Storymania - The Dish Star: Stories From Bay St. Louis, 2005 by Shelley J Alongi

The Dish Star: Stories From Bay St. Louis, 2005 (2)
Shelley J Alongi

start all over again. The people in the kitchen, most of the time, it was two of the guys named John, and a northern California police chaplain named Don,
Kevin, and me, all used a ton of humor to get through the experience. I don't even remember anything we said but it was all funny. I suppose when you're
scrubbing out a twenty gallon pan someone burned corned beef hash in you either laugh or cry, and there's really no time for crying so laughter is the
only choice. We did get a little annoyed at the volunteer cooks but we toiled bravely on and scrubbed and cleaned.
The Duct Tape mask
There Are Really Uses for Duct Tape!
Somehow a roll of duct tape ended up in my suitcase as I was packing because I figured in a place like this one just might need it. We did use it for a
lot of things, including taping up a scrape that one John got scrubbing out a pan with a grill brick. He found some antibiotic ointment, some gauze, and
then a band aid and then secured it all with God's Own Cure, Duct Tape. Maybe that's what God created on the seventh day and just never told anyone to write
down. Hmm, interesting idea. Well, anyway, he scrubbed bravely on, re-taping the cut and serving the week. Duct tape became the salvation of Shelley's broken
watch band, but the most interesting use of duct tape came on the coldest day in Mississippi when Shelley's resourcefulness got the better of her. It was
cold enough on that day to wear a hat and I had conveniently forgotten mine. Ideas often come in the strangest places, so in the kitchen I took two dish
towels and a roll of duct tape and set to work. I put one towel over my head and taped it crosswise to another towel which went over my face. So there
it was, a duct tape mask with the ends tucked into my light jacket. I'm a California girl, remember I don't wear clothes. Just shorts! Well, a little more
than that, but you know a hat isn't in my wardrobe. The looks the mask got were priceless, but hey I have to say, the idea worked and I was warm. The
advantage was I didn't need eye holes to see what I was doing. So all hail to Duct Tape.
Biloxi to The Rescue
On Saturday, two days before we left to come home most of the kitchen crew went to clean our houses, a process somehow that was called "mucking out houses."
I didn�t' do any of that because there was plenty of room in the kitchen for me the whole week, so I can't tell you any stories of that, but they are just
as poignant as any of the ones at the camp. Home owners stand in awe and disbelief as workers poor into the house to remove damaged appliances. It's a
chance to show Christ's love rather than talk about it, just by getting down into the dirt and doing the work, too. It leads to a lot of conversations.
The leader of the construction crew, Mike, strictly enforces a policy not to accept gifts from the home owners because our main job is to just help. We're
not interested in payment or gifts. But anyway, back to the kitchen.
Saturday was as busy as any other day and somehow I ended up in the kitchen all by myself. No problem, I'm used to being relegated to dishes, I actually
like them. As I kept telling people on the entire trip, "I didn't come here to sleep." That afternoon you looked at the dishes and said as I do about anything
else "okay just break it down into manageable segments." So I did. As I washed twenty pound serving containers the shape of large ice chests with two sides
for entry (I'm not kidding about the weight) a new group of volunteers poured into the kitchen. As it turned out, a Calvary Chapel youth group had come
down to help serve that day and so along with me doing the dishes there were five other people, and they all did well. They were funny, too, but the thing
that stood out the most was that they all kept calling me "mam."
Please!
Page, Ryan, Brandon, another name I don�t' remember, maybe it was Tony, and the youth leader Brandon were a huge help. I walked out earlier in the afternoon
to the prep line where they were all making ham and cheese sandwiches and said "Are you Brandon" to someone whose voice I didn�t' recognize.
"How did you know?" he asked me.
"Well, I figured one of them was in the kitchen so you had to be the other one."
Turned out he had been in the Air force and he wanted to start a camp for high sschoolers, probably some kind of retreat.
The whole team only stayed till 3:00 but without them I would have been more far behind than I was. Oh well, it got all done so we could do it all again.
bubba the head cook asked me if when I got home if I was going to go to all disposable plates. "No," I said, "because doing the dishes at home is a lot
easier."
