Wow-Great story telling, very informative, feel like you were there!

Couldn't have told it any better and I was there with the band as the
photographer. Overwhelming, unbelievable destruction, almost like being in the twilight zone! Words can barely describe the devastation, so complete-mile after mile, it must have been horrific for those that
were caught in Katrina's fury. Our trip was an eye opener, the region
will need years to rebuild, to get back to some sort of normalcy, God
bless those that remain and to those that yearn to return to what they
once called home. Our mission of bringing hope and good will to those
in need was a success, not only for the people we reached out to, but
for all the musicians and volunteers that made it all possible. What an
incredible journey-I know it changed me some how. When you THINK you are having a problem, remember the devastated people of the gulf region, they do have a problem, one that will take years to fix.
Thank you Tim and Holiday Express for letting me be part of the journey.
Scott Longfield

This was another wonderful season for HolEx and an incredible one for me to experience...

This was another wonderful season for HolEx and an incredible one for me to experience. I was lucky enough to go to the Gulf and Tim has already described so much of what we saw. I'll add a few of my thoughts. As a volunteer, one of our goals was to find gifts to use in our client "raffles." We talked ahead of time and agreed that portable electronics that run on batteries would be the best since many people still don't have electricity. We set out for Sam's Club in New Orleans thinking of radios, walkmen, iPods and the like. We quickly found out that there were none to be had. They had been bought out weeks ago by the storm's survivors.

At Xavier Prep High School, I spoke to an older woman who was a resident of New Orleans. She told me that when she heard Katrina was coming she packed up some things and went to stay with cousins in Lake Charles. Her home was destroyed, but she was safe. Then came Rita, which devastated Lake Charles. She got out safely again and went to stay with family in Illinois. When we spoke, she had moved back to N.O. about 3 weeks earlier. She was put up in a hotel with many of the other displaced persons. She had desperately been seeking an apartment, but the waiting lists were literally 800 people long! She started to smile a bit and told me, "Hey, this will be the only time in my life I get to stay in a hotel in the French Quarter." Her resiliency was amazing. Turns out she was a former teacher at the school and her daughter teaches at one of the other Catholic schools in the area. She was just happy the school would be re-opening in the next few days.

There was 5-year-old David who sang with us at the Joe Henry show. He must have asked me 5 times if he could go sit on Santa's lap again and get another present. I got my Frosty initiation and survived so many children clinging to my legs that I literally could not move - thank you elves for helping me. The eerie nighttime ride along the gulf from Pass Christian, MS to the NCBC in Gulfport. And the military personnel...so young (or maybe I am just so old). They told me about hoping to "get home to the folks in Tennessee" or "seeing my newborn baby after Christmas." They work long hard days trying to rebuild the area and really needed the party we provided. They were wonderful. And I will forever be left with the sight of the last soldier marching out of the auditorium, doing his drills with his unit and carrying the microwave oven he won in our raffle on his shoulder the whole time. Priceless.

There was so much more, but I'll shut up now and leave room for everyone else. Thanks to all.

LYNNE BROZA

Holiday Express in the Gulf 2005

Pass Christian, Mississippi
photo © Scott Longfield

The first inkling we had that conditions on the ground were much worse than we had been led to believe came upon our approach to the runway at New Orleans Airport. As our plane banked, first left then right, we could see thousands of brightly colored royal blue rooftops everywhere we looked. It took only a moment to realize that these were not roofs, but tarps covering virtually every structure that was standing..

We were greeted at the airport by Terry Singleton, our bus driver, whose family had lost their home. He would become our friendly and infomative tour guide over the next five days but, for now, he just took us to our hotel. Only a few rooms were ready as the hotel didn’t have enough housekeepers available to clean and prepare the rooms for the next guests. We came to find out that the occupants of the hotel were a mixture of relief workers, displaced citizens, and business people and now, Holiday Express. Conditions in the hotel reflected those of the area in general in that services were minimal, the restaurants were closed, and reconstruction, although moving slowly, had begun. One of our members, Mark Murphy, would awaken later that first night to a loud altercation in the hallway outside of his room that left some walls damaged.

We arrived at our first event that Monday afternoon at the Marriott Hotel in downtown New Orleans to find the party already underway. Big Joe Henry of 101.5 Radio in New Jersey had brought his toy caravan to town and had set up his Santa Village with Big Joe himself as Santa. He looked incredible (and incredulous) as a long line of children waited anxiously to sit on Santa’s lap. The band started up, and soon, despite the unusual location, it was just another Holiday express event.. St. Michael’s School for Disabled Children was in attendance and they gathered in front of the band doing their best to dance and sing along to the happy strains of candles burning low It was a great start.

About 10 days before the departure for the Gulf, an Alenhurst resident named Joe Coyne had come to see Tim and the Shirleys at McLoone's in Sea Bright. Upon hearing about the impending trip, he disclosed that he was heading up salvage operations in the Big Easy and would the group be willing to do something for those folks ? Well, of course, we would. So, early Monday evening, Holiday Express set up again at the nearby Loew’s Hotel and performed for about 70 Coast Guard and FEMA workers who thoroughly enjoyed themselves. It had been a long day.

Tuesday brought the first disappointment of the trip. The schedule had Holiday Express traveling to Baton Rouge to meet up with Big Joe again at a local school but a last minute phone call disclosed that the event location was too small for us . In a way, this turned out to be a fortuitous development. We were about to board the bus when the news came and our driver, Terry, volunteered to take the group on a tour of the devastation in the 9th Ward. It’s safe to say that noone expected the extent of the destruction they were about to witness. More than one person had the same thought..Hiroshima. That bus ride put everything in context for the remainder of the trip.

