I thought to myself as I sat on the side of a tree-lined street called Esplanade in a puddle of sardine-like tears. Just salty!

The last three days have been emotionally taxing.

Lack of sleep. The stress of unemployment. The battle of chasing your dreams. Being in the driver’s seat on so many things at once. I’ve been waking up at 4 a.m. with equal parts solutions and ideas, my brain apparently refusing to observe normal business hours.

And today, as the renovation budget continues to humble me and the timeline on this property renovation inches toward its end, I found myself outside painting the side of my house in the New Orleans heat.

My skin was clammy. My body tank was on E. And if my scent were bottled, it would simply be called Outside.

I know I’m in the “you gotta do what you gotta do” chapter of this story. But I did not want to be doing this shit.

I’m working on this house. I’m building a seafood company that gets questioned and critiqued almost daily. I’m trying to figure out what comes next professionally. And somehow, despite all the uncertainty, I have never been more sure of what I’m supposed to be building.

I just have absolutely no idea how it’s all going to work.

After a cold shower and the sharp zing of a text message that the side of the house “could have used some plaster,” I decided I needed to get away. Escape to my favorite Tuesday time vortex: The Broad Theater, where you can catch a movie for $6.

And unemployed or not, I love a deal.

Now pause.

I’m 28, living in New York City and working an incredible job at a sports agency. The kind of job a lot of people coveted. Not an entry-level salary. The biggest athletes in the world. An apartment with a rooftop instead of a fifth-floor walk-up. Generally doing well, fresh out of law school.

On paper, there was absolutely nothing to complain about. But after nearly five years of loving the job… something was off.

The city that once made me marvel had started to feel dull. I used to love the sirens in the night, a good horn honking and my neighbors blasting Tevin Campbell’s “Tomorrow” on repeat.

The job that once filled my cup felt empty. Now it was “You look good in that secretary skirt,” as one of the male agents intentionally dropped his pen so I could bend over to pick it up.

I had reached one of those strange inflection points where I needed to choose the red pill or the blue pill. I actually loved the work I was doing, but I couldn’t spend another day in that environment.

Was sports even where I wanted to be? Apparently not.

And while I didn’t write my Jerry Maguire manifesto or grab the goldfish on my way out, I did quit my job to pursue my love of cooking.

You complete me!

I was the girl in New York who hosted dinner parties and built community by feeding people. Somewhere along the way, Top Chef convinced me this meant I should become an actual chef.

So naturally, I traded my cushy sports job for cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

This was not a popular decision. Like, at all.

But armed with supportive words from my mom and a fresh copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, gifted by my then roommate Latreava:

Bonjour, Paris.

I learned soups, sauces, spices and classic French dishes. I wandered markets, hopped from hostel to hostel, ate escargot and mussels, dug through vintage stores and started my mornings with cappuccino and pain au chocolat. On trains, in cafés and during little trips through France, my eyes stayed buried in Kitchen Confidential.

Bourdain was my companion through that strange little reinvention. For the first time in my life, I chose something for myself and allowed myself to get lost in the pivot.

His life reminded me that people do not have to move through the world in straight lines. They can follow curiosity, change their minds and build lives out of appetite, instinct and experience. They can trust the thing pulling them forward before they fully understand where it’s taking them.

At 28, I walked away from certainty because something inside me said there was more. At 44, certainty has apparently decided we should see other people.

I’m standing inside The Broad looking at the movie listings. And although I love the union of Tomdaya, Spider-Man was simply not on my spirit today.

Then I saw an A24 and a movie called Tony. I knew nothing else.

Hadn’t seen a trailer. Hadn’t read a review. Had no idea what I was walking into. I spent the best $6 I’d spent all week and bought a ticket.

Within the first 20 minutes, something started to feel familiar. The unmistakable tone of his voice. A sharp wit and a curiosity for more. A young man trying on a life he didn’t yet know would become his.

And then it clicked. Tony. Ohhhhhhhh, Tony. I was watching a story about Anthony Bourdain.

For almost two hours, I watched a young Bourdain navigate a Cape Cod summer in the kitchen, an experience that would help send him down the path toward becoming a chef and eventually writing the very book I carried around France all those years ago.

Kitchen Confidential.

And somewhere in that dark theater, 2010 came rushing back.

Paris. Warm nuts by the Eiffel Tower. Squinting at signs on crowded trains, piecing together elementary-school French and the remnants of kitchen conversations with my Creole grandmother to figure out where the hell I was going. And Gruyère. (No explanation needed.)

And suddenly I was 28 again. Except I wasn’t.

I was 44 me, now. Sitting in a $6 movie on a Tuesday after painting the side of my own damn house, unemployed, building another improbable thing and once again asking God whether I had lost my mind.

Neither version of me couldn’t see the shape of life she was building. And then another thought hit me.

I went to Paris because I thought I wanted to become a chef. Sixteen years later, I realize maybe I wasn’t wrong. I was just being too literal. Because what I actually fell in love with was bigger than cooking.

Food. Travel. Culture. Storytelling. Gathering people around a table. Following my curiosity wherever it took me.

I couldn’t see the shape of it then. Maybe, I’m finally starting to see it now.

The woman sitting in the cracked leather seats of The Broad Theater is finally able to understand the decision the woman wandering around Paris made 16 years earlier. And she realizes that she’s being asked to trust herself in exactly the same way.

Not sadness.

Gratitude.

The prayer I had been praying for clarity and guidance had been answered in a language I understood. Apparently God looked at my request for a sign and thought, She’s not going to listen to a burning bush. Send Bourdain.

