I don’t always film people who’ve seen the world. Sometimes I film people who never left home. And those are the ones that wreck me.
Last week I was in Gonzales, Louisiana, filming a woman named Momo. Her real name was longer and more French than that, but everyone called her Momo, and if you knew her for five minutes you’d understand why one name was all she needed.
Momo was born in 1927. In the house we were filming in. In the very room where I set up my camera. She grew up there. When she got married in the 1940s, her husband didn’t take her somewhere new. He moved in. And here they were, ninety years later, still in that house. Same walls. Same kitchen. Same everything.
I know what you’re thinking. She never left?
Not exactly.
Momo never traveled beyond Gonzales, Louisiana, with one exception: LSU football games. She had not missed a single game in person since 1955. Let me do the math for you. That’s sixty-two years of showing up to Tiger Stadium. Sixty-two years. She saw Billy Cannon. She saw the Earthquake Game. She saw every era of LSU football, in the flesh, from the stands. I’ve met die-hard fans in my life. Momo was something else entirely.
But the film wasn’t about football. It was about the house.
Some of the families I work with have these sprawling, globe-trotting histories. Military service on three continents. Immigration stories. Big, dramatic arcs. And those are wonderful to capture.
Then there’s Momo, whose entire universe fit inside one house in one town in one parish. And it was overflowing.
She had recipes. Cajun chili, gumbo, things I will not attempt to replicate because I am a Texan and I know my lane. Her family wanted those recipes on film. They wanted her voice, her hands, the way she moved around that kitchen like she’d memorized every square inch of it. Which, ya know, she had. For ninety years.
I think about Momo a lot. Because her story reminds me that a life doesn’t have to be big to be extraordinary. It doesn’t have to span continents or involve narrow escapes. Sometimes a life is a house, a kitchen, a recipe, and six decades of never missing a football game.
That’s not a small story. That’s a life lived with absolute conviction.
Momo was one of the greatest ladies I ever filmed. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t hand out superlatives like candy. But she earned it. Ninety years in one house, and she filled every room.