...and this is how it ends for another year...

...so you end a literary festival with a party (free to the public, of course, with free food and free drink and free readings and free laughs, all those things that still flow like water in New Orleans, even after Katrina) in a building where the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803, and you fill it with a few dozen authors who range from a former Bourbon Street stripper to a distinguished professor and winner of an O.Henry award, all of whom contributed to an anthology with 110 contributors, and all of whom attempted to summarize Louisiana in the space of a single page.

Meanwhile, down the street, dozens of crazy people have gathered in the street below a balcony of America's oldest apartment building, all shouting "STAAAANLEY!" in their best Streetcar Named Desire impressions, hoping to win a prize or at least a few seconds of airtime on the evening news, and one of the distinguished litterateurs from the upstairs party notes, "New Orleans is a place where you can have good sex," and a seventyish gentleman passing by stops to correct her sternly: "Good sex? No--GREAT sex."

And, a few steps away, the preliminary winners from the screaming contest are herded into the courtyard of an 87-year-old theater, where the Festival president Peggy Scott Laborde is giving them all last-minute instructions or advice or just passing the time of day, while a giant sheet cake and hundreds of cups of sweet tea are being handed out at a table by some exhausted and stressed-out Festival volunteers and assistants, who are still managing to smile despite a four-day weekend of sweat, humidity, logistical high-wire acts, and thousands of book fans in various states of decorum, intelligence, and inebriation.

And inside the theater, a group has gathered, including the actor Jeremy Lawrence (who plays Tennessee Williams) and the memoirist, essayist, journalist, and foodie Calvin Trillin, who are dragooned into judging the finalists, which include everything from a modern Stanley who tries to call Stella on his cellphone to a generously proportioned man who gets the crowd screaming by ripping his T-shirt and exposing his ample belly. And while the judges total up their ballots, yet another pair of actors takes the stage and enacts an entire four-minute "Tennessee" play, with Stanley stuck on the roof of his tenement in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while his wife paddles away in a rowboat.

And then a winner is crowned, and the dates of next year's Festival are being yelled from the stage (not by Stanley Kowalski), and I'm too tired to get 'em straight, and it really is over, except for word of an impromptu dinner gathering at Galatoire's and word of a few people gathering later in the evening at a sketchy bar at the other end of the French Quarter...