New Toulouse

Not Just for Kids

Gamaliel’s Vintage Toys & Dolls
French Market, New Toulouse

You may know Mr. Gamaliel as the person who cracked the radio code and who, together with his wife Arijah Ankh Khalid-Zyn, operates Ravenwood Arts & Curios on Shotgun Row. He can be seen around town in various elaborate costumes. Now he has a new venture: a toy shop in the French Market district. Since was giving away free popcorn, naturally I had to take a look.

Why open a toy store in New Toulouse? He and his wife recently made a wooden doll for a little girl who visited Ravenwood. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life,” said Gamaliel. “Some good, some bad, and some … well, we’re not gonna go there. But it felt good making that doll—to know that someone will enjoy the hard work put into it. It also reminded me of my dad. When I was little, he carved me a wooden toy boat. It was probably the best gift I ever got from my old man, who lathed fine furniture by hand. So in a way, it was like living that all over again.”

Gamaliel has in stock a fine selection of handmade jigsaw puzzles with pictures of local scenery. He also sells toy planes and is giving away a special New Toulouse version as a gift. “It’s made of a really thin, lightweight strip of wood. The propeller is wound tightly by a flexible band that makes the propeller move, so when you toss it, it flies like the real thing. On my travels I met one of the Schweizer brothers, who was exhibiting a glider prototype. This is the best I could replicate it, but I figured I’d make it look like a biplane.”

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As the rain begins to fall and the skies thicken, Cavalco, the farrier, jockey, and factotum of the Old Spanish Stable, waits patiently while the pig family takes the last bites of the weeds behind the stable. The padrone of the stable and sheriff of New Toulouse, Pazzo Pestana, hoped his pigs would help abate the weed problem. (Photo credit: Pazzo Pestana.)

The grand opening of Gamaliel’s Vintage Toys & Dolls is delayed by troubling weather, which didn’t stop Mr. Gamaliel from composing verse. (Photo credit: Nikita Weymann.)

It was a busy extended weekend with the twin holidays of Midsummer, the longest day of the year, and St. John’s Eve, New Toulouse’s biggest fete of the year.
Midsummer and all of its mischief were welcomed in this year by a Midsummer Night’s Scream masquerade ball. The ball was organized by Miz Arijah Ankh Khalid-Zyn and yours truly, and the theme this year was “Vampires and Fairies,” which pretty much meant all magical creatures were welcome.

New Toulouse turned out in its dark and glimmering finery and tore it up with DJ Gamaliel of Dance With the Dead Radio, who was generous enough to have the revelers donate to the Gumbo Society instead of his own coffers by way of traditional tips.

Miz Ari draped New Toulouse’s Spiegel Hall in black and green regalia and provided delicious traditional food. She included the recipe for each dish, so one could recreate the enchanted morsels easily in one’s own Unseelie-free kitchen. I provided the booze and had some O-negative on hand for the translucent and thirsty vamps who showed up. We didn’t want them eating the fae, after all.

Nearly L$2,500 was raised for the Gumbo Society, making Gumbo, the society’s mascot, one happy donkey.

St. John’s Eve, organized by Miss Maggie Hawksby and Miss Tilda Brown, was also a huge success.

The bayou was all dressed up in tradition so powerful that many of the mighty loa slipped into corporeal splendor to dance with the partiers. Baron Samedi, Papa Legba, and Mama Oshun were among the divine attendees, and they mixed it up famously with the many residents of New Toulouse, as everyone danced to the splendid spinning of Holocluck Henly and his psychedelic shades.

Dancing around the bonfire to goatskin drums and zydeco beats was a glorious way to celebrate this most sacred night, and while not present in the flesh, the very essence of Marie Laveau was there leading the revelry and celebrating with her beloved loa.

The night sky was resplendent as the merrymakers spun beneath the celestial umbrella.

For more images of both events, visit Miss Maggie’s photo albums:

• Midsummer Night’s Scream
• St. John’s Eve Celebration

It is safe to say that summer and all of its mischief are well and truly here. Enjoy the season!

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Salome Starsmith is the owner and manager of the Severed Head pub in New Toulouse and lives on the bayou in a tall, stilted house with her dog Edouard, hoping zombies cannot climb stairs.

The mysterious radio transmissions have been solved, thanks to the agile mind of Mr. DJ Gamaliel, who received the mayor’s L$2,500 reward and shared his method.

First I gathered the full code published in the paper and wrote it down, broken up by the breaks. I figured it would be a hard nut to crack, but trust me, there is nothing too hard to crack. I’m from Chicago, after all, and I have seen it all. First I thought it was weather code—five letters, two of which were repeated, so my first thought was FLOOD, but nothing after that made sense. I even tried converting it to a cryptogram in letter form, seeing if there were any leads. But again nothing made sense. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
 
I remembered my old friend Bugsy, rest his soul, who was a great guy that got a bad rap helping out his local community. A real “people person” Bugsy was. But I remembered something he showed me. We were in Tennessee, at a joint called High Point, heading to Chicago from Florida, where we … well, that’s not important, and I am getting off topic now. But I remembered him showing me a piece of paper with numbers on it. But it wasn’t like the numbers from the paper; these numbers were split in twos.
 
So where you had 1, 40, 50, 50, 4, using Bugsy’s method it became 14, 05, 05, 04. So I broke it up like that and got a string of two-digit numbers. First I assigned the two-digit numbers to letters, like this: 01=A, 02=B, 03=C, all the way to 25=Y and 26=Z.
 
Then you have your string that you need to break down. First 1, 40, 50, 50, 4, which becomes 14, 05, 05, 04, which translates to the word NEED, using the above cipher.
 
I did this with the rest of the numbers and got NEED ASSISTANCE, PLEASE HELP for the first string of numbers. For the second I got ATTEMPT NO LANDING HERE. Probably some military pilot code or something that came in on the crystal set. Those wires do cross. Amazing how that works too. Just amazing.

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DJ Gamaliel is the husband of Shotgun Row’s newest resident, Arijah Ankh Khalid-Zyn. He is no stranger to radio.