And God was right. The sign could not have been clearer.

The book that found me during one of the biggest leaps of my last life had somehow found me again, this time as a movie, during another.

The message was the same:

Trust yourself. You are on the right path. You know the what.

I’m trusting God to provide the how.

And while everyone may experience the spirit of God differently, apparently mine occasionally arrives as a chain-smoking, beer-drinking, foul-mouthed, lovable and brilliant explorer of life, people and cuisine.

Saint Anthony Bourdain.

Thank you, Tony.

Rest in peace. xx

Not skeptical. Not cautiously curious. Straight up against it. PERIOD.

As a storytelling purist, development executive and producer, I believe that the work is in the work. There is no replacement for human connection nor human observations. The thinking mattered. The draft mattered. The long, occasionally painful process of finding the story mattered. And for the most part still do.

I was not interested in outsourcing creativity to a robot, nor was I particularly moved by the flood of LinkedIn posts promising that one magical prompt would make me richer, thinner, more productive and possibly fluent in Spanish by Tuesday.

I thought, are we trading craftsmanship for convenience? Worse, I thought people were using technology to skip the very struggle that makes ideas good. Immersing yourself in the process. You gotta sit with it and sit in it.

Then, due to cultural peer pressure, I tried it out.

Hold on… not for storytelling at first. I used it for the boring things. The I need an executive assistant real bad things. Budgets, trackers, schedules, renovation lists, meal planning, contract summaries and all the administrative debris that quietly eats three to six hours of your day while producing nothing I could proudly mention in the family group chat.

And boy, it was helpful. Annoyingly helpful. Where have you been all my life helpful?!?

It simplified things my Aries perfectionist brain had been overcomplicating. It organized information I had scattered across Notes, emails, Google Docs, screenshots and the pieces of paper piled on my coffee table like a centerpiece.

It helped me turn thoughts into systems and systems into ACTUAL usable tools.

So I started digging deeper. I took classes. I learned how to write better prompts, build workflows, create specialized bots and use different platforms for different kinds of work. And my homie, Claude, is so damn good.

I stopped thinking about the machine as a threat to my job, but more of the assistant I’ve been praying for and know that I needed.

I was in a safe space.

Then I became a solopreneur. Emphasis on the solo. I didn’t need an AI bff, I needed a team.

Nothing will make you appreciate artificial intelligence quite like becoming the marketing department, finance department, legal department, operations department, customer service department and creative department of your own company. Most times all before lunch.

My first six employees were AI bots.

If you are building something right now, you probably know exactly what I mean. AI is not replacing your team.

For many founders, it is the team.

And I treat mine like actual employees. I assign them roles. I return to the same conversations. I give context, offer feedback and occasionally remind them that we have, in fact, already discussed this.

Roberta is excellent at research. Sarah is better at strategy. Fin loves a spreadsheet a little too much. Callie has never met a simple answer it could not turn into a seven-part framework. Yes, I gave them names.

So, really, no different from any other office. Especially not these days. I’ve worked virtually the past 5 years. The fact that I know my team only through a screen is not especially unusual anymore.

I have worked with plenty of people I only ever saw through Zoom, Google Meet or the God-awful Microsoft Teams. At least the bots do not begin every conversation by asking, “Can you hear me?” No calls where three people have the same minimalist office background. And no more executive leadership meetings with counterparts who contribute to a toxic company culture.

These “employees” helped me research markets, build spreadsheets, organize product development, pressure-test ideas, think through strategy and create systems I could not have built as quickly on my own. For a solo founder, that kind of leverage can feel almost miraculous. Suddenly, work that might have required a small team could at least be started by one person with a laptop, a point of view and a mildly concerning number of browser tabs open.

But somewhere between useful and indispensable, I fell into what I have started calling the AI loop. And here is where I crossed the line.

The AI loop is what happens when artificial intelligence stops being a tool and quietly becomes a place you live. It is the strange space between thinking and doing where AI convinces you that because you are processing information, you must be making progress.

And I had a former boss at Sony who famously quotes, “Don’t confuse busy with progress.”

WE WERE BUSY.

It started innocently enough. You open ChatGPT with one question. The answer sparks another question, which sends you to bff Claude. Claude gives you an idea for another project. That project needs a framework. The framework becomes a Loveable dashboard. The dashboard needs an automation. The Zapier automation reminds you of another business idea. So you update your Notion using the notes you forgot you had in Whispr Flow.

Three hours later, you have built an incredibly sophisticated operating system for work you have not actually done.

At one point, I had so many AI chats open that I could not remember which conversation contained the answer I was looking for.

So naturally, I opened another chat to help me find it.

That was probably the moment I should have closed my laptop and gone outside. Side note: AI has been the disrupter and the cause of my daily walks.

The AI loop feels productive because, technically, it is. You are learning, researching, processing, refining and connecting dots. Every conversation makes you smarter. Every prompt reveals another possibility.

That is what makes it so dangerous.

You mistake processing for producing. You mistake optimization for execution. You mistake the movement of information for the movement of the work. And you are definitely mistaking refinement for retention.

Eventually, it starts to feel like reading twelve books at the same time and finishing none of them. Not because any of the books are bad. In fact, they are all fascinating. Every chapter introduces another rabbit hole. Every rabbit hole promises to make the original idea even better.

Until one day you look up and realize you have not finished a single book.

Worse, you have forgotten why you picked up the first one.

And I convinced myself I was using it for good because I’m not out here trunk of car hustling digital products. But, information becomes entertainment disguised as productivity. Optimization becomes procrastination in a designer outfit.

