They were assembling for a parade in honor of Buddy Diliberto, the portly, balding broadcaster. He vowed that if the Saints ever made it to the Super Bowl, he would dance through the streets in a dress. He died before the Saints made it. Thousands of men kept his promise. New Orleans was back to regarding itself as peculiarly blessed. By the time Treme, the HBO miniseries, started airing this year, visitors would have had to go out of their way to find neighborhoods that still showed signs of Katrina.

Treme took its title from the venerable soulful neighborhood that has been a home to many New Orleans musicians. In fictional threads beginning three months after Katrina, Treme was portraying various local characters jamming and coping with recovery. David Simon, the show’s auteur, asked me to come down and join those characters.

Well, cool.

So in episode 5 I’m in one of my favorite N.O. restaurants, Upperline, standing to greet Creighton Bernette, played by John Goodman. I’m introducing this imaginary character to my real-life wife and friends Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, there at the table, all of us as ourselves. It’s as if we were out to dinner and a TV show sprang up all around us, and we were cool with it. That’s New Orleans for you. Magic is bound to happen.

Then I watched my performance, and saw that I had not realized what a stretch portraying myself would be. You’d think they could have cast somebody younger-looking.

And in respectable venues, I can’t repeat most of my lines. That’s because my lines congratulate Bernette on one of his YouTube rants. In so doing, I quote that rant. That rant is taken from an actual blog by Ashley Morris, on whom Bernette is largely based. In his blog, post-Katrina, Morris went off on anybody who bad-mouthed New Orleans. In the process, he frequently, and from the heart, employed what is known in respectable venues as the f-word. How shall I put this: if the f had been for fatalism, the high point of Morris’s, and Bernette’s, rant, which I, playing myself, quote approvingly on Treme, would have been something like “Fatalize you, you fatalizing fatalists.”

And now I am just returned from a New Orleans confronted by another plague. An oil spill? An oil vomit. Which threatens to kill the Gulf of Mexico. At Felix’s, I ate two dozen lovely oysters raw. At Cochon, I ate some oysters wood-roasted in wonderful chili butter. Am I never to eat a New Orleans oyster again?

I know this: Folks in New Orleans are maaaad—hoo. My last line in episode 5: “There are times when rage is the only rational response.”