HEY, USA

KATRINA UPDATE:

When Fats Domino, the legendary rock & roller, whose perennial rotundity provides a ready explanation for his nickname, was asked how he survived Katrina’s floodwaters when his home in New Orleans was inundated, he responded with his usual jovial condor, “I don’t owe my life to anybody but my own body.  I float better than most people.  No way those Katrina flood waters were gonna put me down.  I just stretched out on my back and rode the current to safety like an inflatable raft.”

He did, however, express regret that, when he tried to float out with one of his pianos on his chest, the weight was just too much, even for his unusually buoyant corpus.     

On another note, Mayor Roy Negin, in an unprecedented display of racially balanced candor, admitted that white people also drowned in Katrina’s floodwaters.  His about-face has been credited to inadvertent but highly convincing sightings of white people, toiling among the ruins of their homes. 

Asked by a reporter about the sightings, he confessed, “I am willing to infer from this that some white people were apparently living in the flooded neighborhoods and, if that's the case, I guess not all of them made it out, even if they were given preferential treatment by the few rescuers who were on the scene.” 

His admission immediately sparked debate about whether or not he had finally decided to be the mayor of all the people of New Orleans or was only courting racially diverse investment in the rebuilding the city and appealing to the new voter base, which shows that blacks no longer make up 2/3 of the electorate.

On another note, a number of well-known jazz musicians who have been living comfortably in New York high-rise apartments for many years, continue to return to the city, if ever so briefly, to express their sympathy for those who lost their homes and families in the hurricane.  They have vowed to do everything they can to help but from New York.

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