One of New Orleanians’ most treasured pastimes is to complain that the city ain’t what it used to be, waxing nostalgic about all the people & places that “ain’t dere no more” as time has marched on without them. I tend to roll my eyes at this hyper-local brand of cynicism, because it’s very obvious to me that the city’s greatest charm (and most glaring fault) is that it never really changes, so when people get romantic about “the New Orleans that used to be” I assume they’re mostly just personally nostalgic for being in their twenties. Every time I have an especially great day in the Quarter, at Jazz Fest, or watching a second line from my front porch, I find myself getting emotional about how the people & culture of New Orleans have remained the same for at least as long as I’ve been alive. The city is just as beautiful now as it’s always been. Sometimes, I can even get verklempt about that much-debated fact while watching locally produced documentaries, such as the gay Mardi Gras doc The Sons of Tennessee Williams, the year-in-the-life party doc Always for Pleasure and, most recently, the late-90s documentary profile Ruthie the Duck Girl, which the New Orleans Film Society recently screened at The Broad. Looking at the French Quarter through director Rick Dulaup’s camcorder lens, I was overwhelmed by the comforting feeling that it’s just the same now as I always remembered it, and seeing local legend Ruthie the Duck Lady on the screen felt like running into an old friend while day-drinking on Decatur Street — sublime.
I would have known & caught glimpses of Ruthie the Duck Lady exactly as she appears in this documentary, drinking & smoking away her 60s in the late 1990s & early 2000s. As this documentary’s title suggests, however, her history goes back much further back in New Orleans’s past, back to Ruthie’s girlhood. Ruthie started her lifelong performance-art project as a humble Duck Girl, purposefully attracting attention by wearing a garish Easter bonnet and shepherding ducks around the Quarter. She was an eccentric by nature, but she was also one by choice, making a modest living out of selling autographed postcards of her image. By the time I would’ve seen her, the ducks were long gone, and the bonnet had evolved into a much more elaborate fashionista ensemble, covered in promotional buttons and accessorized with a ratty fur coat, no matter how hot or humid. Ruthie no longer needed to sell postcards; she’d get by just fine on free Budweisers & Kools, generously provided by the fine folks of New Orleans who were just happy to see she’s still around. If you stepped into her orbit at that time, like I did, it might be unfathomable how she had developed her character over the decades, like jumping into the Dune series by reading God Emperor first. This documentary does its best to answer the basic questions you’d have about Ruthie’s life & art, which were one & the same, preserving it for posterity in the process. The city that made her story possible might’ve continued on unchanged, but she only held on for another decade. So, it’s a gift to see her frozen in time here, exactly the way the Ain’t Dere No More cynics wish everything could remain.
Aesthetically, Ruthie the Duck Girl is the kind of New Orleans culture documentation you’d expect to see on local PBS affiliate WYES. Even so, it’s the WYES equivalent of Grey Gardens, spending time getting to know a larger-than-life character while she was still alive to contribute to her own legend. Ruthie even occasionally waves around a miniature American flag like Little Edie, modeling her “costume for the day” with the full intent of making herself a fabulous spectacle. The biggest revelation of this profile was just how aware Ruthie was of her public perception, using it as both a modest source of income and a shield for some of her riskier behaviors (such as kicking tourists she found annoying in the shins with her roller skates). You’d expect a documentary profile of a local eccentric to go out of its way to humanize its subject, but Ruthie’s humanity was apparent to anyone who spent time talking to her instead of gawking at her. What’s much more compelling is puzzling through how much of her persona was a deliberately constructed character, to the point where she tests out new catchphrases like “That did it!” and “Can I get a beer for later?” on-camera, as if Delaup were shooting a sitcom pilot in front of a live studio audience. Revisiting Ruthie did feel like stumbling across an episode of some long-forgotten sitcom I haven’t seen since I was a child, a feeling amplified by the movie’s spotty distribution as an occasional cultural event outside the streaming market. Much like Ruthie herself, you can only see it by leaving your house and spending time around the city’s cultural hubs, occasionally catching a glimpse of the artist at work.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 