But at home I'm not the dish Star
Saturday night the head cook Bubba told Joe the camp host that they needed to get more volunteers in the kitchen because I had spent six hours on Saturday
working there. I was banned from the kitchen, not out of meanness, just because we needed others to get involved. Don't worry, on Sunday afternoon in the
serving line as I was getting my food and preparing to go sit down, I told him that being banned from the kitchen was like "being banned from a spouse."
He got really quiet and then said "well maybe bubba will let you in."
"No way" Bubba said. Joe related my analogy and bubba said "well I'll have to make more dishes for you before you can come in."
The banishment was over. But by that time there were lots of people in the kitchen because we didn't send out mucking crews on Sunday, so I talked to people
and in the next installment I'll tell you about the most amazing local story that I experienced. I still want that guy to come back.
More stories later,
From the Dish Star,
Shelley
Part 4
the Adorable Man and the Pink House
It didn't matter what side of the tracks you were on in St. Louis, loss was equal. They say death is the great equalizer, but if the side of the tracks
determines your status in life, it didn't matter on August 29, 2005 what side of the tracks you were on because you were going to get it. Of course the
closer to the beach you were the more you were in Mother Nature's predetermined path. But who would have thought in Bay St. Louis on Sunday December 11
that two people would sit down and talk about one house on one side of the tracks.
Sunday was a different day in the Calvary Relief camp. Oh you still got up at 5:00 in the morning if you were on the prep crew. I didn't draw prep duty
that day so I slept in, yes, even if I didn't come to sleep, somehow I ended up sleeping on that day. But breakfast saw me in line and that's a whole other
story which I'll tell you in the next installment.
Sunday lunch is what I'm talking about now and yes it does have to do with being near the tracks. Bay St. Louis used to boast a train depot till the flood
waters swept it away. On one side of the tracks, the side between the tracks and the beach, stood an old pink house; a house that stood across from a theater,
and was eighty years old. But this story doesn't start on Sunday. It starts on Wednesday in the line that extended outside the tent to the fence that determines
the boundary of the camp. On Wednesday I went out to talk to people on the line, and met a wonderful couple. Norlita and Gene were the lucky ones. They
only had three feet of water in their house, and are still in process of fixing it, but their house wasn't the pink one between the tracks and the beach.
Norlita and Gene came to eat every night and it seemed we always ended up together, talking about what I do not know, but talking nonetheless. They introduced
me to their daughter Rosarito and their two grand children Kathryn and Preston. They always came together, except on Sunday December 11 at lunch when
Rosarito had to go to Gulf Port to straighten out some FEMA disaster. FEMA seems to create disasters of its own not related to Katrina but sure not helping
things either. What would one expect from bureaucracy? Well, perhaps more than identity mix ups and such. In any case, Norlita and Gene ended up at my
table at lunch all alone except for one other person. Shortly after I sat down with my lunch, a man approached the table and sat down. We exchanged greetings.
"What's your name," I asked him.
He said his name was Scott. I had been serving meals for days, met a variety of people, but I know I had never met this one.
"Are you new here?" I asked him.
He said he was and that he had been eating at the Hippy Dome which is some word for something which I've forgotten, but that they weren't serving meals
anymore.
"How did you find us?"
A friend of his had told him about the Calvary Relief camp and said that the food was good here, so now he ended up here on Sunday December 11 the day before
I was to hop back on a plane and return to California.
Another question one learned to ask here other than "did you lose property" is "what do you do?"
Scott told me that he had been out of town for seventeen days because he works on the oil fields off shore.
"Oh."
Now I don't know what he looks like, how he was dressed at the time, or his age, though I'd guess it at about forty if that, but the thing I did notice
was his accent. Yeah I know that's a tired one, everybody has an accent in the south, don't they? Well, I don't know about that. I heard a lot of them
that week and I heard some uninflected ones, but I never heard one like that. It was just, in my humble opinion, college graduate kind of terminology,
simply adorable. He could have talked to me for hours.
As it happened, he didn't have to talk to me, because this is when Norlita and Gene showed up.
"Good morning, Shelley" Norlita said to me. We chatted and then perhaps just because I like to be a hostess I said:
"This is Scott and this is his first time here."
That was the end of it and the beginning of the most interesting experience I had at the tables in the serving tent. They began to talk to each other and
discovered that they had both moved to Bay St. Louis from new Orleans.
"It seems like everyone moves here from New Orleans," I said. "Why is that?"
