Back in the Big Easy, Pt. 2

It’s wonderful when conference planners choose a beautiful city like New Orleans as the place to hold their conference. There's all kinds of amazing stuff here! It’s beautiful! The food is fantastic! And they need our dollars! So let’s keep you shacked up ALL DAY inside the goddamn CONVENTION CENTER which seems to SMELL LIKE PEE no matter WHERE YOU ARE and only CERTAIN PLACES get air conditioning and your place is NOT ONE OF THEM!

I don’t mind meetings like this so much if I’m a participant, moving from room to room and listening in on panels and whatnot. It’s infinitely harder to be an exhibitor. Standing in a booth trying to get the attention of passerby is not something I do well when I’m sober. I learned I am a master at it when I’m drunk and throwing beads from a balcony, but we’ll get to that.

I was in New Orleans for a meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), where hundreds of elected state officials from across the country convene to talk about best practices, good governance, and fiscal responsibility, all while being wined and dined at the expense of organizations like mine. As I mentioned, we had a booth, one of hundreds, in the massive exhibit hall. There are many different methods of getting the legislators' attention as they walk through. For example, the Beer Institute gives away samples of – you guessed it - urinal cakes. Ha. In actuality they set up a beer tasting each day of the convention. They were much more popular than the International Bottled Water Association. Larger organizations with key issues, such as PayPal, set up massive booths that look like something from the Jetsons, with crazy multimedia presentations on huge flat-panel TVs. Other groups with issues that are, let's face it, extremely dull, such as the American Dental Hygienists Association, add spark to their booth with truly exciting giveaways such as stress balls shaped like teeth. Wow! Other groups simply hire attractive young women to staff the booth, a crude maneuver but one that never fails to work on your average aging state legislator.

The truly smart groups, however, such as both NRAs, use a combination of all of these techniques. The National Rifle Association had three HOT young blonde women giving out hats, t-shirts, and backpacks. I tried to engage them in conversation about the recent overturning of the DC handgun ban, but it was a bit like talking to the Mona Lisa – a blank stare and a vapid smile. The other NRA, the National Restaurant Association, hired chefs to work their booth, a brilliant strategy given the unbelievably horrible convention center food. You’d think of all places New Orleans could get convention center food right, but when you find yourself thinking that the best option is the Starbucks across the street, you know you’ve hit rock bottom.

After working my booth from 9-4 on Wednesday, I was happy when it was time to adjourn to the conference’s networking event at the Superdome. Last year, NCSL was held in Boston, and we were given access to pretty much everything in Fenway Park – the locker room, dugout, press boxes, even the underground batting cages. The only place we couldn’t go was on the field. I thought we’d get this same level of freedom at the Superdome. Imagine my chagrin when, ironically, the only place we were allowed was…the field. No locker room, no press box, not even the stands. Just the turf. I’ll grant you that being on the field in any major sports facility makes me go a big wet one, but we were really hoping to see not only where hundreds suffered and several died during Katrina, but also where Drew Brees puts on his jockstrap. Interesting footnote, four days after our event, the Arena Bowl was held at the Superdome. Two teams played and one of them won. Since Arena Football reminds me watching my five year-old’s soccer team (Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal!) I don’t really follow it.

After the Superdome I was invited to an event held by the National Beer Wholesalers Association (whose booth was, ironically, not too far from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which was almost as funny as the Ringling Brothers' booth being close to the Humane Society’s, who were only there to protest Ringling Brothers). If there’s anyone who knows how to throw a party, it’s Beer Wholesalers. The event was held at a prime location on Bourbon Street with a huge balcony, replete with hundreds of strings of beads to throw, and, most importantly, all the free booze you could drink. An open bar on Bourbon Street is like a sundae station at a Weight Watchers meeting; it’s a miscalculation of almost dangerous proportions. Fortunately, the attending business professionals, association executives, and legislators were able to imbibe and socialize in an orderly fashion, ladies and gentlemen all, and a quiet evening of cards, baccarat, and good conversation was enjoyed by the attendees. Or, everyone got Preakness infield drunk and the affair rapidly degenerated to the maturity level of a fraternity party, only with more alcohol. I was not immune to the debauchery; in fact I'm told at one point I played a washboard with the house band, though I have no memory of it.