As someone who spent years in film and television development, I know this cycle better than I would like to admit. Hollywood perfected it long before artificial intelligence arrived.

Another draft. Another round of notes. Another attachment. Another deck. Another meeting to prepare for the meeting where everyone will discuss whether the project is ready for another draft.

Projects can spend years becoming “better” without ever becoming real. But are they better. This isn’t even the show I pitched anymore.

AI did not invent major studio development hell, but it definitely made it available to everyone with a laptop.

Now all of us have access to infinite research, infinite revisions, infinite possibilities and a machine that will enthusiastically help us create Version 47 of something that probably should have been sent at Version 5.

The danger is not that AI makes us lazy. I actually think it can make ambitious people like yours truly more ambitious. It puts us in a stage where everything is possible and nothing has yet been tested by the inconvenience of reality.

But, reality is where the customer ignores the product, the audience does not click, the client did not pay the invoice, the investor asks the question you did not prepare for and the thing you spent three weeks perfecting performs exactly the same as the version you had last Tuesday.

AI cannot protect you from that. Although, bless Claude’s heart, it will absolutely offer to make you another strategy deck.

So I have started creating rules for myself, mostly because I know myself. Give me infinite information and a fresh notebook and I can turn a Tuesday task into a graduate seminar. These are tried, true and tested.

AI’s job, apparently, is to pull you deeper into the vortex until you are entering your credit card number to buy more tokens to find the answer buried in an artifact inside a project on your second platform behind a Pro membership.

So now you upgrade. Again.

Meanwhile, the actual work is still waiting. Step away from the computer!

I do not think the answer is using less AI. Tomorrow morning, I will probably open it to update my calendar and organize my week, talk through some business decisions I have been obsessing over.

My first six employees are not getting fired.

But I use them differently now.

I know when I am asking AI to help me move faster and when I am asking it to make me feel better about a decision I already know I need to make. I know when I am researching and when I am just hiding in the research. And I am getting better at noticing the moment when one more prompt is not actually going to make the work any better.

That was the part I did not understand when I started.

I was worried AI would somehow take the human part out of creativity. Instead, I have had to get much clearer about what the human part actually is.

Taste. Judgment. Knowing when something feels off even when you cannot explain why yet. Changing your mind. Taking the risk. Hitting publish.

AI can get me there faster. But at some point, I still have to close the chat and do the damn thing.

Donaldsonville, LA became Clarksdale, MS. An overgrown golf course, flooded out in Katrina, turned into the juke joint where Michael B. Jordan fought off a singing vampire army. A canopy of 1800s oaks in St. Bernard Parish stood in for someone else’s hometown. Ninety million dollars in production, one of the biggest original films in years, shot top to bottom within fifty miles of this city.

Coogler called Louisiana “a state that helps make filmmakers successful.” We’re proud of that fact but now have little to show for it.

In 2022, this state had more than a dozen major productions shooting in any given month, generating about a billion dollars a year and roughly 11,000 jobs. By 2025, we were down to two. “Quiet on the set” took on a whole new meaning.

Then January happened. Six productions on the ground in a single month, more studio work than the entire year before it. Film Louisiana came home from Los Angeles saying half the studios they met were looking hard at us. In February, The Times-Picayune asked whether Hollywood South was back. So, is it?

I want the answer to be yes. Maybe more than most.

I grew up here obsessed with movies, dissecting frames and memorizing lines. Then I spent most of my adult life leaving New Orleans to work in the business that makes them. New York. Atlanta. Los Angeles.

There is something strange about having to leave a place this cinematic to build a career in cinema.

And now that I’m back, I keep thinking about that.

Louisiana has spent decades proving that we can host this industry, crew it and make almost anything look believable. But for generations of people who actually want to build careers in it, the assumption has still been that eventually you leave.

For 20 years, New Orleans has been Gotham, a generic Anytown USA or usually the Mississippi Delta. We have gotten extraordinary at being everybody else. And that’s the whole problem!

Why are we so much better at being everybody else than at keeping the business that lets us be ourselves?

New Jersey is spending hundreds of millions. New York spends more. California just doubled down. Then there are countries where the dollar stretches a production budget even further, which is why most tentpoles are now shooting overseas.

Louisiana keeps bringing a rebate to a relationship fight.

At one point, we were the only state in the country offering a meaningful film incentive. We invented this game.

I’ve spent my career inside studios and produced across nearly every format in the business. Sony, Lionsgate, Disney, Universal… Nobody is sitting in a sterile, glass-walled conference room saying, “We have to shoot in Louisiana.” Location rarely enters as a romanticized conversation.

Beignets do not trump budgets. And I’m saying this as a lover of beignets.

Someone whips out a spreadsheet. Physical production names three jurisdictions. Finance compares incentives. By the time anyone discusses what the place looks like, two options have already been cut.

They are asking, where does the math work? And that conversation usually comes down to some version of these questions: Can we get it cheaper or easier? Or, is it irreplaceable?

We bet our entire film economy on cheaper. It’s the one category where somebody with a bigger budget or a softer currency will always undercut us.

New Jersey is buying easier. Netflix is sinking a billion dollars into a twelve-soundstage campus at an old Army base, and the state tied its incentive to a ten-year commitment to stay.

New Jersey isn’t paying for shoots. It’s paying for roots.

We already had our chance to restructure. Act 44 passed last summer. The state lowered the program’s annual ceiling to $125 million, then removed the old caps on individual projects and payroll. Less money overall, fewer limits on where it can go.

