Me, that's who.
I was born a "Charles", but I've been "Chuck" since infancy, as
my parents figured that one Charlie in the house was enough. These days
the legal monicker in my driver's license says Charles Eamon
Taggart. My parents are Pat and Charlie Taggart of New Orleans,
Louisiana. They were both from the old Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood now
known as Bywater, but currently they live in the Upper Ninth Ward in the
dreaded New Orleans East. (Okay, sue me ... I'm not a fan of suburbia.)
They did a good job and raised a good kid (look how fabulously I've turned
out!). I also have two sisters: Marie, age 31, an intensive-care nurse; and
Melissa, age 27, a 1997 graduate (Woohoo! She graduated!!) of the
University of Southwestern Louisiana
in Lafayette, and who became Melissa Willmon on November 15, 1997 (my
brother-in-law Jeff is a great guy).
Other than the sibs, the only immediate
family members have been animals -- Sparky, a toy fox terrier, back
when I was a kid, and Scotty, an Irish setter who had the same color hair
as Melissa. Both dogs mysteriously disappeared after we had had them for
several years. I think they were abducted by aliens. Or rednecks, or
something like that. Same thing. I also had two cats out here in L.A.
-- Space Cat, and Vic. They both got squashed by cars, thanks to their
extremely ill-advised habits of cleaning themselves while sitting in the
middle of the street. Heed this, folks -- if you're going to obliviously
lick yourself, do it on the sidewalk, or the sofa, or some place like
that. Jeez ... I guess I don't have very good luck with pets.
I was born at 4:18 a.m. on November 11, 1961 (you do the math), at Sharp Memorial Hospital
in San Diego, California, while my dad was stationed there as a Navy
dentist. When I was about 7 months old, I realized that my parents had
been deceiving me all along -- I was not in New Orleans, but in fact, in
southern California. A clever ruse on their part, I thought at the
time, but they couldn't fool me for long. I was appalled. I immediately
demanded to be taken back to New Orleans, as I knew without question
that that was where I belonged. Fortunately, this demand coincided with
my dad's discharge from the Navy, and I didn't have to get nasty with
Dad's C.O. (luckily for him; I'd have eaten him for lunch).
Despite the unfortunate set of circumstances that resulted in my being
born in San Diego, of all places, instead of my beloved
New Orleans (okay, San Diego's actually a
really nice city, albeit a tad dull), I most certainly consider myself a native New
Orleanian, and a native Louisianian,
and from da Ninth Ward, having spent a lot of time at my grandparents'
house back in da ol' neighbahood in da Lowuh Nint' Ward. We lived
in da Uppuh Nint' Ward, in New Orleans East, but that area is, to me,
devoid of the soul and character that is New Orleans. I'm out there
a few times a year when I go back home to visit da family, and nowadays
it's mostly a decaying, depressing, dull little splat of suburbia (Mom and
Dad have a nice house, though.) But my little Yat soul feels much more of a
connection with da ol' neighborhood where my grandparents lived, and
where my mom and uncles grew up. Dat's neighbahood's
Bywater, bra ... as seen below.
My maternal grandparents, Joe and Dot Luquet, ran a little neighborhood
corner grocery store called Niedermeier's (after Granny's father, who
first opened it), on the corner of Mazant and Royal Streets in the
Bywater neighborhood. It was a tiny place, but it
served its little working-class community well, and my grandparents often seemed to be
regarded as the matriarch and patriarch of the neighborhood; I remember
being told once, for instance, that occasionally neighborhood women
would tell them they were expecting, before they would tell their
husbands! They worked their fingers to the bone and I think most of the
other members of my family despised the place, but I thought the grocery
to be a magical, fascinating place, mostly because of the incredibly
strange and motley crowd of people who would come in there. The place
had nothing if not local color. Perhaps I'll write more about the place
later on ...
Anyway, November 11th (a national holiday, no less, and also the
birthdays of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Thomas à Becket, Fëdor Dostoevsky,
Daniel Ortega, Leonardo DiCaprio and the King of Bhutan) will be upon you
before you know it, so be prepared.
I managed to
survive a lifetime of Catholic education. I had years of Saturday catechism
classes (no cartoons, waaaah!) while I was at two private elementary schools,
as the local parochial school was not yet up to snuff, academically.
The first was an utterly horrid little private school run by a woman
whom I remember primarily as a sadist -- The Ferncrest School in Gentilly
(now mercifully torn down and out of business); as soon as my parents realized
what was going on they yanked me out of that place. The other, Clifton L. Ganus School,
is also gone. I remember some good teachers and good kids (and some rotten apples
in both), and it was a better experience than Ferncrest. Terribly conservative,
but a parochial school wouldn't have been any less so.
Eighth grade through senior year
was at Holy Cross High School, down in da Lowuh Ninth Ward on the Mississippi River. It was sort of a family
tradition, as my uncles Joe and Mike had both gone there. I
very nearly went to Jesuit High School in Mid-City, Holy Cross'
arch-rival. It's actually quite a good school, but I couldn't quite
perfect the "Jesuit smirk" (as my old friend and Jesuit grad
Peter Simoneaux calls it) -- that, plus the mild scandal it might have
caused in my family had I attended the arch-rival school led me to
Holy Cross ...
College took me to Loyola University in
New Orleans, the alma mater of both my parents. I was egregiously lied
to by Loyola's recruiter (thank you, S*z*nn* M. T*pp*n*) when I was in high
school, who led me to believe that Loyola had "one of the finest filmmaking
programs in the South." (*Guffaw!*) I may elaborate on that later,
but for now, let's say that at the end of my sophomore year they guillotined what
little fledgling program they did have.
What I did get at Loyola, though, was a rather fine undergraduate
liberal arts education; the Jesuits are pretty good at that, after all.
My Communications degree itself might have been fairly worthless as a
major, but I minored in English, and had almost enough credits for
minors in psychology and history.
Gradual school was a blast. Loyola Marymount
had a great film program, and I had a wonderful time there. I did a lot
of good work, made lifelong friends, and developed a passion for the art
of film that drove me to many sleepless nights of agonizing but rewarding
work. Unfortunately, the actual film industry managed to kill that off
in not too many years ...
Shall we move on? Here's a bit on where I live now.
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Chuck Taggart
(e-mail chuck)
Me, that's who.