Danny Heitman AT RANDOM
Autumn a great time to show up for
La.’s arts community
In an earlier life as a film critic, I’d often find myself screening movies alone at the afternoon matinees each autumn. That’s when vacation season ended and school resumed, leaving the local theaters largely empty What a kingly indulgence to sit by myself in a huge space while a new movie played, a spectacle unfolding just for me. But over time, being surrounded by empty seats made me feel empty, too. If I wanted to get the best insights about a film, it was ideal to screen it with other people. I might not agree about what others found funny, sad or inspiring, but seeing their reactions helped me better understand myself. I gleaned new insights from fellow moviegoers that I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d watched a new film as a solo viewer When I watched a movie alone, it was a thing; within an audience, it was an event.
I’ve been thinking about all of this as another cultural season unfolds across Louisiana, giving those of us who live here lots of opportunities for this kind of collective experience. My mail these days includes brochures from area museums, symphonies and theater companies, and I’ve come to treasure them as much as the garden catalogs that land in my mailbox, too. They all point me to the promise of something larger than myself, which is one of the abiding wonders of enjoying a painting, a play or a musical performance with our neighbors.
The world has changed a great deal since I worked as a film critic more than three decades ago. Thanks to the digital revolution, we can savor hundreds of TV channels and an infinitude of online programming at home. All of us can be what I once was in that empty theater: lone consumers of culture, single diners at the banquet of beauty we call the creative arts.
Like many of us, I welcome quiet evenings at home with Netflix or a good book, cloistered on the couch with my wife in a world that seems comfortably self-sufficient But that kind of inwardness, embraced too routinely, can be isolating, which isn’t good for me or the community and country I live in.
The headlines tell us of a broken world, and there are so many cracks that more than one thing is needed to mend them. But being within an audience or art gallery with other people is one way that we can share what’s good, which can help build sharing and goodness into a habit.
I was moved this week by a quote from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that speaks to what I’m trying to say: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” Local arts institutions give us that shared horizon. I’m going to do my best this autumn to show up for them.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.
ADVOCATEADVOCATEADVOCATE
A Louisiana cooking instructor who has taught for 25 years takes her lessons international
BY MARGARET DELANEY Staff writer
Lili Courtney isn’t a traditional chef. Known as the “Queen of Condiments,” Courtney has been cooking, teaching and serving up dishes in Louisiana for 25 years. She considers herself a culinary instructor
“My passion for cooking started with my daddy,” Courtney said. “There were eight children in our family and that was a lot of mouths to feed.”
After Sunday morning mass, Courtney’s parents would gather in their small home kitchen in Alexandria and fill a 12-inch skillet with enough water to poach eggs for 10 people. They would make eggs Benedict and stir up a pitcher of milk punch made with ice cream.
As a stay-at-home mom in Baton Rouge, Courtney did not stay idle; she took every cooking class she
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY TRAVIS SPRADLING
Lili Courtney shows off her Delightful Palate line of marinades and salad dressings. She works with the LSU AgCenter Food Incubator program.
could get her hands on.
In her 20s, Courtney took cooking classes in New Orleans from Lee Barnes, who studied in France at Le Cordon Bleu one of the world’s most distinguished centers of culinary education.
Opportunities to teach began to come up in 2017, when chef Anne Milneck, the owner of Red Stick Spice Company, started to offer cooking classes and approached Courtney about leading lessons. About the same time, Melissa Marley, owner of Simplee Gourmet in Covington, opened a specialty kitchen store in New Orleans and asked Courtney to teach a series of classes there.
Courtney also leads a small group class at her home, which she calls “In the Neighborhood.”
She builds her own recipes, writes her own menus and schedules her
ä See COURTNEY, page 2G
Did the 1920s’ most popular daredevil bring feats to La.?
Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly was one of the country’s most popular daredevils in the 1920s and ’30s. He was known for climbing tall buildings and sitting atop rooftop flagpoles. In 1928, he brought his daredevil show to New Orleans’ Jung Hotel.
BY ROBIN MILLER Staff writer
lives in the central Louisiana community of Deville, meaning Kelly’s Alexandria show took place only a few miles from her home. So, what, exactly, was Kelly’s schtick?
A rainy day game of LSU-opoly with the grandkids
BY DOROTHY TRICK
Contributing writer
Human Condition
On a rainy Saturday afternoon, my husband and I were watching our two grandsons — ages 9 and 6 — while their parents prepared to host a supper club that night at their home.
As soon as the boys came through the door, they requested that we play LSUopoly, a game we hadn’t sat down with in more than 20 years. Sure enough, it was tucked away on the top shelf in our hall closet. After dusting it off, we were soon engaged in Monopoly designed for LSU fans, alums and future students.
