Decorum and Depravity, Together at Last: Part 1

                 I have struggled with the delivery of this blog post for a couple weeks now.  Sometimes there is too much to write about, and I fail to find any common thread to weave the fabric together.  I brainstormed for weeks, trying to find a literary commonality between a wedding of a lifetime, a trashy dance club, the ups and downs of the French Quarter, ladies arm wrestling, and a transvestite open bar benefit.  But then Friday night I was invited on a party bus.  I was told it would be of the fancy variety, a coach bus with a bathroom and finely upholstered seats, a class act ride around the town.  It evolved into the opposite, a sleaze fest of men and women stripping in the aisle and trying to escort strays from the sidewalk to dance around the stripper’s pole in the middle of the bus.  Above the stripper’s pole was a mirror.  Around the mirror were blue Christmas lights, illuminating the reflection of simple vices, an austere emblem of the city’s allowance, if not encouragement, of turpitude in the city's working youth.   Time and time again there is an indelicate balance between class and ass, respectability and irreverence, pomp and perversion.  A night can begin with the best intentions, honest intentions, well-dressed with predetermined limits of insobriety.  But the slope into depravity is not just slippery, in New Orleans it is a slip n’ slide down a summer ski slalom, home-cooked and escalated by a long blue tarp and a hose full of whiskey.  

            I have broken this topic into two blog entries for readers with short attention spans (myself included).   The first part illustrates how debauchery and decorum are often blurred, if not sometimes inextricable, blended together by the diversity of its participants.  The story is told through a mix of narrative, pictures and captions fabricated in the form of time stamped logs.  While I took no such notes at the event, they remain truthful in content.  I hope you enjoy.

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            Part ` : Mr. Legs and Gender Role Reversal in the Central Business District

            When my roommate Catie offered me a free ticket to an open bar benefit buffet dinner, I didn’t ask a lot of questions.   There were free drinks, free food, and some promise of weirdness, as suggested by the name, Mr. Legs.   She only requested I wear something nice. 

            “It’s not casual. It’s classy,” she said.

           

            Inside Generations Hall, I eat bacon maple donut holes and sip on free scotch while surveying the thousands of dollars of services and goods available by silent action.  The hall is broken into three rooms.   Each had an open bar and dozens of caterers serving their specialty foods..  But the focus of the night is not the food or the alcohol.  It is the cat walk.  And the men ready to walk it.  All money will be donated to local rehabilitation houses (for those dependent on not only drugs, but alcohol) and there is no better draw than twenty-five men ephemerally crossdressing for the night, flourishing their anima as bare-legged capricious characters competing for the crown of Mr. Legs.  We all drink and wait for the contestants in suspense.  Here come the girls:
 (Please allow for some confusion of gender-specific pronouns)

  

7:05: Weighing in at 305 pounds with a pecan-colored spray tan, Snookie wows the crowd with his/her fuck you, but please fuck me too attitude.  She walks to the end of the of the catwalk and lifts her skirt and reveals her junk, wrapped in a mini white hammock for support.  Some of us holler, some of us clap, some of us look the other way.    

 

7:26 - Cher arrives.  Rumor has it that the man that plays Cher received a botox injection (I am not satirizing this) to prepare for his/her part.  She struts and waves her hair and looks like she has practiced for years.  Her legs are shaved and she is the only man to rock high heels at a high performance level.  

 

7:37 - Pee Wee Herman arrives.  His legs are also shaved and he performs the famous Big Adventure Dance.  An hour later, he would be declared Mr. Legs of 2011, the night's champion, and without any skirts or heels.  

  

7:46 - Fed-up with men trying to act like women and failing, the leader of the 601 Stompers asserts all that is man and rips off his pants and jacket.   He dances to the end of the catwalk, finds his largest friend, and lifts him repeatedly.  Later, his mustache falls off. 

 

7:56 pm - The Dos Equis Man, Pharaoh, Bernie, Pee Wee, Dumbo pants, and all the characters take a last dance before they wade into the crowd with cups, mugs, and jars. They ask the audience for money to donate to rehabilitating drug users and alcoholics.  They are nonprofit prostitutes.   The open bar ends in two minutes.  Catie and I refill our glasses twice.

 I give Native American Cher five dollars, and he asks me to grab his ass.  I refrain.  We take a picture and he falls down.  It must be the heels. 


          The show is almost over and the bars are now charging money.  Catie and I hear that there is another event down the street aiming to raise money by again reversing gender roles as ostentatiously as possible.  We walk around in a circle until we find the Rusty Nail under the Interstate-10 bridge, host to the bimonthly New Orleans Ladies Arm Wrestling (NOLAW).  NOLAW's intent was to raise money for BreakOut, a nonprofit fighting against the criminalization of variants of traditional sexual orientation and gender identity.  The cause seemed righteous but obscure, and yet it seemed like a thousand people were packed into the bar and patio, standing dancing witness to the corporeal clash of the Big Easy Roller Girls.  A week earlier they had issued  a Big Easy beatdown at Running of the Bulls (see previous post) but now they were pitted against each other in an effort to crown the strongest. (see previous post).  Each contestant took a wrestling name and appropriately disrespects her opponent.  When the judge cannot decide a winner based on strength, music blares and the contestants have a dance-off.  The girl who rolls her Tootsie the most is declared the strongest and ultimately the winner of the summer NOLAW session.

  The match.

 The Tootsie Roll dance-off.

The Winner.

            The contest has finished and a DJ begins to mix dance hits from the 90's.  Much of the classy business casual crowd of Mr. Legs had found their way to the sweaty mass of young professionals and Breakout supporters at the Rusty Nail.  Everyone dances and all the lesbians, straights, gays, transgenders, arm wrestlers, Stompers, teachers, bartenders blend together in a fleshy midnight mass, grinding under the interstate traffic to rap songs dating back to cassette tapes or MTV's TRL more than a decade before.  When Juvenile asks us all to "Back That Ass Up," we seem indistinguishable from each other.  I wondered if I was just drunk, if the alcohol blurred us all together or if it's the crescent city's Dionysian spirit that makes the weird normal and diminishes the lines that other urban societies draw around class, gender, etiquette, and social expectation.  The crowd eventually thins and the music dies. There is a late night rally among friends to go to a local techno dance club, but for me the the balance has been undone, the blend has been unblended, and is nothing left in the night but downward devilry, best left to another night, if at all.