Click here to visit the wetlands with Mr. Bill.
After Walt was through, I wandered over to the food line and bought some fine Cajun cooking, and then crossed the lawn to the well-lit in multi-colors music stage where my wife had already joined the audience. The last set of the night was just starting and the Mike Zito Band was up at bat to start things off. Zito, who has a classic, raspy Blues voice, put on one fine performance. He travelled all the way from Texas, by the way, to do this gig. Meanwhile, the band kept transforming as more and more guitarists kept walking onto the stage, greats like C.C. Adcock, John Lisi, Ronnie Fruge, Joe Stark and Tab Benoit. What the evening was now evolving into was the 5th Annual Guitar Showdown, and what a showdown it was, sending the audience, which was now crowding around the stage, into more and more rapture and abandon as each guitarist tried to one-up the previous one with his own solo, keeping everyone clapping, shouting or dancing right on up until the last note of the evening. Then we went back to the hotel and crashed.
The next day, Saturday, we got back to Southdown right after the festival reopened at Noon, and spent a good while shuffling between the music stage and the wetlands education area that encompassed, besides last night's stage, various information tables and displays. (I would digress, occasionally, to the awesome Cajun food lines or the beer stand.) Info tables included a nuts and bolts ecological exhibit run by environmental sciences students from Nicholls State University, a campaign table for Senator Mary Landrieu (politicians from both parties were invited), who has been a strong advocate for wetlands restoration, and of particular interest to me, an info table run by the Gulf Restoration Network (http://healthygulf.org/). I hadn't heard of them before, and was quite impressed with what they're all about. I started talking to one of the representatives, Collin Thomas, about the wetlands, and he sounded authoritative enough that I asked him to do an interview for OpEdNews. Here is what he had to say:
Interview with Collin Thomas, Gulf Restoration Network Spokesman
Mac: I'm down here at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival. There are a lot of environmental groups down here, and I ran into one fellow. What's the name of your organization?
Collin: We're the Gulf Restoration Network.
M: And your name, sir?
C: My name is Collin Thomas.
M: Tell me about your network
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