I'm a typical New Orleans girl, born and raised.  Call me a "Scat," a "Yat," a "Gentilly Brat."  You won't bother me.

But I do believe that Wendy Vitter' "cousin Jimmy Baldwin," just called me a drunk.  Me and a few other hundred thousand "typical New Orleans girls."

"Do you believe what Wendy said about us in the Sunday [Times] Picayune?" shrieked my childhood friend Lisa.

"Wendy?"  I asked.  "You mean, David Vitter's alleged prostitute, Wendy Cortez?"

"No!  I'm talking about Wendy Vitter!" as in Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter's wife.  "The one in that...dress..."

Actually, Lisa was talking about Wendy's "cousin Jimmy Baldwin."  All the same, Lisa seethed with fury.  "Her cousin says Wendy Vitter's 'not the typical New Orleans girl who likes to go out drinking,'" said Lisa, a typical New Orleans girl who's a hard-working registered nurse and single mother and who, unlike the Vitters, lost her family home in Katrina and now lives in a crowded Gentilly trailer.  She seethed. "It says Wendy 'was more serious and goal-oriented' than...than who, the whole rest of all the women in the city?  What a load of...."

Yes, I agree.

"And I voted for Vitter!"  Lisa fumed.

I have to confess that I didn't do that.  I'm a conservative but I do swing liberal sometimes, as long as the blue dog stays beside me.  And I have Cajun blood and family ties and had to support Chris John, hoping to save great Cajun traditions like cockfighting in Abbeville.

So I'd canceled out Lisa's Vitter vote, even though in the end, Democratic Governor Blanco did us cockfighting champions in.  "She calls us drunks?"  Lisa said of Wendy Vitter.  "Well, we'd have to be drunk to vote for her husband again!"

But Lisa's more than angry--she's hurt.  "How could Wendy's cousin say we New Orleans girls  just go out drinking while she's more serious and goal-oriented?  I have goals, just like everyone.  We have our serious sides."

Yes, we New Orleans girls do.  We like to party, but we also get down serious-like.  We read Tolstoy.  We hold jobs--sometimes more than one job.  We struggle.  Wendy Vitter may have four children, but she shelters them and herself in Old Metairie luxe.  Lisa and I buy coffee in Old Metairie, but that's about all.  Lisa has a FEMA trailer and a Gentilly home that looks like a bomb hit it.  She has a yard of dried dust in which a certain persistent variety of very hardy weed grows to six feet high.  Her elderly mother, aunt, and brother and his girlfriend live in the FEMA trailer parked next to hers, and pre-Katrina, they all lived in the same big house.

But this was what typical New Orleans girls did.  We took care of our families.  If we had a crazy relative, we dressed them up, bought them a nice hat, and took them to church, to Mandina's, to the park.  Every family on my Gentilly block had a deranged grandma or grandpa living with them, and when they went out walking and got lost, we'd steer them home.  And we knew where every one of them belonged.

We were indeed "typical New Orleans girls," and our city was a better place back then than it's been lately.

Wendy Vitter's cousin's insults sting us, but we know that the pathetic truth behind them is that Wendy Vitter's life is so miserable, she can only make herself feel better at our expense.

Poor Wendy!

"She's pathetic," Lisa ranted.  "She and her useless husband are like the crawfish in the bucket!" referring to the phenomenon of keeping crawfish in a bucket without a top because even as one crawfish climbs upward, the others will pull it back down.  Cajuns know it's an endless repetition, with all of the crawfish involved collectively doomed.  "Does Wendy feel better because her cousin 'dissed us?"

I wonder.  I wonder why Wendy spoke at all.  I wonder why the Times Picayune went to such trouble to say Wendy's smart--unlike us "typical New Orleans girls."

"Are you suprised that I have something to say?" Wendy Vitter asked rhetorically at the vitters' self-inflicted press conference last week.  The answer, of course, is that no, I'm not.  No journalist is surprised at all.

Everyone in America has something to say, unless they work in the Bush White House--in which case, they will only talk to you in private, off the record, and not under oath, if they deign to talk at all.  In fact, this is why the weirdest and wackiest reality shows are so popular.  People say the darndest things, and there's no end of the odd commentary in public life.  But most of us were surprised when Wendy referred obliquely to her husband's alleged philandering with hookers, and then said she was "proud to be Wendy Vitter."

Why?

"Why did she say she was 'proud?'" Lisa pondered.  "Does she mean, 'proud' of David Vitter, the accused whoremonger, or proud of herself?"

And Wendy might well have an interesting answer about what she sees in David Vitter that is fast disappearing for the rest of us.  But of course, the Vitters refused to answer any questions at all, so we won't know.

