STRANGER THAN FICTION: MARDI GRAS FUN BRINGS ABOUT SOME MARITAL TENSION

Mardi Gras revelers are supposed to let it all hang out, but this was ridiculous!

As a Midwesterner, you've probably heard all the stuff about Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Everyone there is drunk.

You'll get (a) pick-pocketed, (b) mugged, (c) stabbed or (d) all of the above.

If you aren't claustrophobic now, you will be after a few hours on Bourbon Street.

Well, as a recently deflowered former Mardi Gras virgin, I'd like to set the record straight. I wasn't stabbed.

New Orleans is a mere three hours from Pensacola, so when our friend Al proposed a weekend trip to catch the festivities, The Other Half and I couldn't say no. He invited us three months ago.

Three weeks ago, Al mentioned the trip again. "Uh, I've got a couple motels rooms we can stay in, but I don't have a credit card to put them on."

"A COUPLE rooms?" I asked.

"Oh yeah! It's the coolest!" he said. "I've got, like, 16 people going! And I told 'em you'd use your card to reserve the rooms and collect the money and stuff!"

As "The Responsible One," this is the story of my life.

Of course, that put me in the position of shaking down 16 people, some of whom I'd never met, for cash before the trip. Five of them bailed, one because she broke up with Al. Remember Al? The guy who truly believed 16 people could fit in two motel rooms?

Everyone eventually paid up, especially after I invented a story about my friend Sammy "The Horse" Buccino.

So we were off to The Big Easy, which didn't get that name for nothin'. It was a big city full of easy women. And that's not so good on a marriage. Particularly when your husband has consumed every drink you asked him to merely HOLD while you took pictures at a parade.

I should explain that men stand on balconies dangling beads over Bourbon Street and throw them to girls who lift their shirts. Large collections of beads are status symbols of sorts. It's no place for the kiddies.

For women, Mardi Gras works best if you're slender, blonde, large-chested and small-brained. Take Danielle, one of the girls I met over there. She thought Iraq was in Africa and walked away with so many beads around her neck that she could barely keep her desperately-in-need-of-a-root-job head up straight.

Which brings me to Mr. Half.

A girl fitting the description above staggered up to him Saturday night and admired a pair of beads I'd bought him in a gift shop. "Hey," she slurred. "How about I do a little bargaining for those?"

She tried to get her top over her head, but it was a bodysuit and she couldn't get the snaps undone right away.

In the interim, you'd think Mr. Half would have said, "Excuse me, miss, but I'm insulted that you'd even believe I'd look at private parts of your anatomy with my wife standing right next to me. I suggest you consider what kind of person would flash her chest for a $3 strand of beads!"

Instead, it came out something like, "Uhhhhhhhhh."

Back home, he's still paying for that little beverage-induced lapse in judgment.

But despite the two-hour parking space searches, the unbelievably disgusting portable toilets and the dramatic drop in self-esteem I experienced after coming home with three strings of "pity beads," I still believe Mardi Gras is something everyone should experience at least once.

I'll be experiencing it at least twice. I'm going back next year after my liposuction, implant operation and dye job.

~Heidi Nieland is a former staff writer for the Southeast Missourian who now lives in Pensacola, Fla.