Who Is She
When Bourbon Street’s most famous cocktail purveyor came after me
I was 29 years old, I was living with my parents, and I was the worst person in my dance fitness class. I went to this class for free — I got a lot of things for free in New Orleans — in exchange for promoting the class on social media. But I was a terrible ambassador for Dance Trance. I would spend the class panting and embarrassed, grape-vining in the wrong direction to the current Top 40 hits, before leaving New Orleans proper and heading back to the suburbs.
In my life outside the dance studio, I was also sweaty and flailing. It was summer in New Orleans. I had recently been “laid off” from a job I was completely wrong for and very bad at. It had been my first career risk, leaving the old-fashioned-but-no-bullshit world of publications for an internet marketing job at an office with standing desks and a lax dog policy. After eight months of fuck-ups I was unemployed.
I declared in a triumphant Facebook post that I would now be “creating a life on my terms,” starting a freelance career. I would stitch together an income out of various writing jobs, joining the ranks of the untethered workers of the “gig economy” who love making their tax returns as complicated as possible. The comments section of the post was flooded with messages of support and job leads.
