I can’t help but mention a great chance meeting today on Royal Street. I was lucky enough to work for Emily Post’s family for a few years, and while I was their publicist, I helped set up a shoot for Spirit (Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine), whose editor had decided to write a piece about Anna Post. Anna is one of Emily’s great-great-granddaughters, an author and spokesperson for The Emily Post Institute, and, incidentally, my girlfriend. (She wasn’t then, but that doesn’t matter.) The angle was etiquette in these modern times and the hook was that, hey, there’s a woman in her late 20s carrying on the tradition of writing about and advising people on how etiquette can help us in our personal and business lives. This, of course, being a time when etiquette seems all but forgotten, like corsets and chaperones.

The magazine hired a guy named Cedric Angeles to make the photos, and from the moment I met him and his girlfriend, Mia Kaplan, at Penny Cluse, a local favorite for breakfast in Burlington, to the last drink at the 1/2 Lounge that night, we had a great time.

This unneccesarily long lead-in is about the fact that they run an art gallery on Royal Street, here in New Orleans. The Ammo Gallery. I had been on their mailing list for several months and thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll stop by when I’m in town.” I had no idea I would be staying a few blocks down the street.

So I stepped in today, just under the circular red sign with white san-serif caps, and after I closed the door, Mia stepped out and said, “Hi…” She didn’t recognize me, of course, but I reminded her and she passed me the phone. It was Cedric. We caught up for a moment, and then Mia and I had a great, long-ranging conversation about art, business, independence, and the fact that Cedric never returns my emails about photos.

They’ve recently shot Kyle McLaughlin in Walla-Walla for one mag, flown to Brazil for another, and Cedric had just returned from Turkey. Great clients. We talked about catalogs, stock photos, all kinds of nerdy photo business talk. The kind of thing I do with my roommate.

Anyway, Anna, Mia claims she’s going to light a fire under Cedric about those photos. If anyone else is reading this, go check out Cedric’s website.