Everybody is happy, happy, happy on Treme. So where was the “Shame, Shame, Shame,” as the episode was so named?
Davis McAlary is recording with friends and associates for his campaign aspirations. Everyone has a bang-up time. Creighton Bernette is plugging along with his new-found YouTube discovery, doing his thing in putting the word out that New Orleans is still in deep, deep trouble. He’s glad-handed by friends at a restaurant when he and his wife Toni enter. Everyone pumps the flesh and smiles and laughs. A Second Line is back in the Treme, and residents come out of the woodwork, displaced or otherwise. Everyone is ecstatic. Antoine Batiste gets an admirer and a brand new trombone. He is mightily pleased. Janette Desautel’s place gets busy … and with a gaggle of top-rated celebrity chefs in tow. She’s on Cloud Nine. This episode has everyone having a grand old time up in the Treme. So, again: Where’s the shame?
And then, just as quickly, things go downhill in the blink of an eye.
Davis celebrates a little too heavily in a local bar after the recording sessions and drops the “N” word, to one patron’s obvious distaste. He’s decked flat out on the floor by a nice roundhouse right, and gets a nice, shiny bruised jaw for opening his pie-hole. The shame for him comes later, when his neighbors find him passed out drunk on the street outside their house. He is dismayed by their graciousness … and when he later returns to his residence, he exhibits a new-found humility. His massive stereo speakers are taken down out of his windows where they’ve been pointed at the street, the menace of the neighborhood. His neighbors have shamed him into rethinking his position as neighborhood ass-hat.
Creigh’s publisher from New York is coming for a visit, and he believes she’s going to want his advance back from his six-years-in-the-making, far from complete book. The money from that advance? Long gone … long gone. He storms out of the room in guilt, knowing full-well his shame will be manifesting itself soon enough.
The dancing in the streets with the freshness of that Second Line celebration? It ends not with the music of celebration hanging in the air, but in gunshots and people screaming. We don’t find out why or who is responsible, but we will in the coming episodes, I’m sure. To break up such a fine party — relief from the depravity that’s eked its way into everyone — is nothing less than a low-down, dirty shame.
Antoine, on a mission, finds his previously absconded trombone in a secondhand shop. Toni Bernette, doing him a favor, heads over to the police department and makes accusations about the police who roughed up Antoine. She is rewarded with not so much an apology as a bribe and a sorry-ass explanation as to what went down … why Antoine’s “bone” ended up where it did. The explanation is shameful. Inexcusable, as a matter of fact.
But the epitome of shame within this episode had to be Davis McAlary’s bastardization of the Smiley Lewis tune “Shame, Shame, Shame.” (Take a listen to the original below.) Davis ripped the innards out of it in using it for his own devices for his political aspirations. While the music was swinging, the lyrics he added were just deplorable. Oh, they’ll be effective for the campaign, and Davis knows the recording will work the people into a tizzy … but that doesn’t make it not shameful in the end.
Nifty episode. Can’t wait to see what Davis and his big mouth get into in the coming weeks.
Clacked by Michael Noble 
on May 11, 2010 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
