New Orleans can't die, right? Even though I may have recently eaten some of the city’s last unspoiled oysters? Maybe just New Orleans fatalism could die.

Before faulty levees allowed Hurricane Katrina to wash big portions of the city away, New Orleanians would talk about how the Big One was coming some day, oh yeah. New Orleanians, they somehow assumed, would be ready for it. Ready psychically, or vibes-wise, or karmicly, or bluesily, or something; because the City That Care Forgot had never relied upon anything so mundane as precautions. New Orleans was about savory, rootsy things to eat and dance in the streets to. New Orleans was inherently on the verge of going under—that’s why so many people came there to get down.

Bigger the catastrophe, bigger the party, right? Katrina, five years ago, squelched that notion. My wife and I got down there as quick as we could. Cars squashed between houses, boats up in trees, empty streets, bodies still in attics, and a stink in the air that wasn’t the good old New Orleans funk.

The culture proceeded, however, to improvise its way back home. At the first post-Katrina Jazz Fest, the Dynamic Smooth Family of gospel singers were singing, over and over, “There ain’t no party like a Holy Ghost party cause a Holy Ghost party don’t stop.” Maybe fate did love New Orleans, just had a funny way of showing it. Festivals, restaurants, and hotels got back up and running, and you never knew when the next parade might arise. One afternoon in January I noticed a bald, portly, heavily unshaven man walking down the street in a pretty party dress. Drag is not out of the ordinary in New Orleans but is generally more becoming. Then I saw a couple more men with much the same look. And a few more, and more.