TARGET PRACTICE

More bead mania, mixed with considerable cleverness. The woman standing along the rail is holding a painted box. It may be impossible to read the words at the resolution this image gets when uploaded. There is a circular target painted in the center. The upper flap says BEADS and the lower BOX. The left and right flaps have arrows pointing to the middle with the words HIT and AIM.

I don't know if the strategy was successful. She was across the street so when a float passed by my view was blocked.               

BEADS!

Crowds line the Mardi Gras parade route waving and screaming at the passing floats, begging the participants to hurl brightly colored strings of beads in their direction. The spectators, if they are lucky to catch some. pile them around their necks, layer after layer. It's mass hysteria. I bet most of them end up in the trash within a few days.                 

COME! FOLLOW ME TO THE BEER!

That idea would have met the spirit of the day at the pre-Mardi Gras pet parade on Sunday. However, that wasn't what was actually going on here. Some of the marchers throw strands of brightly colored beads into the crowd, like on the man at frame left. The person in the flamingo hat (!) is doing just that. People along the sidewalk scream "beads, BEADS, BEADS" to try to get the thrower's attention. It can start to sound like squealing animals.

It's common that these people see me along the parade route with nothing around my neck but my camera strap and insist on hanging some on me. I always gratefully accept.           

Support Our Troops

I don't know about Carnival celebrations in other countries, but at what we call Mardi Gras (French for Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar), the people riding the floats throw strings of cheap, shiny plastic beads at the crowd. People line the parade route screaming, pleading beeeaaddsss!, as if the nobility were dispensing gold coins to the peasants. What exactly happens to all these baubles over the next few days is a bit of a mystery.

In this photo, a spectator is using a ploy that is either fraudulent or just weird, a sign begging "BEADS FOR THE TROOPS." "Support our troops" signs and stickers are common in the U.S. these days. Even those of us who are horrified by Bush's military adventures have respect for the men and women in the field. Does the man holding the sign intend to send box loads of trinkets to soldiers in Iraq? Is there a more selfish reason? Either way, it's pretty strange.