Stories Span Gulf South Culture, Food and Travel

New Orleans pianist Jon Cleary has built a career blending jazz, blues, funk and soul, while a Shreveport play recounts how five local beauticians used a beauty shop to organize voter registration and civic engagement during the Civil Rights Movement. New Orleans Nightmare offers a theatrical haunted-house experience in the former House of Shock. A travel feature highlights north Louisiana’s Shreveport music, food, arts and history, as well as nearby wildlife refuges and nature trails. Houston’s Zydeco Louisiana Diner, opened in 1988 by Louisiana native Martin Venable, serves family-inspired Cajun dishes on a changing menu rooted in his Acadia Parish upbringing. Mississippi’s Witch Dance recreation area along the Natchez Trace offers forest trails and picnic spots alongside a local legend that witches’ dancing left patches where grass cannot grow. The Baton Rouge Clinic is marking 80 years of serving the Capital Region; founded in 1946 as a small physician group, it has grown into a multispecialty practice.