The youngsters have frequented the LSU campus
COURTNEY
often enough to know most of its landmarks and those of the surrounding area. The LSU-opoly game has
Continued from page 1G
own classes.
“I try to keep it trendy,” Courtney said.
She even has a Dubai chocolate recipe, her take on a TikTok hit Courtney’s classes range from the basics, like roasting cauliflower and chicken, to more complicated meals like homemade dumplings or lamb kofta with naan and tzatziki.
‘Queen of Condiments’
In 2013, Courtney started a salad dressing company, Delightful Palate — earning the “Queen of Condiments” moniker and manufactured the product at the LSU food incubator
For years, she was making her own marinade-dressings, tangy oil-andvinegar mixtures she served at home and in her leisure cooking classes at Kitchen Warehouse in Alexandria.
But when the facility’s director, food entrepreneur Mimi Kirzner suggested Courtney sell the marinade-dressings on-site, it planted an idea she had never considered: to launch her own line of bottled condiments.
After more than a year of investigating how to convert a favorite recipe into a sellable product, Courtney introduced her Delightful Palate line in October 2013.
The dressings, which come in Balsamic Garlic Honey, Stone Fruit Nectar and Wild Mayhaw Berry, can be used on salads and cooked grains or for infusing meats and vegetables.
“When I started, I had no idea how to get something like this done,” says Courtney “I just jumped in and started asking questions.”
With the help of Edible Enterprises, Courtney connected with contract chef and food scientist Ehab “Happy” Abdelbaki. The two worked extensively to convert her small-batch, home-based recipe into the Delightful Palate products.
“We would just keep adding and tasting over and over again to make sure
CURIOUS
Continued from page 1G
“He was known for sitting on flagpoles on top of buildings,” Alexandria historian and author Michael Wynne said “He would sit on some of them for days. He once spent 49 days on top of a flagpole on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier braving rainstorms and high winds. So, how did Kelly achieve his feat?
“He had a thin sliver of a platform that he attached to the top once he got there,” Wynne said. “And he would tie his legs to the pole when he slept, which enabled him to stay there for days. He would also attach a tube to himself, so he wouldn’t have to take bathroom breaks.” Large crowds would gather as he ate doughnuts, drank milk, read newspapers, slept and performed handstands. This was long before AI could engineer fake videos of daring feats this was the real thing.
“He was the fourth best-known personality in the United States during this period,” Wynne said. “People were fascinated by him.”
From WWI to a daredevil
Kelly was born Aloysius Anthony Kelly on May 11, 1893, in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. He ran away from home at age 13, changed his name to Alvin and spent his early years working as a steelworker, high diver, boxer,
an 1988 Late for the Sky copyright marking, but our grandkids claimed there is an updated version of this
tried-and-true board game. Sure enough, a quick online search located a 2004 version.
Once the markers were chosen, a roll of the dice landed my 9-year-old grandson on Highland Road. We were off and playing. On the home stretch were Fred’s, The Chimes and Mike Anderson’s. The next dice roll sent the player to Louie’s Café. They’re all still there!
The board includes spots for registration, student parking and academic probation, all of which are now handled online.
The old saying “the more things change, the more they remain the same” was apparent as my husband and I immersed ourselves in this cleverly created board game.
We soon found ourselves landing on and buying prop-
erties such as The Chimes, Thomas Boyd Hall, Memorial Tower, the Quad, the Indian Mounds and the Parade Ground. Other familiar landmarks include Lakeshore Drive, Dalrymple Drive and Chimes Street. Although still on the 1988 version of the game, places such as the Cotton Club, the Bengal and the Bayou have long since disappeared from the LSU horizon. In the board’s Campus Mail, there’s a card for “lose one turn if you cannot recite the Tiger Fight Song.”
And another card for a “$50 library fine.” Another card from Campus Mail claims you can receive a “$200 check from home,” something surely now accomplished by the click of a mouse.
Missing from the board are Mike the Tiger’s Habi-
Lili Courtney helps a student layer dough into a cast-iron
class at Simplee Gourmet
it stayed true to the original formula,”
Courtney said.
Even though Courtney is skilled and no doubt experienced, she would not call herself a chef.
“Becoming a chef involves several years of studying and internships,”
from the files of The Times-Picayune.
movie double and licensed pilot who performed aerial stunts. He was also an ensign in the U.S. Naval Auxiliary Reserve during World War I, serving from May 1918 to September 1921.
Then came Kelly’s daredevil career with some writers describing him as a modern-day stylite, comparing him to fifth-century Christian ascetics who gave up everything to sit atop pillars to fast, pray and preach.
While Kelly didn’t preach or pray, he did entertain fans while business owners paid him promotional fees. He also made a little
a
Courtney said. “I believe that it is a title you should not banter about lightly, so that’s why I call myself a culinary instructor.”
