HOW’S THIS FOR BARBARISM?

Susan Feeney Fleet, trumpet player and feminist extraordinaire, lives in Metairie, La., in an apartment complex owned by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which is about to evict her and all her neighbors, despite what she terms “livable” conditions and only minor flood damage.
She saw yesterday’s post and wrote: “I am expecting an eviction notice, with 30 days to get out. Since there are almost no apartments available here, I have no idea where I will go. Nice Christian concept at work here, put your residents out on the street. … How’s that for a ‘barbarism’ story?”
Fleet, whose gorgeous playing is recorded on “Baroque Treasures for Trumpet and Organ” with Robert Train Adams, moved to New Orleans in July, 2001, from Cambridge, Mass., where we first met her. At the time she was an assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. (Formerly former principal trumpet in the Rhode Island Opera and Providence Chamber orchestras, she also taught at Brown and the University of Massachusetts.)
Before Katrina, in March, she wrote us from New Orleans: “Very happy, keeping busy … still tooting my trumpet and sticking up for women musicians.” In July, her musical research prompted the New Orleans Times-Picayune to write “A band of their own,” about an eight-piece all-women group called “The Original Shades of Blue,” which played from roughly 1929 to the mid-1930s.
The last time we wrote about a musician displaced by Katrina — violinist Samuel Thompson — he became a cause célèbre. Susan isn’t likely to, not at this stage of the Katrina catastrophe, but we can hope.
— Tireless Staff of Thousands

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