Margot Denman/N7

“I made a cocktail for Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington because when I first moved to New Orleans I got a job at Boucherie uptown and one of my regulars was Hank Staples of the Maple Leaf—such a sweet man. He’d come to the bar and have dinner and write his name on a paper napkin and we’d call them ‘hankies’ [laughs].

- Elsa Hahne

Anyway, he gave them to all of us on the staff so that after our shift we could go dancing and drinking at the Maple Leaf. You presented your ‘hanky’ at the door and the door people let us in for free so we could see some music. Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington played the first night I ever went out and that was the first time I had really seen music like that.

My parents lived here and went to medical school at Tulane. They worked at Charity [Hospital] for a long time, so I heard so many crazy stories about New Orleans growing up in Portland, Oregon. They were working at Charity in the ’80s, so I heard some crazy shit. We had come down here to visit a few times, but I had this whole idea of New Orleans that was so magical.