Will Durst: A speck in Katrina's eye (Durst's escape from NOLA)

[Dudley_DUright]

Hard to fathom the chaos I'm seeing on my TV, soggy but safely ensconced here at my Dad's house in Milwaukee. A wrung out speck of comic detritus lucky to have dodged the wrath of Katrina's Eye. And a mite sheepish. Always told anyone who bothered to listen I wanted to experience a Hurricane, but then, when the chance finally came, I hiked up my skirts and ran like a little school girl. And am extremely glad I did.

My scheduled two dates last weekend were going to be a working vacation with the emphasis on the drinking like a fish part. Working on Saturday at Martine's, a club in Metairie, and then the House of Blues Parish Room (little venue -- seats about 240) in New Orleans on Sunday. Followed by a flight out of Armstrong International to Milwaukee to see my Dad Monday morning. Cue ominous music.

After landing Friday night, the joke was the damn Hurricane was going to screw up not just the whole town but our shows as well. We would make a fortune with our "Dive the French Quarter" t-shirts, featuring a logo of a tiny floating scuba diver holding a hurricane glass. Easy, less-than-a-1-percent-chance-of-it-ever-happening kind of laughter. Saturday morning the chuckles started to stick in our throats like a sawdust canape. Katrina stubbornly refused to veer off and wimp out, like all New Orleanians distractedly assumed she would. People exhausted from evacuating Hurricanes that had never come. People who had heard the weathermen cry "Chicken Little" too many times: twice last year and twice the year before. People suffering from a serious case of Hurricane Fatigue.

But that didn't factor into our thinking. We were just comics trying to salvage a gig (me and Bill Dykes, the producer/ comic who booked the mini tour,) so we spent an hour haranguing the general manager of the HOB, that "the show must go on."

"How bad can it be?"

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