"To get out of new Orleans," Scott told me. It was one of the first encounters I had with the negative part of New Orleans that didn't come from a media
perspective. It didn't last long, though because somehow they started talking about a pink house by the railroad tracks. Gene perked up at this one.
"Which side of the tracks?" he asked Scott to which they determined it was the side between the tracks and the beach. By the way, those tracks are gone
now, the roadbed is completely washed out.
The conversation suddenly took a new turn and soon it was discovered that the pink house Scott had owned from 1995 to 2001 (01) as he said, was built by
Gene's father.
I sat there in awe; I won't say amazement, chuckles.
Two people who had never met in their lives and who had moved to Bay St. Louis and had been introduced by me to each other suddenly had one thing in common:
a pink house by the railroad tracks. the house by the railroad tracks is gone, too, but the history remains. Now I know something about the pink house
even though I've never seen it.
Before I left Bay St. Louis, I got Gene and Norlita's address and phone number. She told me that their phone would be connected today, December 19. They
said they would say hello to Scott if they saw him again.
After the incredible conversation, Scott got up to leave and put out his hand.
"If I don�t' see you before I leave," I said, "It was nice meeting you and good luck."
Part of me silently screamed "Please come back and talk to me!" I never saw him again, and I don�t' know who that mysterious man with the adorable accent
was, but I know something about him: he used to live in a pink house that my new friends in Bay St. Louis knew well.
More later from the Dish Star,
Shelley
Part 5
What Couldn't You Live Without
I don't remember what day it was, but I was just on my way back to see if anyone needed a break on the serving line when I heard someone say "I want to
talk to this young lady." One of the volunteers pointed this out to me and so I found myself sitting at a table after lunch talking to an 82 year-old man
and a 57 year-old woman, Sally and Elmer. They were companions. He had been married twice, and one of his wives had been blind. We spent a while discussing
that and they told me about how she would hand out Mary and Jesus pictures or something, not quite sure what it was all about. The area is predominately
Catholic, one of the legacies of the French settlement of the land before Thomas Jefferson bought it all for fifteen million dollars from a broke Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1803. Well there's your history lesson for the day. There are other religious representations of course but this one goes back a ways.
We talked a lot and they told me that they had evacuated to Alabama before Katrina struck and had lost everything. They are in the situation of so many
others, living on their property in a FEMA trailer, trying to rebuild, and not knowing quite where to go. Elmer, the strongest most healthy 82 year-old
I've ever seen somehow ended up asking me a question. He said: "What is the most important thing in your house that you couldn't live without."
"Well," I said, "I'll have to think about that one."
We separated for the afternoon and I really did have to think about that one. The computer, that could be replaced even if the files couldn't, the phone,
no; the furniture, that could be replaced, the knickknacks, no; family memories, I didn�t' think of that one at the time, but I did manage to come up with
something. I thought of this: something you could have in your house or out of your house and use anywhere, small, bristly, versatile, you can use it anywhere,
and well if I lived without it I'd probably be avoided like the plague.
Soon it was time for dinner again and the cycle started all over again. We served and said hello and there they were.
"I thought of the answer," I said when I came to sit with them.
It may surprise you.
Maybe you've figured it out by now.
The envelope please.
I decided the thing I couldn't live without would be a TOOTHBRUSH.
A toothbrush? I think he was surprised a bit. He thought I'd say a toilet. Well, you can find that somewhere, but a toothbrush?
It's strange what we think we can't live without. I decided that I couldn't live without a toothbrush.
Sally and Elmer will recover with the comunity, it may take a while and be different, but they did teach me one important thing: you can probably live without
a toothbrush but you cant' live without friends.
The Dish Star signing off,

Part 6

Letting the Blind Lady Cook
My first fun experience was of course cooking four hundred pieces of French toast, and then cutting about 400 biscuits and then barbecuing about twenty-five
pounds of chicken. I had help with this one, we had about fifty pounds of chicken and a man about seventy years old, John, when he figured out I could
do this all by myself, fired up the other propane grill and started cooking some of it. It's a good thing because it would have taken about four hours
to barbecue that much chicken.
"Who loves to barbecue?" Joe the camp host (who later received the nick name Mr. Energy Bar from me) asked the kitchen crew on Tuesday.
