Flood Streets explores life in New Orleans a little over a year after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of the city, interweaving characters as diverse and eccentric as the city itself. It’s based on the collection of short stories, In the Land of What Now.
Matt Bergeron is a reformed bohemian who is putting aside youthful creative pursuits to start a small advertising business. He hopes maybe he’s finally getting somewhere with his life – except he hates his work and is increasingly alienated from his rock ‘n roll girlfriend. In his search for a new identity, he imagines he is falling in love with the buxom young dental student who fixes his teeth in a low-cost clinic.
Madeline Mueller is a rising singer-songwriter, but to pay the bills she’s trying to sell real estate in the devastated Lower 9th Ward. Here she encounters Ruby, an older Creole woman with terminal cancer, who has been happily living without electricity or water inside the bare stud walls of someone else’s abandoned home. Madeline really should throw Ruby out of the house . . . . if she didn’t grow such good weed!
Madeline’s friend Georgia struggles to be a good mother, but her shady schemes to find love and money may put her feisty thirteen year-old, Feliciana, in danger.
These and other stories coalesce and explode in a moment of jouissance that could only happen in New Orleans.
A nuanced view of the city and its people, Flood Streets shows the changing landscape of New Orleans as it has never been seen before, dispelling the stereotypes about this tragic, defiant, joyful city.
