Gray day, ahead of snow, but February is over. It's March, Women's History Month. Let's kick it up with three feisty ladies -- and bid farewell to one of them. .

Antoinetre straightened out Ernie K-Doe (pronounced KAY-doe) and, after the singer of "Mother-In_Law" died in 2001, kept a mannequin of him in her New Orleans bar, which she defended in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a shotgun. She died Tuesday, Mardi Gras. The mannequin rode in her funeral procession.

The Times' William Grimes does her proud: Antoinette K-Doe, 66, Who Turned Club Into Shrine to Husband, Dies

From nola.com:

· Antoinette K-Doe dies on Mardi Gras at 66

· Antoinette K-Doe's funeral was an appropriately colorful farewell

 

Video:

· Ernie K-Doe Mother-In-Law Lounge, Claiborne Street, New Orleans

· Antoinette K-Doe funeral Feb 28, 2009 New Orleans

· The Northside Skulls lead the crowd in tribute to Antoinette at the Backstreet Cultural Museum, 1116 St. Claude, New Orleans.

· Ernie K-Doe at his Mother-in-Law Lounge with The Egg Yolk Jubilee. April 27th 2001

 

Poet back from suburbia: Literary Kicks : One Writer's Life (or, Call Me, Andy), by Eleanor Lerman at Literary Kicks.

The intro reads,

A literary sensation and National Book Award nominee at age 21, Eleanor Lerman has paid her dues, been there and back, and has now published a new book of short stories. Here's her story.

And what could she have been but a writer, given this first sentence?

Person wanted to sweep up in harpsichord factory. That was the ad in the Village Voice that I answered in 1970 when I was eighteen years old and looking for a job so I could support myself in the city, where I was headed to join the revolution. It also happens to be the first line in Civilization," a story in my new collection of short stories, The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press). The story is fiction, but the ad, the job -- and the way they both changed my life -- are still the touchstones I go back to again and again whenever someone asks, "What made you want to be a writer?"

It was actually reading Leonard Cohen that made me think I could write poetry...

Reading the latest Leonard Cohen poem (A Street) in the New Yorker could lead anyone to that conclusion, which is part of the humor behind this "Everything I've been through got me to here" ramble.

 

You knew there'd be "stuff":

 

 Jeff Minton for The New York Times
Lucinda Williams at home.

 

Lucinda Williams shows up in the Domains section of the New York Times in a facts-and-quotes list called Country House.  Elsewhere, but dropped at that link, there's indication of an intro: "the acclaimed singer and songwriter whose music blends rock, folk and country... lives in a 2,600-square-foot 1950s Modernist house in Los Angeles."

The photo above was taken inside her Studio City digs. What's lacking online is a photo of the outside, which turns up at Virtual Globetrotting.

If you click the photo you'll see the neighborhood. Big houses, but surprisingly close together.

There's one more, Putting a Bolder Face on Google. I'm not really sure Marissa Mayer belongs in this group. From that story,

"You have to try and make words less human and more a piece of the machinery." -- Marissa Mayer