Going international
For the last three years, Milneck and
extra by selling rooftop seats to fans willing to pay for a closer look.
100 hours atop N.O. hotel
Kelly brought his daredevil show throughout the country beginning in the early 1920s and continuing through the 1930s.
Wynne documented Kelly’s Louisiana visits in his 2023 book, “Hanging by a Thread: Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly, the World’s Greatest Flagpole Sitter.”
Kelly first shows up in a July 18, 1923, feature article in The Times of Shreveport. He was passing through on a 90-day boxcar ride from New Orleans to San Francisco and said he was considering climbing some of Shreveport’s downtown buildings for fun.
But there was no follow-up article documenting it.
Meanwhile, Wynne’s dig through old Times-Picayune files turned up stories of Kelly’s first New Orleans visit on July 26, 1926, when he spent 100 hours reigning over Canal Street from the Roosevelt Hotel’s rooftop flagpole.
At the same time, splashy newspaper advertisements touted his post-flagpole appearance at New Orleans’ Crescent Theatre after a stunt, promising that he would tell audiences “how it’s done.”
“He appeared at the Crescent Theatre on Aug. 1, 1926,” Wynne said. “And he kept appearing there the rest of the week by popular demand.”
Kelly stuck around New Or-
tat and Alex Box Stadium, two of our grandkids’ favorite hangouts. Our older grandson won the game by landing on Tiger Stadium and the Assembly Center On a traditional game of Monopoly, these would likely have been Park Place and Boardwalk, two choice properties with enormous rents. Some things never change! It was a fun trip down memory lane for all of us on a wet and soggy Saturday afternoon.
Trick lives in Baton Rouge. Human Condition submissions of 600 words or fewer may be emailed to features@theadvocate. com. Stories will be kept on file and publication is not guaranteed. There is no payment for Human Condition.
“I want to give you confidence in the kitchen. So you can leave with the skills to execute the recipes in your own kitchen.”
LILI COURTNEY
Courtney have taken their culinary experience on the road and have taken Louisianans with them.
In 2023, the pair took a crew from the South to Paris, touring the many food markets and cooking classes. In 2024, the group went to Madrid, Spain, to explore all of the restaurants and wineries. And in September of this year Milneck and Courtney took a group to London, England, where they explored the Tower of London, toured exclusive vendors for the Royal Palace, learned how to make gin and more.
Anyone who wants to have fun in the kitchen can join in on the classes and international trips, whether a beginner cook who’s ready to learn basic skills or a seasoned cook who’s looking to mix it up and take it to the next level.
“I consider my classes ‘no pressure classes,’” Courtney said. “Meaning we might mess up, and we might drink a little wine, but we always leave with good conversations and a good meal — plus new kitchen skills and new friends.”
Courtney teaches classes at Red Stick Spice in Baton Rouge or Simplee Gourmet in Covington and New Orleans. Courtney also hosts special “In the Neighborhood” cooking classes in her home kitchen as well as classes over Zoom.
“I want to give you confidence in the kitchen,” Courtney said. “So you can leave with the skills to execute the recipes in your own kitchen.”
Email Margaret DeLaney at margaret.delaney@theadvocate.com.
leans a few weeks longer for a September promotional appearance. This time, his stunt took place not on a building but a flagpole attached to the top of an airplane, which flew over the Central Business District advertising a festival at the Fairgrounds.
“After that, he went to Alexandria,” Wynne said. “That was in October, but he made a stop in Opelousas on the way as an extra attraction, where he spent 41 minutes standing on top of a water tower He appeared in a Vaudeville show at the Princess Theatre there afterward.”
A sneaky stunt, police chase
Then came the Alexandria performance on Oct. 27, 1926 — documented by an article in the Alexandria Daily Town Talk — where Kelly climbed to the top of the Guaranty Bank and Trust Building on the corner of Murray and Third streets.
The building now scrapes the Alexandria sky under the Capital One banner
“He spent 10 hours on the flagpole of the Guaranty Building, but he didn’t get permission to do it,” Wynne said. “He snuck to the top and climbed the flagpole, and the police eventually had to chase him down, but this got him a lot of publicity and notoriety.”
Once again, he made a theater appearance after the stunt, this time in Alexandria’s Home Theatre on Third Street, where, The Town Talk noted, he also sold postcards with proceeds going to
disabled World War I veterans.
Kelly returned to New Orleans on March 13, 1928, to climb the Jung Hotel at 1500 Canal St., spending 80 hours and 13 minutes atop its flagpole before heavy rains and high winds forced him down.
The Titanic?
