Ruthie, the duck lady

I had intended to post this a while back, when I was writing about characters in the French Quarter but somehow, Ruthie slipped away from me. Ruthie was prowling the streets of the quarter when I was in my teens and I was prowling the same streets - but for a very different reason.

A fixture on the streets since the ‘40s, Ruthie came to epitomize the unregimented, unconventional and permissive side of Vieux Carre culture, the kind of insouciant charm that has seduced thousands over the years and burned, in those who paid attention, a memory of street life unlike anywhere else in America, maybe the world.

With her trademark roller skates and legions of pet ducks – often sitting on bar stools next to her – Ruthie was what the Quarter’s street life was all about. She was brash, with a sailor’s tongue. Colorful. Congenial and snakebite mean, sometimes at the same time. She lived on a diet of Budeweiser and Kools. She wore a wedding dress just for the hell of it and danced and flirted and cussed in French Quarter barrooms until she was eighty-sixed, which was often.

I remember Ruthie skating up to me and nearly demanding a cigarette. I'd seen how she would curse out others who failed to come up with the cigarette and I wanted to avoid that experience.

Those were my formative years.