The main sport of the evening was, of course, hurling beads and the crowd below. I saw one legislator throw his beads at an attractive young woman, when an older bearded guy reached over her and snatched them out of midair. This politician, elected by the good people of his district and sworn to uphold the laws and regulations of his state so help him God, then dumped a FULL cup of beer (an official Beer Wholesalers cup, in fact) on the guy’s head, and yelled “GIVE THE CHICK THE BEADS YOU FUCKING DOUCHEBAG!”

I had another conversation with a politician who has helped my organization in the past, to the point where we’re throwing him a fundraiser in his home state next week. This is a stunningly stereotypical politician – fat, rich, drunk, and smoking a big cigar. About ten minutes into our very one-sided conversation (my side was “uh-huh….yup….exactly…uh-huh…) he started in on his belief that marriage is “one man one woman” and it’s up to groups like mine to try to promote Christian lifestyles. My immediate thought was, lifestyles like the one you’re living now, urging young women to show you their tits for a twenty cent string of beads made in China by a kid making a buck a week? My next thought is, who the hell does he think I work for? He either forgot who I am, never knew who I was, or he thinks that the medical specialty organization I work for gets a lot more intrusive than simply cutting you open during surgery. It all became a moot point when he spilled a hurricane on a colleague of mine and stumbled away mumbling incoherently.

On Friday morning, the NCSL held their annual “Walk for Wellness,” a 5K (3.1 mile) walk/fun run that aims to raise awareness of something and promote a healthy something else. It’s a great cause. I had been excited about this year’s race as I’ve been running a lot more in the past year, which isn’t hard given that, prior to that, I never ran at all. Unfortunately, even at 6:30 a.m., it was 85 degrees and humid. As if that wasn’t enough, there had been a massive oil spill (or “awl speel,” as they call it on the bayou) on the Mississippi river two days before, and the stench was absolutely overwhelming. Regardless, I had a good race, very nearly keeping pace with the 12 or 13 year-old kid who was in front of me the whole damn time. The frustrating thing about running is not my inability to win races – I’m never going to be fast and that’s fine. It’s that I get beat by people who I could clearly pound the holy living fuck out of. You are not my physical superiors, dammit, you’re just faster. Get me my gun (which you can do now in DC) and I don’t care how fast you can run, pipsqueak.

Anyway, I came in sixth, which will easily be the highest I ever rank in anything. There were two reasons for this:

1) It helped that of the 80 or so participants, roughly 60 of them walked. Slowly.

2) It did not help that this little blonde girl blew by me at the very end, ruining my potential top five finish. I asked her how long she’d been waiting to pass me. “2.9 miles,” she said. Again, I need my gun. I’ll have to have a longer talk with the hot blonde girls at the NRA booth.

So that was New Orleans. As a footnote, I’ll add that as I was flying out of MSY, I heard the following coming from the gate across from mine:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you’re wondering why we haven’t started boarding the aircraft…our technicians have told us that the two aft lavatories are malfunctioning. It’s up to the pilot whether or not we can go, so we’re awaiting his word.”

Later:

"Ladies and gentleman our technicians have deplaned and were unable to fix the problems with the two aft lavs. I’m working with the pilot to get this resolved and I’ll let you know if we’re going to Philadelphia in just few minutes."

Obvious grumbling. Some cursing. One vow to “pee in the sink.” Finally:

“Ladies and gentleman, I’ve convinced the captain to let us go to Philadelphia. I’m looking out for number one, so to speak. What I need you to do, before I begin the boarding of this aircraft, is to GO TO THE BATHROOM. Now. You’ve got a long flight to Philly and your options are...well, you’ve got no options. Please take a few minutes and go to the restroom, and you might want to think about skipping the coffee or soda or iced tea on your in-flight service, maybe just have those pretzels.”

Back in the Big Easy Pt 1

The allusion has been made many times by blues musicians, but New Orleans is like a hot woman that’s way out of your league but for some reason keeps sleeping with you anyway. The blues guys say this much more skillfully than I - blues musicians can say things like “squeeze my lemon ‘til the juice runs down my leg” and make it sound saucy instead of ridiculous. The first time out, you’re just amazed you’re there. You don’t want to make any big mistakes or fuck it up (so to speak) so you take it easy and don’t go to crazy. Second time you figure you’ve got more leeway, so you go a little harder. Leaving the woman metaphor for a minute and returning to the Big Easy, you drink a little more, stay out a little later, and maybe even throw a couple of stings of beads off a balcony. Third time out (and each subsequent visit) you’re in a comfort zone. You’ve done the touristy stuff (hopefully we’re really away from the woman metaphor now) and you’re settled in, relaxed, and able to go at your own pace and enjoy the beauty and splendor of one of the finest places on earth (okay, maybe we are still with that metaphor).