But what we do know is that Wendy's complaints about overwhelming press attention just don't ring true.  I walked by the Vitter's church the Sunday morning in question, and the only reporter I saw in evidence was a cameraman from Channel 26, scrunched into the farthest left corner of the church's front yard, with his van parked across the street in a bank parking lot.  Almost everyone else present seemed to be a parishioner, and while summer attendance may have been generally higher in hopes that the scandalous Vitters would show up abd enliven the day, most of the visible whispering and snickering at the church was done by the Vitters' fellow congregants.  I don't know about anyone camped on their front lawn, but as far as Wendy's church was concerned, the presence of the fourth estate was far from overwhelming.

And of course, it isn't just the Vitters' private church, is it?  "Come to mass!" its sign on Metairie Road urges.  It doesn't say, "No reporters."

But back to the "drinking" insult.

It's true that New Orleans has a culture of alcohol that's probably unique to America in many ways.  Most of us Scats, Yats, and Gentilly Brats had our introduction to cocktails at relatively tender ages because alcohol is so omnipresent in our city.  Our grandmas would rub red wine on our gums when we were teething babies, which made us stop wailing.  By age twelve, we'd run to the Touche Bar at the Royal Orleans with a tenner to order carry-out martinis for our parents while they waited in line for a table at Gin's Chinese Restaurant in the French Quarter, and we'd take a little tipple on our way back.

Lisa and I lived in Lake Vista in a day when our parents used to actually dress up in their best clothes to merely visit each other at their homes and have elaborate dinner parties, and we'd be pressed into indentured service as hors'deavors passers and barmaids.  We'd take a little swig from the glasses we bussed back to the kitchen.

When he turned 15, my parents put a white waiter's jacket on my brother and turned him into a wine pourer and beer bottle opener at a family wedding.

And we did the usual New Orleans' rites of passage--trying to buy beer at the Pick-a-Pack on Harrison Avenue (which never worked), trying to look sophisticated enough in our prom dresses at the Huki Lau in Metairie so we could get a double-typhoon rum drink with our older dates, and oh-so-casually ordering a beer with our burger at Ruby Red's on Esplanade.

Even after we became of age, it was probably a decade before we actually ordered an alcoholic drink that did not have banana liquor in it.

Still--we typical New Orleans girls knew what a drink was.

Alcohol and "partying" are indeed New Orleans' traditions.  This has good and bad points.  But Lisa's parents actually met at Nick's, a famous bar frequented by Charity Hospital staff and Tulane students.

My parents met in the Tulane Medical School cafeteria but dated at Nick's shortly after.  The New Orleans neighborhood bar was a social center for generations of real New Orleanians, especially us Gentilly brats.  In Lakeview, the Rockery was the original hot spot.  Like all old New Orleans places worth drinking in, it had a screen door with "Coca Cola" stenciled on it, pulled shut by a long thin spring. These bars have been slowly disappearing.  But the folks who socialized there and elsewhere were "typical New Orleans" boys and girls, men and women, who just liked being out, having fun with their friends.

In fact, if anyone was passed out or throwing up on the floor, it was usually a Tulane law student whose grandma had never rubbed red wine on her gums, who'd never snuck a drink at her parents' cocktail parties, who'd never, well, been a little bit..naughty!

Because that's what real New Orleans girls are.  We're not haughty uber-lawyers or shrewish know-it-alls.  We're a little bit naughty, nice when we wanna be, we're smart, we're serious, we're goal-oriented.  We work hard all week long, and on Friday, we like to shake it up.

Life does change you, and nowadays, Lisa and I don'tdrink hardly at all.  Having been stopped only once on Canal Street after an especially lively evening, we never drink and drive.  We have kids, we have lots of responsibilities, we are often too tired.

But last year, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lisa took me out for a burger on Magazine Street.  I was nervous about my upcoming surgery, and as our diet cokes arrived, I mentioned that I'd never had a Cosmopolitan cocktail-- that "Sex in the City" drink.  I wasn't going to order one, I couldn't imagine drinking anything like that.

But Lisa insisted--"How would you feel," she offered helpfully, "if something went wrong with the anesthesia and you died an agonizing death on the operating table, and you'd never had the experience of tasting one?"

Being a typical New Orleans girl, born and bred, I understood her point, and so we both had a Cosmopolitan.  It tasted like drinking velvet.  Delicious, fruity velvet.  The next day, I took my son jet skiing in Gulfport--something he'd really wanted to do but we'd never done--and I realized that if I did die an agonizing death on the operating table, at least I'd die relatively happy--knowing that while I hadn't "done it all," I'd at least done it some, and had a good time.

That's an epitath for a typical New Orleans girl.

I thought of my sister-in-law's mother who, during chemotherapy, was in the kind of relentless pain that only a Beefeater martini from Mandina's could assuage.  We got it in a "go" cup and always brought it home for her.  She'd grown up in Mid-City, a quintessential New Orleans girl.

"Wendy Vitter needs to lighten up," said Lisa.  "She needs to come out with us and have a Cosmopolitan."

I agreed.  "And she has just the right dress for it."

by Sarah Whalen, who is a freelance writer and a contributor to Bayoubuzz.com.