DW rode in a local Mardi Gras parade last night. I didn't go, and was in bed by 10:30. Two of the members of the kids' classroom staffs came by to babysit last night, so I went out for a bite to eat and a trip to the coffeehouse with a book. Yeah, I'm really boring. Anyhow, DW rolled in around midnight, totally sore from standing and throwing beads for several hours. She didn't drink anything along the way, contrary to the tradition in which riders get rip roaring drunk.

I used to attend most of the New Orleans parades when I was single. I lived right along the Uptown parade route, which is where the most famous parades roll. I lived on the edge of an overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood, so I usually watched parades with black people. I used to gripe about the Rex parade throwing one set of beads every block, then I watched that parade from a predominantly white area one year. Hmm, I thought, they throw more stuff here. Enough negativity, though.

My favorite Mardi Gras was in 1989, when I flew down from law school with my friend Maurice. We got a bit rowdy, though neither of us got laid in the street (or anywhere else, for that matter). Maurice did grab ahold of an attractive woman at one point and plant a huge kiss on her lips. I got a great picture of hundreds of men looking up at us, hooting and hollering, when we stood on a balcony next to a woman who was baring her breasts (showing her tits, in the Mardi Gras vernacular). At the time, I had an extremely homophobic roommate named Bob. As Maurice and I walked past a place called the Club My O My, I chortled, "wouldn't Bob love it if we went in here." Maurice was behind me at the time, and I turned to see him going inside the club. I followed, and we were seated. After several minutes, Maurice commented to me that if he didn't know better, he would think that the dancers and waitresses were men. I had to break the news to him. We had fun watching the act, but were a little skittish when the waitress, Seth, asked me to put a dollar in his garter. I handed him the money instead, then told him that my name was "Jim." Or maybe I stuck it in his garter, I don't remember. We discovered that the best place to watch the parades was right at the end, when they unloaded all their junk. There we were, scrambling for plastic trinkets with preteens.

And that's Mardi Gras.