The Deep South's voluptuous, ensnaring Queen is a contrary, self-absorbed, seasoned survivor. In the face of war, epidemics, fires, and floods of Biblical proportions, she shakes the blood and muck, ashes and black mold off her skirts in preparation for the ball. She won't be rushed, however. She will dance when she's ready. And you can forget making her dance to your tune. She makes her own music, moves to her own beat.

This sense of her own rhythm has proved, in some instances, the salvation of New Orleans.

During my 40 years in the Big Easy, I have seen carpetbaggers waltz in, full of Music Man swagger, high-stepping con-artistry, and flim-flam fanning of plans to fleece the city, to bulldoze her heritage and turn a grand courtesan into a cookie cutter's thoroughly modern, boring Millie, a soul-destroying Orwellian Atlanta-Dallas-Houston nightmare of concrete sameness. Then, after frantic antics in pursuit of La Belle Dame, they throw up their hands and depart dramatically, frustrated by failure to get New Orleans on the dance floor fast, to get beyond the courting to the coupling , before options and lines of credit ran out.

I love this slow dancing, when it keeps that sly old wolf "progress" away from the door.

Some bad ideas New Orleans talked to death:

—Urban renewal snuck up on New Orleans and caught her asleep at the switches. She was on the verge of being totally destroyed by insensitive, untalented modernists when she woke up and put on the brakes. But, even though she staved off total annihilation of her architectural personality and colorful neighborhoods, these modernists already had created possibly the ugliest city hall complex in America. A chunk of one of the city's most important historic districts, Treme, immediately adjacent to the French Quarter on the Rampart Street side, had been bulldozed to make way for the Performing Arts Center and a park, eventually named Louis Armstrong Park as a sop to the Afro-American residents of Treme , whose neighborhood had been wrecked and many families displaced. The Claiborne Avenue corridor which runs through the city East to West, on the East side of Canal Street had been a stable family neighborhood of mostly Afro-American homeowners with lovely, ancient oak trees lining the entire corridor, all bulldozed to make way for I-10 by the time New Orleans started talking her way out of urban renewal.

—An expressway along the Mississippi River, which would have destroyed the river access and enjoyment of the riverfront for the city's most historic districts, including the French Quarter, with hideous concrete barriers. This expressway would have ruined the quality of life in these areas with automobile traffic polluting the air with fumes and noise.

—A sound and light show in Jackson Square, the single most historic location in the city, which would have put New Orleans one step closer to the Disneyland visions still harbored by some.

It's true that New Orleans does from time to time recognize bad ideas and talk them to death over long, excellent lunches, usually paid for by developers, but, then, she has a tendency to talk everything to death.

The world's fair, a good idea when it first came up back in the 60s, was talked into a coma over a period of 20 years. By the time the fair finally opened, the whole idea of world fairs was passé. No one came. The fair became just an expensive party for New Orleanians, lots of fun for us but no bonus for the economy. Developer visions of overnight wealth from converting warehouses to luxury condos, which would be purchased by rich people coming to the world's fair, disappeared into the pipe dreams of lost opportunity. Only now, two decades after the fair, is the Warehouse District beginning to show small signs that it may eventually become a vibrant neighborhood full of street life and music and comfort food and conveniences such as bakeries, tailors, dry cleaning establishments, pharmacies. Sadly, the post-Katrina housing shortage may be providing the boost that the fair did not.

Ditto, the Aquarium. While one candidate for mayor gives as a major accomplishment the creation of a "world class aquarium", not only is the end product ugly, designed as it was by a committee to spread the dough and political brownie points, it is pedestrian, especially when compared to an actual world class aquarium, like the one in Monterey. Because there is no real opportunity for human interaction with Aquarium creatures and no opportunity for Aquarium creatures to interact with the natural environment, the facility lacks the ability to produce a lot of repeat visits. It is a boring accoustical nightmare—so noisy you can't wait to get out of it, and , by the time it was up and running, the American Aquarium craze was over. I suspect that if the books are examined closely, one will find that the Aquarium has been a drain on the more important facility, the Audubon Zoo, which is world class.

Gambling is another good example. By the time New Orleans had decided, yes, she might like to have some kind of gambling, after all, the little Mississippi Gulf Coast towns had stolen her thunder, had gambling up and running big time and contributing enormous sums in taxes for Mississippi's public schools. New Orleanians finally approved gambling, many voting for it with the misunderstanding that they were going to get one, glamorous Monaco style gambling palace which would attract high rolling celebrities in gorgeous evening gowns or black tie arriving by limousine to play roulette or 21. What they ended up with, after beating the horse practically to death with yak-yak , was an operation designed strictly to appeal to a target market of leisure-suited senior citizens who arrive by bus, only after losing all of their money on the Gulf Coast, and working joes who shuffle over after work to lose their paychecks at the slots. New Orleans tore down her most original contemporary building (an idea that should have been slow-danced but wasn't) to make way for a casino way out of scale to its surroundings, an elephant's foot jammed into a delicate slipper, decorated like last year's Mardi Gras float.

Carpetbaggers are arriving daily, intent on remaking New Orleans as Las Vegas, Disneyworld, Atlantic City, joined by certain local developers who have demonstrated phenomenally bad taste and total lack of sensitivity to the city's heritage with past projects.

Some candidates for mayor—including the current Mayor who wants to turn the Central Business District into Las Vegas East—and business leaders are ready to throw the essential core of New Orleans to the old wolf and get on with the business of making developers and themselves rich, regardless of the end result.

For those who wish to see New Orleans retain her ethnic diversity, her communal joie de vivre, her architectural and cultural heritage, slow dancing may again prove the best way to save the old girl.

But, in this new period of post-traumatic disorder, the timing has to be perfect because, this time, she needs help to rebuild the important neighborhoods which are home to the people who make New Orleans fine and loveable and rebuild them quickly. If she dances too slow, her good souls wandering in the diaspora may find a rhythm to their liking elsewhere and be lost to her forever.

And the essential core will be gone.