"Me!" I chimed in. You see I cook for eighty people a week on Fridays using a small propane grill so to graduate to a larger one was no problem. And the
great thing was that health and safety wasn't looking over my shoulder wondering if I could do it without supervision. Hey, in this place, you just did
it and did it right because there was no time to get it wrong. Joe seemed perfectly willing to let the blind lady cook.
"What's your name again?" he asked me about half way into the project.
"Shelley," I said.
"You're doing an awesome job."
You know, the same thing could be said of all the people there. It was a lot of work and a lot of people helping to get it done.
Cooking Up the future
Ok now it's time to tell you about Bubba, the head cook, or as he became known by me "Mr. Head Chef." He has a cooking degree and taught me how to make
a good pot of beans and how to make mashed potatoes the easy way. I'll share the secret of the beans if you ask me, but the other one is a secret and I'm
not telling!
Bubba is married and has at least two kids. He's a medium height guy who lives in La Habra, California, probably about fifteen miles from us here in Fullerton.
"You mean I had to come all the way to Mississippi to meet you?" I asked him when I first learned he lived so close to me.
"Amazing, isn't it?" he says, and yes he really did say "amazing."
bubba was a courageous man. One restaurant manager I know said it would take him a while to trust me to cook since I'm blind but he said if I showed him
I could do it he'd be convinced. Well, that shouldn't be so hard, there are several hundred people at Cal State Fullerton who know I can cook, and a few
hundred people in Bay St. Louis who know it. bubba, aka, Brad, knows it now and I have to give him credit. He is the one who gave me the least trouble
over it. Perhaps the reason why he gave me the least trouble is because we didn't really have time to ask questions there and I see it like this: if I
was blind and I showed up in a serving tent to cook, and paid $350.00 to get there and slept in a tent in thirty-three degree weather, I figured people
thought I pretty much knew what I was doing and they weren't going to ask me questions.
Now don�t' worry I didn't take over the whole kitchen though I told Bubba that I probably could and perhaps would in the months to come if the need came
up. I could do this, plan menus and such things, because it's always what I've wanted to do my whole life, but now wasn't really the time for ambitious
plans like owning kitchens and such, it was more about getting the work done.
By the time I finished working in the kitchen, he was letting me fry hush puppies in a huge walk about the size of a small car with enough oil to cause
as much damage as an oil spill off the Gulf coast.
I also worked with the biggest spider I've ever seen. Don't worry, the spider is the name of a tool that people use to take food out of deep fryers. I probably
would have chosen a bigger one but this one was good enough and I fried about 150 hush puppies and they were all yummy. One of the volunteers helped me
put them in the huge pan to serve them out of, and we had it down to a science.
Another time I was floating around seeing if anyone needed help and I came across Bubba working with a huge bag of beans. he told me he was sifting the
bag for rocks.
"Can I help?" I asked him.
"Well, if you think you can do this, then you can certainly try."
I was happy to know that neither of us found any rocks in fifty pounds of beans.
Who knows what this will all lead to in my future. Now my ambition to cook helped people who were rebuilding and working and planning their own futures
and this is much more important.
And by the way, if you want to know how the blind lady cooks, there are techniques, but remember this: fire does the same thing to food whether you can
see it or not, you just have to know when enough is enough.
The Dish Star
Epilogue
Four years have passed since I went to Bay Saint Louis. Things have changed since then, perhaps not only in Bay Saint Louis, but here as well. Gregg the man who led our team is at another church. Amber and Ryan have moved to Kentucky. Kim and Caleb are currently in an eastern European country on a mission trip. Georgina is still at the church. I work for Disney full time and don�t have much time these days to take vacations. I have to get approval for time off now. I am now an avid train fan adding that to my experiences. I think about Mr. Energy Bar and I haven�t seen Brad, AKA Bubba since that year. NO doubt he�s cooking somewhere. I�m currently working to pay the rent in a two bedroom apartment, working, watching cable, amusing two cats, and I still write all my memories down about things I experience. I am now an avid train fan adding that experience to my aviation memories. I don�t know what happened to Scott the guy with the adorable accent who owned the pink house by the railroad tracks. I don�t have any information about anyone else in my stories. We all came together for a certain time in a certain place and we are all now back to our lives. The Dish Star came in contact with some wonderful people all who had been affected by a hurricane ravaging the Gulf Coast. I don�t know if I�ll have experiences like that again. I have always thought that I have had amazing opportunities. I only know this: everything there was simply amazing!

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