Cajuns

After 10 glorious days of meandering through southwestern Louisiana bayou country, my husband, Paul, and I are having a bad case of Cajun withdrawal. The symptoms are cravings for crab boil, accordion music and the openhearted hospitality of the easygoing Cajun people. Our addiction began the minute we opened the door to B&C's Cajun Restaurant in this town--just 45 minutes west of New Orleans--and walked over a huge floor painting of an alligator to get to our seats at a long wood table.

To fans and scholars of Cajun music, Amede Ardoin and Adam Fontenot are legendary names, founders of the infectious accordion-based Cajun music that has grown from a regional backwater style to find a worldwide audience. To Wilfred Latour, though, the long-departed Ardoin and Fontenot aren't sketchy chapters in a musicologist's treatise. They were neighbors and family friends, who sat a 7-year-old Latour on their knees and taught him the rudiments of his instrument.

New Mexico State overcame a five-point second-half deficit, made all 16 of its free throws in the last 2:50 and defeated Southwestern Louisiana, 81-73, Sunday during the second round of the NCAA tournament. The game turned in the Aggies' favor after Coach Marty Fletcher of Southwestern Louisiana called a timeout with 5:59 to play. Aggie center Chris Hickman, who scored 18 points and made all 12 of his free throws, used the timeout to deliver a message.

On his way to becoming one of the leading figures in American traditional folk music, it helped that Michael Doucet knew when to absorb everything a teacher could show him, and when to reject a teacher's pronouncements as complete nonsense. Doucet's confrontation with academic nonsense came when he was a freshman at Louisiana State University, enrolled in a survey class in American folk music. Speaking by phone from his restored, 1824-vintage house outside Lafayette, La.

Canray Fontenot is considered one of the modern masters of the traditional French music of Louisiana, music that's increasingly in demand at folk, blues, Cajun and zydeco festivals around the world. But the instruments on which the seminal Creole fiddler got his start, back in the early 1930s, held little resemblance to the Stradivarius favored by Europe's old masters. One of them, however, well may have been a Dutch Masters.

The house Canray Fontenot lives in is a good stretch from everywhere, in a town of 3,299 about two-thirds of the way between Lafayette and Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana, deep in the land known as Acadiana. Once in Welsh, a visitor still doesn't have an easy time spotting the rocky dirt road that splinters off a cracked, aging asphalt street, and doubles back in front of the place where Creole fiddler Fontenot, 68, has lived for four years.

Stanley (Buckwheat) Dural Jr. played organ with Clifton Chenier from 1976 to 1978--a stint that left more than a musical mark on the musician: Working with the late zydeco patriarch reintroduced him to the Creole roots and culture he had previously shunned. "Before I got with Clifton Chenier, I'd never played accordion before in my life," recalled Dural, 40, in a phone interview from his home outside Lafayette, La.

Paul Prudhomme is happy. "I'm mobile. I work 18 hours a day. I wake up every morning feeling wonderful," he says. But about two years ago, at 485 pounds, he was not so happy. "I got to an uncomfortable weight and I had to do something," he says. First, he tried powdered diet products and even got creative with them, inventing new recipes. "I got sick of it and decided it was time to get serious," he says. "With my ability to cook, I changed to food."