Born in New Orleans on October 28, 1785, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (also known as Bernard de Marigny), was a French-Creole American nobleman, playboy, politician, and President of the Louisiana Senate between 1822-1823. He died on February 3, 1868 in New Orleans, he is buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.  More information.

Happy Birthday Antoinette K-Doe
Born on February 3, 1943

Antoinette Dorsey was born in New Orleans on February 3, 1943. She was a cousin of rhythm & blues singer Lee Dorsey.

After marrying Earl Fox, she moved with him Buras, in Plaquemines Parish.  The Fox's had no children of their own but took care of 27 foster children over the years. Antoinette worked as a seamstress and as a welder’s helper on offshore oil rigs. 

She  returned to New Orleans, after splitting with Fox, in the 1980s and worked as a grocery store clerk, a bartender and a bar manager. While working at the Hinky Dinky bar on St. Claude that she met up again with Ernest Kador Jr. (Ernie K-Doe), who she had known years before.  K-Doe was down on his luck, sometimes living on the streets.  They became close.  “She had a remarkable influence on this guy, who was just uncontrollable,” said David Freedman, the general manager of radio station WWOZ. “She got him to sober up, and they were running a bar. It’s amazing that anyone could get K-Doe to do anything, much less that.”

The bar was the Mother-in-Law Lounge at 1500 North Claiborne Avenue, opened in 1994 and named for K-Doe's greatest hit, Mother-in-Law, which was written by Allen Toussaint and recorded by K-Doe in 1961,  Ernie had long before crowned himself "Emperor of the Universe" but it was Antoinette who turned the bar into a shrine to K-Doe.

They married in January 1996, in the bar, and lived in the apartment upstairs. Ernie died in 2001 at age 65 but Antoinette kept her husbands memory alive at the lounge where, in addition to a plethora of memorabilia from his carreer, she dressed a manequin of K-Doe and dressed it in a series elaborate costumes of he own design.

According to the New York Times, "When Hurricane Katrina hit, Mrs. K-Doe stayed put. She moved the memorabilia and the statue upstairs and, armed with a shotgun, kept watch over her domain for more than a week before being airlifted out [seven days later]."  In her own words  “I heard guys in the water talking about breaking into the lounge for the whiskey,” she told USA Today in 2007. “I fired my shotgun right over their heads, close enough to scare them away. And I yelled, ‘I have more bullets!’ Nobody was getting in.” She was surrouned by five and a half feet of floodwater.

After she returned home, she batches of gumbo and othe local favorites, as much as 200 servings at a time, to feed volunteers who had come to New Orleans to help rebuild her neighborhood. And with the help of the Hands on Network, the lounge reopened on the first anniversary of Katrina on August 29, 2006.