Louis Michot, fiddler/front man for The Lost Bayou Ramblers, is profiled in a New York Times article focusing on his funky, homemade home near Arnaudville — an edifice raised of reclaimed lumber, sunken cypress and bousillage, that unique-to-Cajun Country building material comprising Spanish moss and mud used by Acadian settlers to insulate their austere dwellings.
Scion of a musical family of judges, politicians and culture keepers, Michot built the house in Arnaudville entirely by hand with the help of friends and family. The article, “Song Man With a New Métier,” focuses mainly on the house and, by extension, Michot’s dedication to preserving those unique cultural ways of South Louisiana’s Francophone natives. It’s fair to call him a renaissance man; according to the article, Michot is also the founder of the Cultural Research Institute of Acadiana, a nonprofit that collects heirloom seeds and the oral histories of gardeners and subsistence farmers.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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