And then, in July, the Governor declared New Orleans less important to the state’s economic success than it once was. A strange thing to say about one of Louisiana’s biggest engines of tourism, culture and film production.

For years, Louisiana even paid productions extra to put their offices and most of their principal photography outside the New Orleans metro area. That bonus is gone, but the instinct behind it is worth noticing: spread the work around the state. I understand the politics of that. I’m just not convinced you strengthen Hollywood South by treating its biggest production center like something you need to work around.

But, back to Jersey.

New Jersey should be studied. Not copied. Studied. The part Louisiana should steal is the ambition. The roots part.

Because a comeback cannot just mean six productions in January instead of two the year before. I want the soundstages busy. I want hotel rooms booked and grips working and caterers sending invoices. I want my hairdresser to stop having open appointments because she’s on set. But I also want a kid growing up in Gentilly, the West Bank or St. Bernard to imagine becoming a producer without automatically imagining a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

And I want filmmakers to start companies here because staying makes good business sense, not because they are willing to sacrifice something to come home.

Irreplaceable is where we win outright but have somehow treated as an afterthought. You cannot build a bayou, and you cannot manufacture a second line. There’s no set decorator alive who can age an oak tree two hundred years. And there is no substitute for a crew that knows how to wrestle 100-degree humidity without losing the day.

The richest terms should go to companies that anchor here.

For years we’ve treated film incentives like a tourism campaign. The goal was to get productions here. We valued hotel nights, catering invoices and payroll spend. Those things matter. But if we’re honest, they’re not where lasting wealth gets created.

Louisiana spent twenty years creating jobs. Georgia spent twenty years creating companies.

The lasting wealth is in the production companies, the intellectual property, the distribution rights and the revenue that keeps coming long after the talent trailers leave town. Louisiana shouldn’t just be asking how many productions shoot here. We should be asking how many companies get built here.

The danger of being the beautiful stand-in is that you start believing standing in is all you’re worth. We are main character energy, but we’ve built an economy around servicing other people’s dreams.

Fund a homegrown pipeline, and fund it the way the business actually works: think first-look deals, not grants. And make ownership part of the conversation. Black New Orleans built much of the music, food and mythology this industry keeps flying in to photograph, yet owns almost none of the companies selling those stories back to the world.

Why have we accepted ownership in our music and our food, but settled for subcontracting our stories?

And send people who can actually sit in the room. Louisiana doesn’t need another brochure. The entertainment business still runs on relationships. Not LinkedIn relationships. Real ones. The kind where your call gets returned because you’ve sat in the room together.

We would never accept being a stand-in for somebody else’s cuisine. We would never accept being a stand-in for somebody else’s music. We will fight a grown man over our grandmother’s gumbo recipe. Yet somehow we’ve accepted being a stand-in for somebody else’s stories.

Maybe this January was a blip. Or maybe it was the beginning of something.

Six productions do not rebuild an industry. But there is something about seeing the trucks again. Hearing somebody complain that parking is impossible because a block is closed for filming. Finding out the person who normally cuts your hair is unavailable because she got called to set. Those little inconveniences start looking pretty good when you remember what quiet felt like.

I do not think the Louisiana film business is dead. I think it is standing at the uncomfortable point between what worked twenty years ago and whatever we are willing to build next. We have the crews. We have the locations. We have the stories. We have twenty years of proof that the machinery works.

The question is whether we only want Hollywood to come back, or whether we want to build something that stays. We’ve spent twenty years being everywhere else. Let’s spend the next twenty being unmistakably, profitably, ourselves.

It was supposed to be the reward after producing the biggest event my company put on, EBONY Power 100. The kind of trip you book while you are still in the thick of it, telling yourself: just get through this and then you can go be a person again. A few days to come down from the adrenaline of making something massive happen, something I was very proud to have made happen.

Lisbon. Wine. Pastries. A little romance. A little rest.

That was the plan.

The trip had been booked as an exhale. Somewhere between the planning and the plane tickets, the chapter I thought I was vacationing from became the chapter that ended.

I had been laid off.

A strange thing to carry into a beautiful place. And Lisbon was beautiful. Truly.

Colorful tiled building holding secrets from generations before me. Generous light pouring through a storefront bay window. The river opening toward the Atlantic, a body of water that somewhere made this foreign place feel familiar to home.

The wine was bold, and most of the time cold. The pastries were warm. But the hills? The hills were disrespectful!

We had a wonderful time. That part is true. Late night dinners and long street roams, jokes I still remember, and cliffside moments that became exactly what you hope travel will give you.

But underneath all that beauty, I was disoriented. A gumbo pot of emotions I was too exhausted to taste, much less process.

But here’s the truth: I was traveling with someone I loved, someone I would split from two months later. There was real joy between us. There was also a quiet ache I did not yet know how to name.

I loved him in a language he either could not speak back or would not. And maybe I’m being too generous here.

Maybe that distinction matters less when you are the one sitting inside the absence. There was no villain. No dramatic scene. Just the end of a string that I held on to since college, running softly through my hand, while I was still trying to enjoy the view.

So I did what I often do when life gets too loud. I went for a walk.

Not because anything was wrong in that exact moment and not because I needed to escape. I just needed a little room inside the day. Room away from the version of me that had spent months producing, solving, managing, protecting, landing the plane and then quietly absorbing the crash.

I wanted to wander. I wanted to observe. I wanted to want something without negotiating it. I wanted to be absolved of responsibility. At least for a moment.

For a moment, I wanted to belong entirely to myself.

Lisbon was doing what Lisbon does. It was late afternoon and the light seemed to linger. The way it only does in cities built on hills near water.