I’m currently in New Orleans for the sixth time in my life, the fourth trip this year alone. I’ll be back one more time – maybe even twice – before the year is out. I am not guilty of hyperbole when I say I could probably pass for a native at this point. I know which streets go where, where the good, out-of-the-way restaurants are, and where the best music can be found. I can also tell you where to get your bike fixed. Where to buy three pounds of the best crawfish in the city. Where you should go running.

Bottom line, lost in all the post-Katrina hooplah is the fact that this is still one of the most fun cities in the world, Bourbon Street notwithstanding. Which isn’t to say that Bourbon isn’t good for a larf. My room here at the Hotel Monteleone is just a block away, on Royal Street. But there’s so much more to this city than boozing. Take this hotel, for example. I had a roster of hotels where I could have stayed, some closer to the convention center (where I’ll be spending most of my time over the next three days), and some nicer (I once stayed at the Ritz at the same time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I don’t know a lot of guys on that team by sight, but you could pretty much tell who was on the team and who wasn’t. If the dude was 6’6” and 350 pounds, odds are good he was on the team. Or just a local named Tiny who likes his alligator tail and bread pudding.) Instead, I chose the hotel that was haunted. Not just one of those “they say there’s occasionally a strange presence in room 237” type of haunted, but a flat-out, there-are-ghosts-everywhere-in-the-place haunted. No way I was gonna turn that down. So far I’ve been ghost free, though for some reason my room has five smoke detectors, all with spooky little green blinking lights. Perhaps the ghosts frequent this establishment because of all buildings in the French Quarter it’s the least likely to burn down.

They may be frightened away by my odor this evening though – I went to K-Paul’s restaurant tonight, third time I’ve eaten there. K-Paul’s is owned by Paul Prudhomme, a chef so astoundingly fat he is no longer able to stand up under his own power, instead wheeling around on one of those electric scooters you see advertised on daytime shows like the Price is Right. I’m in danger of catching Paul on the scale after just one meal – frog legs, onion rings, gumbo, jambalaya, a chicken leg stuffed with (really) a chicken breast, and bread pudding. And here I have ambition to run tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes. Tomorrow, a tour of the Superdome, a place of death, sorrow, and disappointment. And that’s just the Saints.

The Williamsburg Coniglium

We spent this past weekend in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia enjoying the beautiful history and splendor of the area, and getting in touch with our country’s roots. For example, we spent almost a full day at the historic Water Country, USA, plunging down the same chutes and slides enjoyed by George Washington in the 18th century. We spent the next day at the very same go-kart track where Thomas Jefferson would drive his beloved #23 car for hours on end back in the mid-1770s. To spend such quality time embedded so fully in our nation’s history is nothing short of breathtaking.

The fact is, you could spend weeks in Williamsburg and come across nothing of historical significance. Sure, they try to force it on you - there are fife and drum players everywhere, most places (including Chinese restaurants) will sell you a tri-corner hat (which my son the superJew refers to as Hamen hats), and there are markers everywhere with years on them, some dating back to 1619, when a young John McCain visited the colony. But the fact is it’s more theme park than history lesson. Which was fine with my kids who have not yet developed any sense of time - if it hasn’t happened in their lifetime, it just hasn’t happened. For example, my son is insistent that there will be more Star Wars movies because they’ve had six since he was born, so clearly they’re on a roll.

I will say this for the place; amidst the history, the buildings dating back to 1699, the Revolutionary War sites, even the rampant evidence of the destruction of Native Americans, there is one thing that overcomes all of them, one thing that rises above all else to become the one thing you take away from Williamsburg when you leave - pancakes. There are probably 100 different places to get pancakes in a two mile radius of Williamsburg. No one could tell me why. I’m assuming because everything you do there requires physical activity, whether it’s going to the water park, Busch Gardens, or eating large piles of pancakes. It could also be that the College of William and Mary is smack in the middle of town and all of their students are stoned. (Most restaurants seem to have really old autographed pictures of W&M's most famous alum, Jon Stewart. One pancake house had an autographed picture that was signed “Dear Mario, Are you Jewish? Jon Stewart.”) Each pancake house seems to have a hundred ways to serve pancakes, the best of which was something called “pigs in a blanket,” massive sausage links wrapped in buttermilk pancakes. While not nearly the gastronomic orgasm that is Eggspectations’ construction pancake (“A layered high rise of pancakes, sausage, bacon and grilled potatoes”) it’s still more food than any human should eat in one sitting. And meal at which I can just pour syrup all over everything on my plate is a good meal.

