Ryan Tramonte

If we’re being honest, there’s no better way to understand Festival Season in New Orleans than speaking with a local who sleeps, eats, lives, and dies by the festivities. In case you aren’t sure if you know one of these people, here’s how you can identify them. They will start talking about the Jazz Fest line up at the Thanksgiving table. Perhaps you might catch them arguing over which is better: the crawfish bread or the crawfish bread pudding. They will skip work, funerals, weddings, and even post-pone surgeries to avoid any commitment that might fall between March 1st and the end of May.

Knowing your limitations can be one of the smartest things you can do for yourself, and I have always known mine. Paying attention to them can be a different story. But knowing something and living something are often two vastly different things.

If you listen to your limitations, you just might find yourself keeping the training wheels on your first two-wheel bike on far longer than you ever needed them. Let your limitations take control, and you’ll find yourself snuggled safely in your nest while the world and all its grand opportunities pass right by you without a second glance.

I am mad bananas for 1970s disaster movies. I was a “Towering Inferno” of excitement when Ms. Shelley Winters declared herself a very skinny girl in the water. Flipping ships, earthquakes, volcanoes, and distressed airliners had me sitting on the edge of my bean bag chair waiting for the Sunday night movie. It only got better when they sold me the catastrophe with an all-star cast. While other kids were counting cookies with Bert and Ernie, the simple words “Ernest Borgnine” had me counting the days till I could see him save the day, and Stella Stevens.

People like to say that kids say the most at amazing and honest things, but I disagree. I find children horrifically boring. And I find that the truth tends to topple the tower of delusion on which I have built my life.

While it makes my heart sing to listen to people’s stories about how being quarantined changed their lives and enlightened them about their diets, their marriages, and their affinity for positive affirmation YouTube videos (insert eye roll here), it really excites me to see the changes in the world of art that were a result of artists and gallerists witnessing an unsure, uncertain future staring them in the face. It’s not any specially kept secret that art has had it fair share of growth after global hysterics scared the mixed media out of us in the community. 2020 was no different.