I wrote a big long thing about a couple of films on the Documentary Channel in which Ms. Pearl from New Orleans was a player, but my Internet connection was down so I think I lost it.

Mardi Gras: Made in China is a documentary that links nudity for beads at Mardi Gras to the onset of free market trading in China that made it possible for China to manufacture Mardi Gras beads.

The film makers showed footage of the underpaid teenage girls in China making the beads to drunken Mardi Gras participants and footage of Mardi Gras to the Chinese workers. Both sides had been unaware of the other side of the equation up until then.

One of the Mardi Gras people was Ms. Pearl, a free spirit who lives in New Orleans. She was having a good time seeing how many beads she could collect (no nudity involved at least on camera) and you wondered what she wanted with all of them. This was filmed before Hurricane Katrina.

A bazillion beads are made in China every year, and most of those end up in the trash when Mardi Gras is over. There were so many in the street at the end of Mardi Gras they got wrapped around the street cleaner's revolving brush.

The second documentary with Ms. Pearl is set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the name of the film is Kamp Katrina. Ms. Pearl and her husband Dave evacuated before the hurricane to Oklahoma and Texas where people helped them, so they wanted to give back by opening their backyard to homeless people living in tents.

There were rules: no hard drugs, no alcohol, stay away from the crack dealers and pimps across the street and they had to get jobs. Dave would hire them to work for him rehabbing houses damaged in the storm if they couldn't find other jobs.

As Ms. Pearl expresses it, some of the tent dwellers have something missing in their makeup and after other more resourceful people had moved on, they were still living in the tents but were not following the rules.

One of the young women was pregnant and Ms. Pearl moved her into her upstairs bedroom because it wasn't right to be pregnant and living out in the yard with all those single men. Eventually this gal stole an antique lamp from Ms. Pearl's bedroom and gave it to a one-eyed woman living in one of the tents so Ms. Pearl kicked the one-eyed woman, her boyfriend, and her two dogs out of the yard, kind of like the story of Adam and Eve. The pregnant gal just stood around during all the accusations and looked stupid, as if she didn't realize there was anything wrong with giving away other people's stuff.

When the baby was born three months early it was addicted to crack and was put into protective custody. The parents vowed they would get jobs and get cleaned up so they could get their son back, but on the way to wherever they were going (not Ms. Pearl's house) they stopped the cab so she could buy some street drugs.

Another character in this film is the city of New Orleans and its recovery efforts. The most poignant image for me was all the refrigerators duct taped shut and put on the curbs for fork lifts to pick up for hauling off. It made me realize how people had little time to get away ahead of the storm and how long it took to get back home.