One of the things that's beautiful about New Orleans is how culturally rich we are and how well we have worked together. People call us a gumbo. It's really important that we get focused on the very simple notion that diversity is a strength it's not a weakness.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

New Orleans life is such a night life. The thing that comes up very often is that our day essentially doesn't start until midnight or 2 in the morning.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor - got her master's with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

New Orleans more than many places I know actually tangibly lives its culture. It's not just a residual of life it's a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth marriage death. It's our culture.

These past years as we have been recovering and given our city a rebirth we have been encouraged by our faith knowledge and steadfast belief that we will pull through. There will be challenges and setbacks as there have already been but we will continue and we the citizens of New Orleans will prevail in bringing our city back.

I have no doubt that the government of this great nation will work with its people to lead New Orleans and the Gulf Coast back to an enlightened proud safe part of the world.

I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.

In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked it was the best-and it was my heritage.

There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there got food poisoning and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.