Two highlights stand out for me on the weekend, both involving my son. He is timid kid by nature which is to say that everything everywhere with the possible exception of bunnies scares the hell out of him. (Fortunately, for some reason, there were bunnies all over Williamsburg. Geese too.) I was leery to get him on a water slide of any size, as he’s scared of heights and more specifically falling from them. And the dark. Fortunately not water, so that’s how I talked him up the very tall ladder and into our little raft, in which we plunged almost 400 miles an hour into a pitch-black tunnel which looped and rolled and seemed to go forever, before finally emerging through a very heavy waterfall into a large pool, which we went skimming across with the grace of a birdshot mallard before tipping over and going underwater. Fortunately Jake was wearing a life vest, so he popped up laughing and asking if he could go again.

At the go kart track, he was eager to go on the kiddie roller coaster, primarily because it was the only thing that was built for kids his age. They had several rides that were built for infants, and many more rides that were built for adults, but the kindergarten set seemed to have been passed by save for a tiny roller coaster called the Python Pit. I witnessed not one but two kids who appeared to have been at least second graders ask to be let off the Python Pit because of its severe intensity. Jake, on the other hand, loved every minute of it, screaming to go faster. (I taught him to say “damn carnies” for the occasion, but being a gentleman he refused to say it in front of his mother.) Unfortunately for Jake, his sister is even more ballsy than he is and ended up riding the Python Pit about five times, much to the chagrin of her father’s body which took a freakin’ beating from the tightness of the safety bar and the g-force pushing him up against the very unpadded side of the car.

So if pancakes and children’s roller coasters are your bag, I suggest Williamsburg. Apparently there’s history there too, but damn if you can find it.

That's Some Bullshit

I was on a Southwest Airlines flight a couple of weeks back and they gave me a bag of peanuts. On the back of the bag were these words and these words only:

CONTAINS: Peanuts, Salt

WARNING: Processed in a facility that processes peanuts

Then there's this.

Happy Memorial Day

Nothing says Memorial Day like thousands of bikers...

...and babies drinking Jack Daniels.

Mike Franzione Gets Married

Remember the show Silver Spoons? Remember, Mikey Franzione, the kid that lived across the street from Ricky Shroeder? Of course you do – little overweight kid who’d come panting into Ricky’s house with big news and deliver that timeless catchphrase “You’re not gonna BELIEVE this!” And the crowd would just erupt with laughter because they just knew that line was coming? No? Think hard now. That's him, on the left. Ringing a bell yet? No? Then you must not be drunk on Bourbon Street.

Let me back up.

I’ve known Josh for twelve years. When I met him, I liked him because he was fat and poor and therefore made me look good by comparison. Sadly (for me, anyway), he has shed his extra pounds (through both rigorous exercise and shaving his back) and become a lawyer (in fact chief council at a major DC lobbying firm). He has also gotten digits from a stripper and been hit on in a crowded pool hall by a hot woman who, for whatever reason, was there by herself. These are all accomplishments that have thus far eluded me. Yet despite his apparent superiority (and my hatred of superior people) we remain friends, mostly because we have criminally immature senses of humor and the social graces of a drunken orangutan. Both of these came in handy at his bachelor party, for which we travelled to the Big Easy.

I’ve been to post-Katrina N’awlins quite a few times but only for business. I was pleased that because the shackles of the business world were thrown off, I could drink heavily, eat expensive meals, ogle woman like I was Bill Clinton, and throw money at strippers like you’d throw bread to starving ducks. Come to think of it, it would be exactly the same as my business meetings. The only major difference was instead of staying at a company-bought hotel in the French Quarter, we would be staying in a large mini-mansion in the Garden District. The mini-mansion turned out to be purple. And there were dozens of small handwritten notes from the owner pasted in various locations, warning us about flushing only toilet paper and not using certain balconies. Since we found no signs about having naked women dance in the living room or leaving massive piles of crawfish pieces all over the backyard, we weren’t too concerned.

There was far too much comedy to recount in one blog entry, so I shall present the highlights. However, we must begin with the story of Mikey Franzione, or else, to paraphrase Dickens, nothing that follows shall seem wondrous.

