This was going to be an event.

They had booked the venue for half an hour starting at 3:00 PM. At 1:00 PM Tootie and I bicycled on our 1970’s Schwinns to meet the others in the French Quarter. There were eight of us; Lyman and Gillian, Gillian’s friend Celia, Lyman’s brother Alex and his wife Suzanne, who live in Austin but have a condo here, Lyman’s sister Yancine, who lives in Baton Rouge, and Tootie and me. The lovely bride Gillian had gone dress shopping with Yancine the day before.

We needed a pre-wedding cocktail and lunch and decided on Napoleon House six blocks away. It’s an informal French Quarter bar and restaurant with faded walls and classical music playing in the background. The building was constructed in 1794. About 1815 it supposedly was designated to house Napoleon when European powers were looking for a place to exile the troublemaker. That deal never went through but an Italian family started a grocery store there in about 1920 that soon morphed into a bar. Not much has changed in a hundred years.

Seven of us jammed around a table in the interior courtyard. Most ordered the signature Napoleon House cocktail, the Pimm’s Cup.

More than forty years ago in about 1981 I read a review bemoaning that Napoleon House’s muffulettas were inexplicably heated, claiming that local tradition was the muffuletta is to be served at room temperature. That’s ridiculous and the warm sandwiches of Italian cold cuts and olive salad on this wedding day in January 2025 were delicious.

At 2:30 PM we began a small procession through the French Quarter. I led the music, strumming several songs on the ukulele, including the Johnny Cash song “Ring of Fire” and “Chapel of Love” recorded by the New Orleans group The Dixie Cups in 1964. Ten second video.

They had been told to show up exactly at 3:00 PM, not before and not after. We were a little early and drank coffee for twenty minutes across the street at the pretty courtyard of St. Pat’s Irish Coffeehouse.

We found The French Quarter Wedding Chapel to be a welcoming small space with over-the-top decor.

Dollar bills signed by brides cover the ceiling. This is the groom, if you didn’t know that already.

The owner is an older woman and she is a warm and comforting officiant. In the ceremony she recited familiar poems about love and marriage, making them sound somehow new and inspiring. Yancine read a prayer.

We lingered a bit after the ceremony. Yancine wanted to buy everybody champagne but couldn’t find it when we all walked into a friendly dive bar across the street. We did find fizzy a block further down Conti Street at the similar dive Deja Vu Restaurant & Bar on the corner of Dauphine. We all toasted in plastic cups before heading our separate ways.

The bride Gillian and Lyman and both his siblings and sister-in-law had to leave and get their costumes ready. It was Epiphany, the beginning of the Carnival season. In just a few hours all of them were marching in the homemade, artsy and fascinatingly somber, creepily Catholic but totally secular, medieval themed walking parade of Krewe de Jeanne d’Arc. Patron saint of France, she was burned at the stake just over six hundred years ago at age nineteen.

Tootie and I walked back to the sidewalk in front of Napoleon House, where our bicycles were thankfully still there. We biked home; it’s about two miles. In the early evening we biked back to the Quarter to watch the parade.

That parade has become more popular in recent years, we had to struggle to see it from the curb.