Living life out on stage

By ALAN SMASON

Sidney Smith is telling the improbable story of his exit from New Orleans after Katrina. Sitting in his tony Uptown home festooned with the famous images of rock performers and famous film and TV vestiges he has snapped through the years, he is bedecked in a casual pink camisole that clashes with the heavy dark beard and more than ample chest hair he sports.

Sidney Smith gets a rare opportunity to play himself in “Katrina: The Mother-in-Law of ‘Em All” at the Joy Theater, August 28-29. (Photo by Alan Smason)

He is an unbelievable New Orleans character – the kind one usually reads about in picaresque novels where the protagonist rises above trials and tribulations with relative ease to emerge victorious on his quest. A hopeless romantic who has been married and divorced four times, the 61-year-old is a highly regarded rock photographer, promoter and a very successful tour owner and operator of the Haunted History Tours in the Vieux Carré and Garden District.

With twinkling eyes he relates the tale of his survival from the ravaging Hurricane Katrina floodwaters ten years ago with measured calm and expert comic timing.

It is a tale Smith first related to playwright and fellow tour guide Rob Florence in 2006, one of dozens of interviews Florence had collected in the hopes of mounting a Katrina-themed series of monologues titled “Fleeing Katrina.”

Through the years, the play has morphed from the original series of individual monologues into a fictional play set in the Mother-In-Law Lounge originally run by famous New Orleans rhythm and blues singer Ernie K-Doe and his wife Antoinette. It has also undergone a series of four title changes as it was presented since 2007 at places like the New York International Fringe Festival (where it won top honors), Los Angeles, Chicago and nearby Lockport last year.

Rewritten and retitled as “Katrina: The Mother-in-Law of ‘Em All,’ six of the original 13 characters now interact with one another in the bar and often perform other minor roles in other character’s stories.

In a strange twist of fate, Smith was able to play himself in the work’s latest iteration with three shows produced by Jonathan Mares Productions and directed by the playwright on Friday and Saturday, August 28 – 29, 2015 at the Joy Theater, 1200 Canal Street.

“I haven’t had the time,” he explains. “This is the first time I had the chance to do it, quite honestly.”

Smith’s story starts out with several of his tour operators converging on his home, thinking they would be safer there than on their own properties. “Ironically, none of their areas flooded,” he is quick to point out, “only mine.”

Despite having several animals of his own, Smith took in one of his tour guides and his pregnant wife, their two kids and several dogs and cats, a friend with her elderly mother plus their additional cats and dogs. “I had Noah’s ark here,” he quips.

The day after the storm’s passage, he woke up to a nightmare. “My street was a river. My front yard was a lake. I had water coming into my house,” he recalls. He described the swirling waters that filled the bottom of his residence as “five feet of toxic soup that you would not want to put your foot into.”

During the play Smith recounted how he was called on the telephone several times by bow-tie wearing host Tucker Carlson on MSNBC to check on his welfare and that of his retinue. During the course of the live on-air interview the fact he was the owner-operator of a successful New Orleans tour company was disclosed as well as his home address accidentally leaked over the TV cable channel. With the city all but abandoned, Smith reckoned that no one would use that information for ill gain. After all, his downstairs was completely flooded and the city without power and evacuated.

Five days after the flooding had begun and a few days after the cable TV broadcast, Smith recounted how he found himself alone with the menagerie of pets, a large bottle of Viagra given him by one of this friends for safekeeping and the loan holdout with him, a woman companion. Unfortunately for the randy Smith, the lady was the 80-year-old mother of one of his evacuated friends.

He was still not planning on evacuating himself, but there was the  horrible stench from the animals using his upstairs residence as a bathroom, a lack of electricity and no working phone line. His octogenarian guest whispered to him in her thick Latin accent that she thought she heard something downstairs. Reluctantly, but armed with a loaded revolver, he was confronted by a stranger named Gambino, ostensibly looting his house.

The hilarious thick “yat” accent made the redoubtable Gambino sound like a combination petty thief and a would-be MacGiver character. He quickly shimmied up Smith’s wall and soon restored phone service. “I can do deese things,” the opportunist tells him. The phrase becomes his mantra as he eventually offers Smith and his older acquaintance a ride in a purloined boat to get them to where they might be evacuated. Smith decides to made a run for it.

He abandoned his home with nothing more than the clothes on his back, a loaded pistol, his passport, his best digital camera, a vial full of Viagra pills and a satchel filled with a huge amount of un-deposited cash receipts from his tour business.

The story that Smith continued to relate on stage played out in scenes at the New Orleans airport and eventually in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, to where he is airlifted. After a harrowing ride on a gigantic transport plane with his elderly friend, he deals with his own inadequacies from showering with dozens of fellow New Orleanian evacuees, but undauntedly decides to get to Florida and stay with his sister living there.

Hilarity prevails as he decides what to do with his loaded gun at a New Orleans airport security checkpoint and, later, how to convince Arkansas authorities that have discovered both the bag full of cash and the bottle of prescription pills that didn’t bear his name.

“‘Where are you going with all that money?'” the Arkansas deputy with his eyes agog asks. “‘Miami,'” Smith shoots back.  With perfect comedic timing, he recounts the exchange with the authorities, who ask him the reason he’s holding a passport. With each seemingly innocent answer, Smith made them solidly suspect he was a drug dealer heading to Miami to make a drug buy.

The role was made all the more funny by the fact that it actually happened and that Smith finally got to play the role of a lifetime – his own.