STOP! My ankle screamed… please sit down. I had climbed too many cobblestone hills and my body finally filed a formal complaint.

So I ducked into a small café on a street lined with coffee shops, vintage finds and people who looked like they had nowhere urgent to be. Ironically, I had nowhere urgent to be. [Candace - you ain’t got no job. Iykyk.]

I wanted to be the person that sat at the table in the window. A book, a coffee and a little something special.

At first I ordered a salad, a sandwich and a cappuccino. A perfect reprieve from the world. And eventually, a tin of sardines.

No tiny edible flower minding everybody’s business. No foam. No spiraled garnish. Just fish, salt, oil, a chalky cracker, a cold glass of vinho verde and me sitting in the same window, catching the afternoon light.

I have eaten in some serious rooms. Traveled to 33+ countries across 6 continents and counting. I have made the reservations you plan entire trips around. That I’ve planned entire trips around. I love the theater of the perfect plate.

But, it’s almost never the fancy meals that rearrange you. It is the honest ones.

Fish in oil by a window when your life has quietly cracked open. It was the same teeny fish, in the same aluminum tin, that my grandparents ate standing at the kitchen counter in New Orleans. Sardines on saltines. Mustard. Tabasco. Whatever was there.

And there I was, thirty years and an ocean away, feeling like I had come home to something. That is the thing about preserved seafood. It is a memory you can buy in a tin.

In Portugal, they understand this. Conservas are not treated like an afterthought. They kept the canneries. They kept the knowledge. A hundred years of it. Unbroken. 43 years of me sitting here. Broken.

And I sat there in that window, drinking my wine and doing emo math I did not really want to do. But I didn’t realize I was standing at the beginning of my next life because I was still trying to politely grieve the last one.

At the time, it was just a lunch break. I would not connect that moment to Tinfolk until 3 months later. Even then, it did not come back to me as a perfectly packaged founder story with a 13-page investor deck. It came back first as a feeling.

A conversation with my maternal grandfather in the middle of the night. A calling to full circle the work of my ancestors before me.

The dignity of a humble thing done right. The body ache of recognizing something familiar in a foreign place.

I left Lisbon with half a suitcase full of tins. Then, I thought they were souvenirs. How many did I give away? None. How many did I eat? All.

They became the question I could not put down. What still feeds me? What still feels honest? What belonged to me before the job, before the heartbreak and before the performance of being chosen?

That colorful 4oz tin did not solve any of my problems. It did something more useful. It reminded me that I still had an appetite. After being kicked down more times than statistically reasonable, I am getting back up. I still craved work rooted in something deeper than whether someone else had decided I was worth keeping.

Because neither the job nor the love did right by me. And they both know it.

Portugal was supposed to be my reward for surviving one chapter. Instead, a tin of sardines quietly introduced me to the next one.

At least they loved me back.

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Usually, it’s a particular character arc. Or a scene where the vibes, music and cinematography come together to create the perfect emo sandwich. Confession: I’m the girl that cried while watching Con Air.

Christopher Nolan has built a career on reminding us that cinema can still feel like an event. But tonight I went from event to reckoning. What I didn’t expect was to leave the theater thinking about my own life. Or maybe my old life. Who knows???

I am apparently working through that question in real time with you, my Substack readers. I mean, my therapists.

I miss this.

Not Hollywood. Not the politics, development hell, budgets that somehow double while the schedule gets cut in half or the meetings about meetings. I don’t miss any of that.

I miss believing that stories can rearrange people.

Conference room at Sony Pictures Television.

For almost twenty years, I had the privilege of helping make them. Films, series, documentaries, albums and live experiences. I spent my career surrounded by people who believed culture mattered… enough to fight over. There is something intoxicating about that. There is also something completely exhausting about it.

The film and television business has a way of making you spend more time negotiating the conditions around creativity than actually being creative. And how did we get here???

Every idea has to survive the budget, the politics, the notes, the changing executive team, the financing gap, the schedule and someone else’s appetite for risk. Sometimes the work makes it through. Sometimes it dies after 3 years of development hell. After you’ve poured your life into it.

My office on the Disney lot/ABC Studios.

And still, when credit scroll began, I remembered how much I love the thing itself. I felt inspired again. It was an itch also scratched by Is God Is, a film my Dad and I watched intently on a dark leather sofa in Houston.

That was the part that unsettled me.

I have spent the last few months building a different kind of life. One where I wake up thinking about seafood instead of screenings, historic preservation instead of production schedules and Substack essays instead of pitch decks.

I love this life too. I worked hard to find it.

But sitting in that theater, I realized I never stopped loving film. I just stopped loving what the industry started to require from me to stay close to it. At one point, I thought those were the same thing… I don’t anymore.

I'm beginning to separate the thing I love from the system built around it. Hear me out — You can love music and hate the record business. Love food but hate working in the kitchen. Love storytelling and feel completely worn tf out by Hollywood.

That distinction could feel like freedom, but it also raises an uncomfortable question. What do you do when the thing that gives you life is tied to an industry that has repeatedly drained it out of you?

My office on the Universal lot/Universal Television.

I don’t have a perfect answer. I’m not sure I want one. At least not yet.

With each passing day I become less interested I am in building a career that looks impressive from the outside, if it leaves me empty on the inside.

Peace has become one of my metrics for success.

Is there a way to keep the art without letting the business consume the artist? I’ve never found that balance. But if you’ve been on this journey, send me a few tips in the comments (please!).

Maybe the answer is not leaving storytelling. I can’t ever leave the thing that brings me the most joy. And I’m damn good at it.

