After the clerk remarked on how it might "start to get a little crazy this afternoon," we decided to make a special visit to Bourbon proper. One corner of Bourbon was under our balcony and it hadn't been busy at all.
Yes. Things had picked up one block away.
I had expected to see girls rasing their tops for beads and throws, because that's the tale you hear about Mardi Gras, but I saw none of that. What I saw was:
A middle-aged man on a balcony pantomiming to a twenty-year-old girl, "Lift your top and I'll throw you these special beads."
The girl pantomiming back, "Perch here on my middle finger, buddy. And I still want those beads."
After this exchange went on two minutes he tossed the beads in resignation. Hah! No boobs for you.
I don't know why he was so intent on seeing this young woman's breasts, because a girl could strip off her top and walk about with just a few dollars worth of glitter applied to her nipples. We saw two young women who had purchased this service, which seems much more efficient than having to get into a power struggle with some guy on a balcony.
I took in the revelry while leaning against a door out of the crowded street. When we moved, I noticed my butt was wet.
Gary asked, "Did you sit down?"
"No, I was just leaning against the door of that bar."
Yeah, in all my anticipatory imagining of men peeing in the streets I always pictured them peeing into the gutter. Gary explained it's easier to hide the peeing if you pee directly on the wall at groin height. Fun fact!
Somehow, even with the carousing horde, parades were still snaking through the crowd on Bourbon and then on to the relatively empty side streets. Even though we'd amassed all our beads in the Taxi Bead Tsunami, I wouldn't have minded some other parade trinkets. Of course I've never had the mid-air eye-hand coordination required to catch something,so when the Krewe of Prima Donnas marched past I cupped my hands and made eye contact. One of them gently tossed something at me from one foot away.
Of course I didn't catch it, and it fell into this puddle:
When I looked down it was frankly the ugliest rubber bracelet I have ever seen, but she threw it right AT me and I felt obliged.
I fished it from the puddle, and because I had to squat there was time for other revelers to shriek, "Lady get out of that puddle that's nasty!" I felt I already had pee on my butt and that I could wash my hands more easily than my jeans and get into the spirit, uptight people. Laissez les bons temps rouler.
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