No, that's not the Brian Lettier show theme. That's the TBC Brass Band playing a kind of New Orleans type version of the Whitney Houston song, I want to dance with somebody recognize it.

Why are we playing that? Our guest now Mark Hertz Guards sent us a link to that clip

because it was the song that was playing at a parade in New Orleans on Mother's Day 11 years ago

just before Mark and a group of other people were hit by gunfire in a mass

shooting, a Mother's Day mass shooting during a parade in

New Orleans. Mark went back to March in that same parade yesterday for this year's

Mother's Day. Some of you know the name Mark Hurtz-Gard.

He's usually on with us as Environment Correspondent for the Nation magazine.

And he's founder of the Covering Climate Now Media Consortium that inspired our Climate Story of

the Week series on this show. But this time he'll tell us about his experience of

being wounded himself in that mass shooting and the new book that it inspired called Big Red's Mercy,

the shooting of Deborah Cotton and a story of race in America.

Mark always good to have you on.

I never imagine it would be on

something like this, but now I know. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you Brian. It's always a

pleasure to be with you all. And honestly for all we've talked it's only ever been about climate issues really and I had no idea you were shot in a mass shooting so

Before we get into the shooting and the larger issues you explore in the book would would you set the scene for us?

What was this parade and what was happening as that brass band was playing that

Whitney Houston song?

Sure, this was a second line parade here in New Orleans and second line parades are an

iconic ritual, even a sacred one I would say, they go back to the burial rights that enslaved Africans brought with them when they first started arriving in Louisiana back in 1722.

And over time, those burial rituals have evolved into what today are called second-line parades.

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