09/02/2025
(Pictured Above: Jim Monaghan) (Not Pictured: Alana, Tierney, Scott, Bryan, Pablo, Gunny, Michael, Hal, Fang, and at least 100 other people that should be mentioned)
Any of the people above would be a better person to write about 20 years ago. I wasn’t here when the storm hit. I was watching from a distance safe in my apartment in Las Vegas with my girlfriend. We had met in New Orleans four years earlier and we had moved to Vegas to pursue career opportunities. For two days I tried to pressure my sister Tierney to leave. She said she was staying. As the images started to come across the screen early that morning from the safety of the high rise apartment it was apparent everything had changed.
“Everything” is a bland way of saying everyone. We all changed. I’m posting the pic of my father Jim because he is the front row seat I have to seeing all the highs and lows. He decided to stay because when he took over the bar after my grandpa died we had the reputation of being a place people could come after a storm or in a lot of cases even riding out a storm. “It’s what we do” type of stoic response as I begged him to close up and fly out to visit me.
But the change that day was immediate. And the change over the last twenty years has been drastic. Everyone changed 20 years ago. Even if you never lived in New Orleans. Just seeing what happened on the nonstop news changed people’s perception of just how quickly their government can disappear and be unable to “help”.
The lost lives. The lost memories. The total fracture of community as families and neighbors were shuffled and shipped far and wide.
All those people I mentioned above had a vital role in helping keep the doors of Molly’s open during all of it. What I didn’t understand until I was able to get here not long after the storm had cleared out is that what we were doing was trying to keep our promise to the community. Be the place you could come and hear the news, or check to see if we’d “seen such and such” or heard when they might get power on in areas.
(Continued in comments)