Newspapers labeled Kelly as “The Human Fly” and “Steeplejack” along the way, but his selfgiven nickname, Shipwreck, was a mainstay
“He was very much like W.C. Fields in that he never told the truth about his life,” Wynne said. “One of the things he pushed through his entire life was that he was on the Titanic in 1912. But he was never on the Titanic.”
Yet Kelly told people he was a survivor of 11 shipwrecks, the most notable being the Titanic. So, he adopted the nickname and created the daredevil persona that earned him $500 a day at the height of his popularity
Kelly died at the age of 59 in 1958.
“He always talked about how automobiles were more dangerous than flagpole sitting,” Wynne said. “He died after being struck by a car in New York.”
Do you have a question about something in Louisiana that’s got you curious? Email your question to curiouslouisiana@ theadvocate.com. Include your name, phone number and the city where you live.
FILE PHOTO
Daredevil flagpole sitting Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly is shown during one of his New Orleans visits in this photo
FILE PHOTO BY MINH KIET
skillet during
past cooking
The National WWII Museum in New Orleans cinematic attraction
“Beyond All Boundaries,” narrated and co-produced by Tom Hanks, was an immediate hit when it opened in November 2009.
Dave Walker
Offering visitors a “4D journey through the war that changed the world,” it provided an immersive 47-minute overview of America’s experience in the war As the narrative unfolded across the far-flung theaters of battle:
n Solomon Victory Theater seats rumbled as action sequences played on-screen.
n Life-size objects like a concentration-camp guard tower and the nose section of a bomber plane rose or dropped into view
n When troops experienced frigid conditions, snow appeared to fall on the audience.
n An all-star cast of actors, including Gary Sinise, Brad Pitt, Patricia Clarkson and Wendell Pierce, gave voice to the millions of men and women who went to war overseas and on the homefront.
Mike Scott, writing in The Times-Picayune, called it a “mag-
nificent and moving spectacle” and a “world-class, theme parkstyle attraction combining education and entertainment in a stirring and inspiring package.”
The film’s debut was a huge moment for the museum, which had activated and begun fundraising for the master plan that foretold the world-class museum we know today But Hurricane Katrina paused a lot, for all of us. “Beyond All Boundaries” was the museum’s first big move upriver and across Andrew Higgins Boulevard from its original National D-Day Museum base.
“It’s been 16 years, and 4.3
ARTS & CULTURE
million visitors have had the opportunity to see it,” said James Williams, the museum’s vice president and chief operating officer “It’s really become an integral part of the guest experience now.”
Updating the fourth “D”
After 16 years of hourly screenings, however, the fourth “D” needed some TLC. Dark for several weeks, “Beyond All Boundaries” recently reopened with a like-new (or better) technical upgrade. The story remains the same, but film portions have been remastered, moving-pieces props have been restored or replaced, and the theater chairs have been swapped out for new rumble seats. Perhaps most significantly the preshow video narration by its famous coproducer has been rerecorded to reflect the star as he
appears today versus the “Angels & Demons”-era Tom Hanks.
“He is such an integral part, as the narrator, of ‘Beyond All Boundaries,’” Williams said. “So, we were honored that he was having it redone.” The renovation process pro-
ceeded on two, um, fronts. The video presentation was reworked by THG Creative, the Californiaand Florida-headquartered firm that oversaw the original production. Meanwhile, back in New Orleans, the show’s many mechani-
cal elements were brought up to contemporary presentation standards.
“Anything on the mechanical side — the watchtower, the nose of the plane, and then there were some other elements — all of those had to be removed and changed,” Williams said.
Phil Hettema, THG’s founder and chief executive officer, was the project’s creative spark when it was first produced and returned to captain the renovation.
As “Beyond All Boundaries” was in development, Hettema understood that “there was a fine line for a history show to use new technologies while preserving the authenticity of historical content,” wrote cofounder Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller in his recent memoir “Preserving the Legacy: Creating the National WWII Museum.” “Phil was brilliant on that score.”
Preserving the legacy
Writing further, Mueller summarized his original goals for the attraction, which have been reinforced in the upgraded presentation: “(T)he film would reflect the museum’s mission, presenting a positive narrative, a celebration of the strength of the American spirit, and a story of hope and liberation from tyranny I wanted future generations to know that contrary to misguided public opinion about the efficiency of totalitarian regimes, our messy democratic institutions and systems emerged superior in battle, weapons, troops, technology leadership and homefront support.” Mueller then quoted Dwight D Eisenhower, the wartime Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater of Operations: “Our audiences should understand what Gen. Eisenhower meant when he said that ‘Hitler should beware of the fury of an aroused democracy.’”
Dave Walker focuses on behindthe-scenes coverage of the region’s museums here and at www.themuseumgoer.com. Email dwalkertp@gmail.com.