Maybe it is changing my relationship to it.

What I know is that The Odyssey did not really make me miss my old life. It made me miss the part of myself that believed making something beautiful was worth almost anything.

I still believe it is worth a lot.

But it shouldn’t cost me everything.

For the uninitiated, Buc-ee’s is what happens when a gas station, a Walmart and a theme park have a very well-lit baby. There are brisket sandwiches, walls of jerky, beaver-branded everything, bathrooms clean enough to make you reconsider your own standards and an entire section devoted to warm nuts, which feels excessive but also spiritually correct.

As I walked around trying to understand why anyone needed that many varieties of jerky, I kept thinking: We could never have one of these in New Orleans.

Not because we lack abundance. Please. New Orleans invented doing too much with food and calling it culture. We could never have a Buc-ee’s because nobody would ever leave.

You would walk in for gas and run into your neighbor, your pastor, your elementary school teacher and your first love somewhere between the jerky wall and the candied pecans. Somebody’s auntie would stop you near the fudge to ask if your mama still lives over there by the school. By the time you found the bathroom, got trapped in a warm-nuts vortex and pretended not to see someone you used to date, you would have aged two years and forgotten where you parked.

That is when I started thinking about making groceries.

Where I’m from, you don’t go grocery shopping. You make groceries.

That phrase tells on us.

Say that outside southeast Louisiana and people look at you like you plan to build the groceries yourself. Out of what? Flour, humidity and a little ancestral pressure?

But “make groceries” is not bad grammar. It is a worldview. A whole way of understanding an errand.

In most places, grocery shopping is designed around efficiency. Get in. Get out. Scan your own items. Avoid eye contact. Return to your private life with your oat milk and that tiny bag of arugula that somehow costs six dollars; and may give you explosive diarrhea.

New Orleans has never respected a private errand.

Here, making groceries is not really about food. It is about being witnessed. You cannot disappear into a simple task. The city will find you somewhere between the seafood counter and the cereal aisle and remind you that you belong to people.

Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it is deeply inconvenient. Usually, it is both.

“Make groceries” is one of those phrases that gives you away, the kind of thing you do not realize is strange until somebody from somewhere else repeats it back to you like evidence.

Make groceries?

They hear bad grammar. I hear a whole city minding your business with love.

The phrase is often traced to the French faire son marché, then worn down by time, heat, humidity and all the mouths that made New Orleans into New Orleans. We make groceries. We get our hair did. We pass a good time. We ask “where y’at?” and we are not asking for a location.

The grammar is the gumbo.

Making groceries at home is not an errand. It is a public appearance with a cart.

Somewhere between produce and cereal, you will see your cousin’s ex, the woman who did the flowers for your aunt’s repast in 2011 or somebody from school whose name you cannot remember fast enough. Now you are overusing “baby” and hoping grace covers the rest.

And you cannot just wave.

Waving is how rumors start.

So you stop. You ask about her mama. You ask about the knee. The knee has a whole testimony. Somewhere in the third act of the knee, you forget what you came for and buy a king cake out of pure emotion.

A New Orleans grocery run has no honest relationship to time. My grandmother could turn a half-gallon of milk into a four-hour expedition. She knew everybody and everybody knew her, everybody’s mama and everybody’s business. The produce was just the excuse the whole thing was built around.

That is what people miss when they talk about food here like it is only flavor.

It is also surveillance.

Affectionate surveillance, most of the time, but surveillance nonetheless.

Somebody sees what is in your cart. Somebody knows what you are cooking. Somebody wants to know who is coming over. Somebody notices if you bought the wrong sausage and will absolutely let you know before you embarrass yourself in your own kitchen.

This is not nosiness, exactly. Or at least not only nosiness.

It is participation.

In New Orleans, the grocery store is one of the city’s smallest public squares, a place where neighborhoods rehearse themselves under fluorescent lights. People check in without scheduling a check-in. Gossip, advice, condolences, recipes and mild judgment move through the aisles as naturally as the carts.

We made groceries at Schwegmann’s, back when Schwegmann’s was the cathedral. If you are from here and of a certain age, that name does something to your chest.

The aisles went on forever. There was a bar inside because somebody correctly understood that making groceries is thirsty work and a person should be able to sit down while somebody else reads every label in the canned-goods aisle.

It is gone now and grown people still get misty about it because, in New Orleans, a grocery store was never just where you bought food.

It was where a neighborhood happened.

Now, it is mostly Rouses, which is ours too. Louisiana-born. Knows what a mirliton is. You can tell a real grocery by the seafood case and by whether the person behind the counter will tell you, completely unsolicited, what is good today and what you ought to do with it.

That part matters because making groceries is not just acquisition. It is intelligence gathering.

Who has the good shrimp? Who is lying about the crabmeat? Is that fish fresh-fresh or grocery-store fresh? Who has the French bread today? Who is charging too much for okra and hoping nobody’s auntie notices?

Somebody’s auntie always notices.

Then there is lagniappe, another one of our words that does not really translate because the definition is not the point. It is the small, unnecessary generosity folded into the exchange. A little extra. A tip you did not ask for. A “try it this way next time.” A “tell your mama I said hey.”

It is the thing that says we are not strangers doing commerce. We are people moving through the same place and people give each other a little more than they paid for.

Some of the best groceries in the city get made before the sun is all the way up in New Orleans East, where the Vietnamese community runs a market out of a parking lot on Saturday mornings.

Grandmothers with cabbages they grew themselves. Herbs you cannot find anywhere else in the city. Live everything. People moving with purpose. Nobody performing for anybody.

