The One at Mardi Gras
(The Universe is in your Hands edit)
Janet Kuypers
3/25/24
I was at Mardi Gras and got a bunch of beads from parades (no, I didn’t lift my shirt for them). A friend of mine had a balcony on Bourbon Street, so we were on it Friday night, and saw the swarms of people stretched for over a mile as one large mass, no one could walk and the crowd just kind of carried them along. All the men expected women to get naked for them for beads, but I refused to strip for drunk strangers. Men would look up at me on a balcony inquisitively, as if to ask either for me to give them beads or for me to strip. Since I wasn’t stripping, I decided to turn the tables and see if men would accept the same conditions they asked of these women.
When they looked up at me like that, I would say, “Drop your pants.” They would look up at me, confused, because the women are the ones that are supposed to be the ones doing the stripping, but in general I got two responses from the men: either they would look at me like I was crazy and walk away, or they would shrug, as if to say, “Okay,” and then start unzipping their pants. Then they would make a gesture to turn around, as if to ask, “Do you want to see my butt?”, and that’s when I’d yell, “The front,” and they’d turn back around, with their pants and underwear at their knees, and start moving their hips (which I never asked for, by the way).
Over the course of the evening I managed to get at least twenty men to strip like this for me, and I was amazed that there was this microcosm of society that allowed this kind of debauchery in the streets, a sort of prostitution-for-plastic-beads form of capitalism. I was reveling in this bizarre annual ritual when one man, wearing grey and minding his own business, decided to look up at me. I asked him to drop his pants, and instead of disgustedly leaving or willingly obliging, he crossed both hands on his chest and looked up at me, as if to ask, “You want to me do what? You naughty, naughty girl.” He smiled and looked up at me — and it occurred to me that I finally found someone in this massive crowd that thinks the way I do... Someone who wouldn’t blindly do what I asked, but at the same time wouldn’t think I was crazy for asking.
For the next half-hour he never left from under my balcony, and he would still turn around occasionally to look up at me. He finally signaled that he had to move on with his friends, so I threw beads to him — not only because he was a good sport, not even because he was so good looking, but because he was the only one in New Orleans who actually earned them.
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