Okay so HI!!! My name is Dee Landry and I am 29 years old and I was born and raised right here in New Orleans and I have never lived anywhere else and I never want to, because where else can you get a po-boy at two in the morning and hear a trumpet playing on the corner while you eat it?? NOWHERE, that's where!!!

I wait tables at a restaurant in the French Quarter (I'm not gonna say which one because my manager would DIE if he saw this page, hi Mr. Manager if you're reading, I love my job!!!) and I have been there going on six years now. I carry four plates up my arm and I have only dropped a gumbo ONE time and it was not my fault, a man stood up real fast. We don't talk about it.

My roommate's cousin set up this page for me on her computer and showed me how to do the colors, so if something looks crazy that's why, and also because I LOVE it crazy!!! <--- see??

MY BABY GUMBO!!! Gumbo is my cat, he is orange and fat and perfect and he sleeps on my work apron every single night so I go to work smelling like a cat and a roux, which honestly is a good combination. He was a stray behind the restaurant and the cook, Pete, was feeding him shrimp tails and I said NO SIR, that cat is coming home with ME. That was four years ago. He runs the house now. I just pay the rent.

MY BEST FRIEND RENEE!!! Renee and me have been best friends since the fourth grade when she let me borrow her grape scented marker and never asked for it back, and that's how you know. She does hair on Magazine Street and she is the funniest person alive and if you ever need somebody to sit with you in a hospital waiting room or help you move a couch up three flights of stairs, she is gonna be there before you hang up the phone. Renee, I love you, you're gonna read this, stop crying!!!

CRAWFISH OPINIONS (VERY STRONG ONES)!!!

• They gotta be BOILED. With corn and potatoes and a whole head of garlic in there. And sausage if you love me.
• If your lips aren't tingling, it's not seasoned. Sorry! I don't make the rules!!
• Pinch the tail AND get the juice out the head, that's where all the flavor lives!! If you don't want your heads, just slide 'em over to my side, sugar.
• My Maw Maw always said don't eat the ones with straight tails and I have never once disobeyed my Maw Maw.
• Newspaper on the table. No plates. Plates are for company you don't like!!!

JAZZ FEST!!!!! Best two weekends of the whole entire year and I will FIGHT you on it (nicely). I take off work every single day of it, I plan it in January. Me and Renee go out to the Fair Grounds in our big straw hats and we eat crawfish bread and a mango freeze and then we go stand in the Gospel Tent and just cry and clap, every year, it gets me every year!!! If you see two girls in purple hats dancing like nobody's watching, HEY, that's us, come say hi!!!

MY REGULARS!!! I have the sweetest regulars in the whole world. There's Mr. Leon who comes in every Tuesday and orders the red beans and tips me in quarters, a whole little stack of them, all lined up neat, and I think he saves them up all week just for me and I have never been so touched in my life. There's the two sisters who come in on Sundays after Mass and split one bread pudding and argue about who gets the corner. I LOVE THEM. I keep Mr. Leon's quarters in a big pickle jar at home and that jar is for...

Okay this is my big dream so don't laugh!!! One day I am going to have my very own snowball stand, a little one painted purple and green and gold with a window you walk up to, and I'm gonna call it DEE'S SNO-BALLS and I'm gonna have every flavor in the world but the BEST one is gonna be nectar cream with condensed milk on top, the way God intended. Kids get a free squirt of extra syrup on their birthday. Gumbo will be the mascot. Renee will be in charge of the sign because she has the best handwriting. It's all planned out in my head, I just need the money, and the pickle jar is getting FULL, y'all!!! One quarter at a time, baby!!!