1) Mikey Franzione

Josh spent his youth trying to make it big in Hollywood, finally landing the coveted role of Mikey Franzione. He played the role for two years, until Alfonso Ribiero took over the role of Ricky’s best friend. Franzione had a catchphrase, a unique style of dress that was copied by pre-teens all over the country, and a very popular haircut. Unfortunately, after leaving the show, his had trouble finding work as an actor, so he finished high school and went on to become a lawyer.

Now reread the last paragraph with the understanding that only the last twelve words are true. The rest is crap. The picture is from Josh’s bar mitzvah. But damn if we didn’t tell that story to nearly every attractive woman we met on Bourbon Street, as well as some very unattractive ones. I would say that 95 percent of the people we told this story to claimed to remember Mike Franzione and his catchphrase (which we made Josh repeat ad nauseum). In a stroke of pure genius, one of Josh’s friends printed copies of the atrocious bar mitzvah picture on card stock and handed them out to people to help jog their memories of this character that didn’t exist. Most didn’t even need it. “Oh YEAH!” they’d yell. “I REMEMBER that kid!” There were a hundred hilarious moments that developed out of our ruse, including:

• Asking any restaurant or bar that had pictures on their walls (and some that didn’t) to add one of Josh. Most happily accepted. With those that didn’t, we just put one up anyway. For example, here is Josh on the wall of Pascal’s Manale, right below Bonnie Raitt:

I would imagine that if you were to hit Bourbon Street right now, at least half the bars would have a picture of Josh somewhere. I’m headed back in July, and I’ll report back.

• Several people asked Josh to sign the pictures, and some were not joking. Josh happily accepted with an “aw shucks, I’m just a regular guy” humility, writing “All my love” on each photo.


• We ended up giving a photo to a tall tattooed gentleman who was in a band that, he claimed “was opening for David Allen Coe’s nephew.” He said it with the same reverence that a musician in mid-1992 would say they were opening for Nirvana. After his girlfriend showed us her recently pierced nipples (yay Bourbon Street!) he began asking Josh about his agent. Fortunately, Josh’s friend Carlos stepped up and claimed to be said agent. Musician guy immediately asks for phone numbers and claims he can get us VIP treatment at one of the lesser strip clubs. Apparently it didn’t occur to musician guy to ask why, if Carlos was such a good agent, Josh hadn’t had any work since 1984. I get the feeling that opening for David Allen Coe’s nephew doesn’t get you a lot of exposure. (And for the record, we did get VIP treatment at the strip club, if only because we made up 80 percent of the crowd the moment we walked in. As one of Josh’s brothers observed, the women dancing in this place would be on the Sunday 10 a.m. to noon shift at any other establishment.)

2) Shooting
Friday night at about 12:30 a.m. we wandered into a club that had a live blues band downstairs and a DJ upstairs. After being there a few minutes, Josh and some other folks wandered out onto the balcony, a beautiful view of the sea of humanity that is Bourbon Street on a Friday night. Then gunshots rang out. As Josh told it, the crowd below parted like the red sea, and the people on the balcony ran back inside. Immediately rumors started circulating, the most common being that a young woman was shot in the head and that right there, see that stuff? That stuff was her brains. No, really, gray matter. You can tell from up here. And look at the blood. Gross, huh?

The area was promptly cordoned off and a fire truck came, but the amazing thing is life just kinda went on on Bourbon Street. People found their way around the roped off block, found another bar and more booze, and the music continued. The resolve of the true partier is amazing – it’ll take more than just a girl caught in the crossfire to ruin their good time. Turns out she was only shot in the leg and ended up fine, but it did provide a story. Probably not as good as the story she’ll be telling in HER blog, but still.

3) Food
Josh is a true epicurean and I suspect that half the reason he chose New Orleans as a location for his bachelor party was that, beyond drinking and carousing, there is nothing to do but eat. Which is what we did. We at K Paul's on Friday night and Pascal's Manale on Saturday night. Massively over sized portions of good Cajun food. However, the highlight may be on Saturday afternoon, when after consuming massive amounts of hangover-curing food at a Garden District diner, we ducked into a small fish market and bought several pounds of boiled crawfish and andouille sausage. By the time we were done, the back deck of our mansion looked like the beach at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan if Spielberg had opted for crustaceans instead of human actors. There was crawfish shrapnel everywhere.

