In February's issue of New Orleans Living Magazine, Melissa Harris-Perry shares how she juggles her hectic schedule!
Keep up with her exciting life as a mother, wife, author, professor, and host of "Melissa Harris Perry"! Not to mention her 'Irrational' love for New Orleans.
And don’t forget to tune in to "Melissa Harris-Perry" weekends from 10 A.M. EST to NOON and to follow her show on Twitter!
You can read an excerpt of her interview below:
Melissa, you live in New Orleans with your husband James and your daughter Parker, and you teach at Tulane, but you also ave your own show on MSNBC in New York each weekend. That's a lot of flying around!
Yes! All week I fly up there. The coldest moments of my life are in transit from the airport t the cab! (Laughs). I usually fly out on Thursday night or Friday morning and Parker alone or Parker and James together come up on Friday night, then we all go back home together on Sunday.
What do you think of New Orleans now that it's your home?
For me, you know the love of New Orleans is real love because it's irrational. You don't love New Orleans because it works or makes sense. We don't love New Orleans because the roads are straight or well paved, so I think for me, part of i is that sometimes you just give yourself over to place. And the thing about New Orleanians across race and across class is that people do no put on airs! In this city, you can go over to James Carville's house and he's walking around in his purple and gold LSU stuff, or you can go over to a neighborhood Cajun seafood place and the mayor will be standing there. Everybody is just happy all the time, sitting on the front porch. New York is not that way; it's a very status- conscious place in a way that New Orleans is not.
What makes for a really exciting time on your show on MSNBC?
There are a couple of things that make a great show. The first is a great guest. You can have the most engaging topics in the world, but if your guest have dead eyes and are not compelling, that's not good. I have the most fun on that show when I sit down at that desk, say my piece, turn to a guest and the guest says something surprising or new. One Sunday, on a panel that James was on, one of the guest said, "If we do this, we can eradicate homelessness," and she said it kind of almost as a one-off, I think because she works on this issue all the time. I was like "Wait a minute. What? Did you just say to me that you have an actual public policy that can eradicate homelessness.? Because I did not know we could do that!" I think maybe a lot of people do not know that we can eradicate homelessness, though it seems like a problem with no solution. One of my favorite guests is Kenji Yoshino, a professor of constitutional law at NYU; e never says anything that doesn't somehow surprise or shock me.
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