Nightlife
"I still love Preservation Hall. It's so authentic and the guys playing are incredibly gifted, and it's a real part of New Orleans. Otherwise, there's always some place you can check out that has music if you still have the energy after you've eaten all that food, which I usually don't. But after dinner, I would go to the Napoleon House for a drink. They're always playing opera. It was a house that was prepared for Napoleon, but he never actually lived there. The Columns Hotel on St. Charles is my favorite place to have a drink in the Garden District. It's so cool, sitting on that porch. The oldest bar in New Orleans is Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop. It's a grungy, down-and-dirty kind of little bar, but it's so old and it has so much history."

SUNDAY

Excursion
"All the plantation tours are wonderful. I did the ones at Nottoway and Oak Alley. When I saw Oak Alley, with that whole alley of trees, I decided I was going to get married there. I had invitations printed and everything, and then I called off the wedding, and then I met Mr. Wonderful. The invitations didn't go out, thank God, but they were all printed."

Dinner
"I filmed a movie in Baton Rouge recently and fell in love with Lafitte's Landing, a restaurant in Donaldsonville, about an hour from New Orleans. Lafitte's has been there forever. It's in this old house, so it's like being in somebody's home. They have awesome gumbo. [Food writer] Craig Claiborne named one of the gumbos Death by Gumbo, because it was so incredible. I think they put a piece of stuffed quail in the middle of it."

EARLY MEMORIES OF NEW ORLEANS