4) The Hour-Long Hora
At some point during the weekend, Josh revealed his plans to do an hour-long hora at his wedding. (The hora is a traditional Jewish dance in which the wedding guests dance in circles while lifting family members up in a chair.) This was agreed upon ages ago by his fiancee and him, and was ironclad and unbreakable. Josh's brother Mitch, the best man, spent the better part of the weekend trying to put a stop to this. Bad enough we had to were tuxedos, Mitch told his brother, but to make us lift you up and down in a chair for an hour...well that's just torture. Mitch began an email dialogue with his future sister-in-law, and pleaded to anyone who would listen about the insanity of this request.

But we knew Josh. We knew that if Josh's fiancee told him that he was to come down the aisle wearing a leopard-print loincloth and riding on a wild boar, he would ask if he was allowed to wear synthetic leopardskin or if he needed to book passage to Africa to hunt down a real one. Thus, this one-hour hora was happening no matter how much protestation was to go on. But that didn't stop us, the future wedding guests, from trying. Every time something of difficulty arose, it was met with "at least it's not an hour-long hora." When one of us dropped out of a Hold 'Em tournament early, he was met with "you lasted about an tenth as long as Josh's hora." As we waited for strippers to arrive, we asked if we should get a chair so Josh could lift them up and down for an hour. Josh became increasingly agitated as the weekend went on, which made it all the more funny. At one point, he "threatened" to walk out of a diner at which he had just ordered an omelet with chili on top and a milkshake. Unfortunately, he came back.

5) Strippers
The beauty of the successful bachelor party is that, no matter where you choose to have it, no matter who you choose to invite, no matter how classy you pretend to make it, there will always be one constant. At some point at least one, and usually more than one, woman will get naked in exchange for money. Without that, you just don’t have a bachelor party.

Surprisingly, given the post-Katrina economy, strippers were hard to come by. We ended up getting two women, one of whom claimed to be 29. If you know anything about strippers, you know their ages are distorted in proportion to how old they actually are. It’s a complex mathematical formula, but by way of example, if she says she 29, she’s 36. If she says she's 18, she’s 54. It’s complicated. We perused dozens of websites and called dozens of phone numbers, looking for just the right ladies. Most of the ladies we called had names like "Princess" or "Diamond." I'm always amused when strippers name themselves after inanimate objects like Diamond or Platinum; essentially you're telling me that you look expensive but in truth are going to lie there and not do much. A stripper calling herself "Gyrating Whore" would get a lot of business. One of our strippers was named "Judi," a name that I felt was better suited to a librarian or flight attendant.

We decided to have our entertainment perform on what was left of our pictures of Josh, so we scattered them on the floor:

The image of two strippers gyrating all over pictures of a young Mikey Franzione is the stuff of True Hollywood Story. Luckily the strippers asked that towels be laid on the floor; otherwise Josh’s attempt at a comeback may have been thwarted.

Here’s the other funny thing about bachelor parties (or at least the ones I’ve been to): men, despite all their bravado and boisterousness and bragging and testosterone, usually go a big wet one in front of two strange naked women. The 14 gentleman attending Josh’s bachelor party, who up until then had been howling-at-the-moon wild, sat and stared as if they were watching a Truffaut film. All except Josh, who was very busy being alternately mauled, tortured, and abused by the ladies. For me to do what they did to Josh would require much more money than what we gave them. I almost felt bad. They may have given him a discount, however, as he is a former child star.

News From the Brook

When will the good people of West Brookfield address the obvious nepotism of the Nadon family? More importantly, when will they once again have pigs on their farm so my kids can see them? Get it together, West Brookfield. The town is falling apart.

WEST BROOKFIELD— Town Water Commissioner Barry J. Nadon Sr. has sued the town and the Board of Selectmen to recoup his legal costs and possible other damages in defending himself last year against charges by the state. The town contends the suit, which does not specify an amount of money sought, is without merit and has requested its dismissal. The state Inspector General’s office last year accused Water Superintendent Ronald J. Marchessault of Wickaboag Valley Road of allowing Mr. Nadon and fellow Water Commissioner Lester J. Paquette Sr. to be in charge of local drinking water in non-emergency situations.

The state Board of Certification of Operators of Drinking Water Facilities said that action violated board regulations, because the two commissioners were not licensed for such activity. Mr. Marchessault agreed to a $2,000 civil penalty and a year’s probation. Mr. Nadon and Mr. Paquette were each assessed a $250 penalty.

Barry J. Nadon Sr. is the father of Selectman Barry J. Nadon Jr.