It is the oldest idea in the world. You grow it. You carry it in. You sell it to your neighbor.

And somehow, twenty minutes from the French Quarter, it becomes one of the most New Orleans things in New Orleans, even though the postcard version of “New Orleans food” never quite makes room for it.

The city is always bigger than its brochure.

That is the part I keep coming back to. The phrase is funny, yes. It is local. It is linguistic evidence that you belong to a particular place with particular rules.

But it is also a theory of public life.

The groceries are not the whole point.

The encounter is the point.

That is what Buc-ee’s made me laugh about. All that glorious American excess. All that space designed to move people in and out while convincing them to buy a sweatshirt with a beaver on it.

New Orleans would ruin the model immediately.

We would turn the jerky wall into a reunion, the fudge counter into a tribunal and the bathroom line into a cousin roll call. Somebody would bring up a family dispute near the brisket sandwiches. Nobody would get out in less than two hours.

And honestly, that would mean it was working.

So no, I am not going grocery shopping. I am going to make groceries.

That means I am putting on real clothes because I will absolutely see somebody. It means I am buying what I came for, what looked good, what was on sale and what some woman with better sense than me told me not to leave there without.

It means I am entering the city’s smallest public square with a cart and a list I will lose by aisle three.

I may come home with shrimp, Creole tomatoes, two unsolicited updates about somebody’s cousin, one warning about the weather and a king cake I did not intend to buy.

That is making groceries.

You leave with food, but never just food.

It comes after the announcement but before the proof. After you have told people what you are making but before you can place the finished thing in their hands.

The table is set. The guests have not arrived. And you are standing in the kitchen wondering whether you made enough.

When I launched this Substack, I wrote about setting the table. About creating a place to share the things I am building, restoring, tasting, questioning and becoming. That was the declaration. This is the part that comes next.

The part where the vision is clear but the outcome is not. Where the work is real, even if most of it is still happening behind closed doors, inside spreadsheets, on contractor calls, in half-written notes and across too many open tabs. The part where building something can feel like a loop of the same task, and you fall down the rabbit hole of trying to get it “right,” only to realize you may have created three more things to reconsider.

I am building a food company that does not yet have a product on a shelf. I am restoring a historic home that seems to introduce a new problem the moment I solve the last one. I am figuring out what comes next professionally after spending years helping build companies, teams, shows, platforms and other people’s visions.

And now I am writing publicly about all of it. Which sounds brave when you say it quickly. It feels slightly more unhinged when you are actually living it.

And who knows how any of it will turn out?

They tell you to enjoy the journey, right? Yeah, sure. But most days, I am taking long drives to decompress while trying to ignore the snowball stand every half mile in New Orleans.

There is comfort in presenting something once it is polished. Once the packaging is finished. Once the walls are painted. Once the deal is signed. Once you can point to the result and say, See? I knew what I was doing.

The middle does not offer that kind of protection. It asks you to keep moving without applause, certainty or evidence that the thing will become what you imagine.

The middle creates doubt.

It leaves this gaping hole where criticism, critique and conditioning can creep in. I am constantly trying to swat all of that back.

Most of the work of building Tinfolk does not look particularly cinematic. It looks like research. Supplier conversations. Cost models. Product testing. Packaging decisions. Food regulations. Manufacturing questions. Questions that create three more questions.

It is trying to hold onto the romance of the idea while becoming increasingly intimate with the logistics.

Because a beautiful idea still needs margins. A meaningful story still needs distribution. A great product still has to survive shipping, storage and a customer deciding whether it is worth the price.

And CPG is new to me. New to most people, honestly.

This is the part of entrepreneurship people tend to summarize with phrases like “trust the process,” as though the process is not occasionally rude, expensive and deeply committed to testing your self-esteem.

The property has been teaching me the same lesson.

Historic homes are generous with beauty but withholding with simplicity. They give you tall ceilings, old shutters, handmade details and light that hits a room like it was invited. They also give you old wiring, hidden water damage, open permits and repairs that refuse to remain contained to the original estimate.

Every time I think Patina is almost finished, the house seems to clear its throat.

There is always one more thing. One more wall to open. One more conversation with the city. One more person explaining why something cannot be done the way I was told it could be done. One more invoice with a number that feels personally disrespectful.

And still, I love the house. I do not love it because the work is easy. I love it because the house has character. Because it holds 250 years of history. Because I can see what it is becoming, even when I am standing in the middle of dust, exposed drywall and another delay.

Maybe that is what building anything requires. What building a life requires.

The ability to see the finished room while standing inside the demolition. The ability to believe in the company before the product exists. The ability to trust your own voice before the audience arrives. The ability to keep preparing a table for people who have not yet decided to come.

This season of my life has required a different kind of confidence than the kind I knew before.

There is the confidence that comes from experience, title and being able to point to what you have already accomplished. Then there is the confidence required when none of that guarantees what happens next.

That confidence is quieter. It does not always feel like confidence.

Sometimes it feels like failure.

Sometimes it looks like sending one more email. Making another call. Reworking the budget. Changing the plan without abandoning the vision. Getting up the next morning after something fails and trying again.

That is where I am now. Still setting out plates. Still adjusting the chairs. Still cooking. Still hoping I have made something worth gathering around.

And perhaps this is the lesson after setting the table:

You do not get to control when the guests arrive.

You only get to decide whether you will keep making the meal.

So I am staying in the kitchen.

There is more coming. I am excited for you to join me.

I’ve spent most of my career telling other people’s stories.