In the meantime, the support staff had been up early trying to find stores able to help us stock up our own necessities like water as well as to purchase snacks and raffle prizes for our upcoming events. Their work became nothing short of heroic as the week unfolded. With the bus fully loaded we started our 3 hour tip to Lake Charles in SW Louisiana. This area had been more impacted by Hurricane Rita than Katrina and many citizens felt that they had been largely overlooked by relief efforts because of that. Amy Broza had been the primary organizer along with the Lake Charles Mayor's Office and the closer we got to Lake Charles the more she worried that no one would be there. She needn't have.

We had prepared for the 350 or so people that were expected, all of them displaced hurricane victims, many of them with disabled children. Well, when the number went over 700, chaos – good chaos – ensued. The elves danced, the Grinch and Frosty got mugged, children sang, raffle gifts were given out , and the "Twelve Days" were celebrated. It was great. And so was the happy busride home.

Wednesday dawned sunny and warm in New Orleans and we headed downtown to a noontime concert at Woldenberg Park in the shadow of the cruise ships being used to house municipal workers who had lost their homes. The small turnout taught us another lesson: the only people still there are working. There are no tourists, very few residents. Everyone else is gone.

Wednesday evening provided one of those Holiday Express "moments" that are so memorable for all of us. While we were preparing for the trip we had been directed to a Catholic priest, Father John O’Halloran, Red Bank Catholic ’56, who has been practicing his ministry on the streets of New Orleans for over 40 years. He along with Sister Eileen Sullivan, principal of Xavier Prep School, put together a small party for the residents of their area and the wonderful people helping them every day, often without basic necessities such as electricity and clean water. The warm connection among all of us was undeniable and left everyone feeling wonderful.

Thursday found us headed to Mississippi for our final two events. The further we drove, the more surreal the landscape became ; houses blown off of their foundations, shrimp boats miles away from water, cars on rooftops and in trees, entire towns wiped out. We even had to turn around at one point because Terry didn’t know a bridge had been knocked out of service on one roadway. Waiting for us at the end of this journey was the small town of Pass Christian, “ground zero” to everyone who knew of it. Pass Christian had been a rather upscale Gulf Coast waterfront community before Katrina virtually eliminated it. Its prior population of several thousand was down to about 50 or so plus the military and civilian contractors, many of them bivouacked in a small tent village just off the former town center. Now, the mayor has a trailer for his office and an even smaller trailer acts as a kind of PX dispensing small items like soda, candy, chips, and beer to the workers who straggle in over the course of the afternoon.

Holiday Express set up its show on the sand a few hundred feet from the Gulf and began to play. The joyful sounds soon began to attract more and more people. The mayor arrived, a few residents wandered over, and some workmen came by as their workday ended. We had to end by sundown since there was no electricity and , therefore, no street lights. A single decorated tree was over to our left , the irony of its being to only thing green we had seen in miles not being lost on anyone. Soon, Layonne Holmes began to sing the plaintive "One Little Christmas Tree".. How she was able to sing so beautifully through the tears we'll never know, but the moment was priceless and the effect it had on all in attendance unforgettable. It was particularly difficult to say good-bye to town manager Joe Piernas and Pass Christian as darkness settled over the Gulf.

We still had one show remaining but everyone, I'm sure, felt that it would be anticlimactic after our experience at "The Pass". Little did we know what awaited us. Our volunteer, Ron Bruer, had arranged for Holiday Express to visit the Naval Consruction Battalion Center in nearby Gulfport, Missisippi and we arrived at the heavily guarded site some 45 minutes later.

Our tech crew set up in a theatre that had had its stage swept away by the storm, which left us playing on the floor to an audience of hundreds of mostly young, very young, military men and women. Although it is a naval base (home to the "Seabees"), there were members of all the armed forces in attendance: Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines. They had had a particularly tough time of it recently since, not only had ten of their ranks been killed in Iraq , but they also had been pressed into post-Katrina emergency service virtually around the clock assisting their devastated neighbors.. To make matters worse, all the personnel who lived off the base had also lost their homes to the storm.

So, there we all were. They didn’t know what to expect from us and we certainly didn’t know what to expect from them. Well, what ensued over the next 2 hours was arguably the most raucous Holiday Express event ever. The rendition of "12 Days" alone had to have set some sort of decibel record and when the "Leading Ladies", Mary D'Arcy and her two Broadway star friends, Karen Parks and Teri Gibb , hit the stage you would have thought we had all gone back in time and Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield, were entertaining the troops. Amy Broza followed that with her usual stirring rendition Of "God Bless America" and with the "Star Spangled Banner", Navy and Army Hymns to follow, the spirit in the room was soaring. Regardless of anyone in the room’s opinion of the war in Iraq and, perhaps, the military in general, our collective hearts went out to these young people, far from the comfort of their homes and families, most definitely in harm’s way , trying in some way, to celebrate the holiday season.

We learned a lot on our tip to the Gulf. The people there are afraid they will be soon forgotten, the devastation is much more complete and widespread than we ever knew. And, perhaps the worst of all, most of them live in what seems to them a permanent limbo where they just don't know what will happen next. It’s shocking.

Tim

The 2005 Season..

50 events in 30 days
to spread hope and cheer
New Jersey & New York
Louisiana & Mississippi
men, women & children
working together

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