Hello. My name is Lisa. I am from Chalmette.

Chalmette is the butt of every local joke. If anything unites the people of New Orleans -black or white, Uptown or West Bank, rich or poor – it’s making fun of my hometown.

If you think you’re witty when you take a jab at me for being from Chalmette, you’re wrong. You’re just boring.

Earlier this week, I attended a lecture by a prominent local writer. In the span of an hour, the writer made several references to Chalmette, once using the phrase ‘trailer trash.’

I did not have the heart to tell my mother, who is a huge fan of that writer, that he basically called her an ignorant honky. I also didn’t have the heart to tell the writer that my mom never lived in a trailer until after the hurricane.

I might start to carry a shiv and show you exactly where it hurts when you insult my family.

For those of you not from here, here’s a summary of the character of Chalmette.

Chalmette is a suburb of New Orleans, and it’s not Metairie, so there’s strike one. Keep in mind that much of Metairie, at least pre-Katrina, was made up of Chalmette natives who moved 14 miles and then pretended that they didn’t graduate from Chalmette High School.

Chalmette is surrounded by bayous and lakes, so every night before dinner, we stroll into our backyards, put on our white shrimp boots and dive into a lake of seafood, coming up with buckets of crawfish and smelling like we just walked out of a refrigerator graveyard.

And the smell, in general, is the stuff of legends. You can’t go anywhere without someone mentioning the rotten egg fumes that came from the numerous gas and oil plants, used to fuel and heat the rest of the city and probably most of the South.

Oh, and every joke you’ve ever heard about stupid groups, whether it’s about blondes, hicks, politicians or Yankees, can be applied to the people of Chalmette. We’re complete idiots, which makes sense, since I know dozens of people my age who are from the area who attend Loyola or Tulane on full or partial scholarships.

See, I figured the jokes would stop after it was decimated by the hurricane, but no, they kept on coming. And it’s even funnier now because the joke is on the rest of the city.

Since Chalmette does have a pretty diehard population, and many would like to rebuild, the large majority of Chalmette’s 70,000 residents are displaced throughout New Orleans and its suburbs.

On a regular basis, my ears gleefully echo with the collective screams of northshore, West Bank, Uptown and Metairie residents who are horrified by the thought of Chalmatians infecting high society with their Brooklyn accents and their inbred genes.

Let’s pretend the hurricane swept these insults away, too.

It’s old.

Get over it.