Building brands that belonged to somebody else. Shaping cultural moments with somebody else’s name on the door. Flying across the world to convince people to pay attention to an artist, a project, a company, an idea.

I loved most of it. Almost all of it.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I was spending all my creative energy helping other people articulate what they stood for while becoming less clear about what I stood for myself.

That’s a strange feeling.

To be surrounded by culture and feel disconnected from your own.

So after enough years of pointing the spotlight everywhere else, a funny thing happened. I looked up and thought: Candace, you’ve spent a career setting the table for everybody else’s dinner.

At some point, you start wondering what you’d serve if it were your own.

So here we are.

For years, I’ve been writing little dispatches to friends and family. Long emails from airport lounges. Journal entries from hotel rooms. Text messages that somehow turned into essays. Notes about beauty, culture, food, business, community and whatever city or country I happened to be wandering through that week.

Some of you have been reading those notes for years.

This is an expanded version of that reach.

The guest list got bigger. The conversation stayed the same.

Some of you have known me for decades. Some of you are meeting me for the first time. Either way, if you stick around long enough, you’ll probably get to know me better than you expected.

That’s the deal.

I’ll bring the stories. You pull up a chair.

Setting the Table is about food, taste, culture and the work of building something from where you come from. Mostly it’s about the Gulf Coast—my home, my obsession and my unfinished business.

I grew up in New Orleans in a family where food wasn’t just food. It was how we connected to each other, and how we connected to the people who came before us.

My grandfather used to take us down to Plaquemines Parish and teach us how to cast a rod. Back then, our tackle box wasn’t really a tackle box. It was a few bobbers, some fishing line, a cup of worms, bologna sandwiches in a sandwich bag and a collection of brightly colored plastic cups tucked inside an old Quaker Oats tin. I always wanted the pink one.

We’d spend hours fishing, but the fishing was never really the point.

The conversations started with bait and ended with family history.

We’d talk about people I had never met as though they had just left the room. Names. Stories. Recipes. Accomplishments. Mistakes.

Our heritage wasn’t treated like a subject.

It was treated like an inheritance.

There was pride in that.

The quiet kind.

The kind that doesn’t need a speech.

My grandmother kept sardines in the cabinet and ate them on saltines with mustard or hot sauce, usually standing at the kitchen counter in the middle of the afternoon.

No ceremony.

No explanation.

It wasn’t a trend.

It wasn’t content.

It was lunch.

These days that same humble tin gets its own photo shoot. My grandmother would not have understood the lighting.

Let’s not get started on the Vienna sausages.

Looking back, I realize my palate wasn’t shaped by restaurants. It was shaped by people. The ones who hunted dinner, the ones who caught dinner, the ones who knew how to stretch a pot because there was a good chance the whole family was stopping by.

In my family, “pot food” wasn’t really a recipe.

It was a philosophy.

Cook enough for whoever shows up.

Make room for one more chair.

Nobody leaves hungry.

Long before tinned fish became something photographed next to natural wine and imported butter, preserved seafood was already part of life in New Orleans. Part of life throughout the Gulf. In a port city, preserving abundance wasn’t novel.

It was practical.

It was culture.

It was survival.

The Gulf Coast has always known how to preserve abundance.

We just haven’t always gotten credit for it.

I think about those cabinets and those tables a lot these days. About how much of who we are lives on a shelf. In a jar. In a recipe card stained from being passed around too many kitchens. In the thing you reach for without thinking.

Food is how I understand almost everything: history, family, money, power, migration, identity and home. Put a plate in front of me and eventually I’ll find the whole story in it. Food tells the truth people try to edit out.

Food is memory.

Food is community.

Food is a record of who loved you before you got here.

A while back I started building a company called Tinfolk. Gulf seafood in a tin, at least on paper. But it was never really about the tin.

The tin is just the vehicle.

The real question is this: Why are so many people getting rich from the culture, ingredients and stories of the Gulf Coast while so little ownership stays here?

That’s a business question.

It’s also a cultural one.

And around here, those are usually the same thing.

I’ll write about that. About building a company from scratch, and the strange optimism it takes to start something nobody asked you to build.

I’ll probably write about a few mistakes too.

Lord knows there will be enough of those.

But Setting the Table isn’t a company newsletter. Tinfolk will have its own voice.

This is mine.

This is where I get to think out loud.

So what can you expect?

Essays about taste. Not just what’s good, but why it’s good and who taught us it was good in the first place.

Stories from the road, because I travel too much and the best meals never happen where you planned them. They happen at the gas station, in somebody’s auntie’s kitchen, at the spot with no sign and no website.

Dispatches from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast that go beyond the postcard version.

The beautiful parts.

The complicated parts.

The parts worth fighting for.

And the build itself. Manufacturing and memory. Supply chains and storytelling. The parts of starting a company nobody puts on a slide.

There will be joy here, and there will be weight here. Most months they’ll show up together. That’s how life works where I’m from.

We laugh at funerals.

We argue over dinner.

We dance through grief.

I’m calling it Setting the Table because it’s the most honest thing I know how to do. A table is where everything happens. The deals. The gossip. The grief. The recipes. The celebrations. The hard conversations. The family history. The future.

Everything worth keeping eventually finds its way to a table.

Setting one is an act of hospitality, but it’s also an act of intention.

You decide who’s invited.

You decide what’s worth serving.

You decide what story gets told.

I don’t know exactly where this goes.

I know I’ll write it monthly.

I know I’ll write it honestly.

And I know I’d rather say one true thing slowly than a hundred clever things fast.

I’ve spent most of my life helping other people tell their stories.

This is where I tell mine.

Pull up a chair.

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