Screen Time IRL

It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Most animal species go through a juvenile developmental stage where they play with each other. Think, puppies and kittens.

Human beings are different. We don’t grow out of playing. We come up with myriad ways for people of all ages to enjoy themselves.

Here in New Orleans there’s a whole industry devoted to creating fun things for adults to do. Sometimes it’s in the guise of work as part of a convention, and other times it’s simply, well, fun.

The industry is called the Event Production business. Sometimes known as Party Planning. As you’ll know from planning your own parties - from birthdays to Bacchus - organizing a successful fun gathering is a serious business. Like every type of business, it evolves. One of the newest local evolutions is a company called Raising Hell Events.

Raising Hell started life in 2022 and is responsible for giving birth to events like Asking For A Friend – a series of networking get-togethers at various locations aimed at letting screen-centric young adults find friends in real life; Swiftie Fest – a massively popular Taylor Swift dance party; and the Y2K Sleepover Series at The Broad Theater – a nostalgic look back at films you might have watched if you were at a sleepover in the early 2000’s.

This is not your father’s event production company. It’s not even your big brother’s. Raising Hell Productions is the creation of Founder and Creative Director Julia DeLois.

When we humans are not playing, we watch other people play. We watch them play sports. And we watch them play musical instruments. We’re so enthusiastic about watching people play music that when we can’t get to see them play live, we watch them on a screen.

When we first discovered this pastime could be a mass market business back in the 1980’s, Music Television – or MTV as it called itself – became a massive worldwide sensation. Today it’s all over for MTV, but memorializing music on film, and on places like YouTube and TikTok, is still a sizeable segment of the entertainment industry.

Locally, a New Orleans-based content creation company called Lavoi Creative made a movie called Roots of Fire, about current Cajun music and musicians, that has won all kinds of awards. They also produce a wide range of other film and video content, including the TV show My Amazing Cheap Date: New Orleans. And they have a branch office in San Francisco where they make filmed content for Google, Pandora, Netflix, Bank of America, and many more companies with household names.

The co-founder of Lavoi Creative, along with his wife Abby, is Jeremey Lavoi.

People often talk nostalgically about how things were better “back in the day.” But even a diehard curmudgeon would have to admit that life is twice as much fun today. That’s because we now have two ways to entertain ourselves: the old-fashioned way – in real life - and the 21st Century way - on a screen.

Whichever way you prefer, having fun and being entertained is a serious business. That’s why we have a multi-billion-dollar industry, called, simply, “the entertainment industry.” Here in New Orleans, Julia DeLois is bringing us new and innovative ways to entertain ourselves in the real world, and Jeremey Lavoi is creating filmed entertainment that runs the gamut from intellectually informative to frivolous fun.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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