It’s New Orleans: Happy Hour

Hosted ByGrant Morris & Andrew Duhon

HAPPY HOUR is a cocktail-fueled 60 minutes of random conversation with folks who have nothing in common, other than being New Orleanians in a bar. Featuring extraordinary New Orleans musicians playing live, host Grant Morris and sidekick deluxe Andrew Duhon.

Hacking Up Children and Other Tales from The Farmers Market – Happy Hour – It’s New Orleans

andy king

Andy King doesn’t like to describe his job as “hacking up children.” As an orthopedic surgeon and the (pardon the pun) head of the spine unit at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, Andy is good naturedly circumspect about how he describes using mechanical instruments on kids’ backs. As a New Zealander, he’s a lot less sensitive to his description of Australians.

bridget kelly

Bridget Kelly is a 7th generation New Orleanian whose son, August, is an 8th generation New Orleanian, and whose husband Aaron not Erin was faking buying a baguette at the Cresecnt City Farmers Market when Bridget met him for the first time after seeing him across a restaurant the night before while discussing Mork ‘n Mindy’s offsrpring and declaring she was going to marry him.

Even in a small town of bizarre goings on – and on a cocktail-drinking show that is, frankly, a gathering ground for crazy stories – this romantic tale stands out. So much so that Andrew Duhon is contemplating a cross-cultural yoga-centric reconnaissance of the Uptown Farmers Market on Tuesdays. If you’re there on a Tuesday Andrew is the guy with the sitar waiting for the yoga teacher with the New Zealand passport.

cardinal sons

If you’re taking bets on which New Orleans band whose new record is produced by Bob Dylan’s guitar player Charlie Sexton is most likely to bust out of the city and make a nationwide name for themselves, put your money on The Cardinal Sons.

joe shirley

john shirley

dave shirley

God-fearing honest to god brothers from Jackson, Mississippi, John, Joe, and Dave Shirley’s older brother, Daniel, who is not in the band, started out running around the house flapping his hands and singing before realizing he could corral his brothers into learning instruments to back him which could dispense with the incessant circumlocution of the dwelling and hand flapping. Daniel lives in New York and is is an opera singer but if you want to place another bet, put it on him showing up here some day to set the record straight.

hacking up children

Although nobody at Happy Hour has done any research (shocker) to back this up, we’re going to go out on a limb and claim this is almost certainly the only New Orleans podcast that contains cursing, a hymn, a serious and definitive explanation of why New Orleans has potholes, and a hypothesis of how Jesus was born in the year -1 A.D.

The photos on this page were taken at Casa Borrega by Nadine Wu and Douglas Engel.