My favorite moment at this year’s Carnivale Parade in Manitou was a friend’s gay subversion of the spotlight. Did anyone get a picture?

We were watching the parade beside the flatbed truck upon which two radio jocks were announcing the entries. In between discussing their intentions to drink to excess, they’d describe each parade entry, egg on the participants, and whenever they deemed it appropriate, they’d suggest that ladies bare their breasts. The two seemed to think that the masked girls were supposed to both throw the beads and show their boobs instead of the reciprocal tat for tit.

The two hired jocks got plenty of beads thrown their way, and nothing more –it satisfies me to say– until my friend Larry came parading by.

Larry was not part of the parade, and was in fact walking the other direction along the sidewalk, but was showing off his Mardi Gras finery, a flowing silk cape decorated with a hand painted, life sized nude. It was a fully nude figure, androgynous from the backside, with long locks of hair and facial features in profile. The DJs may be forgiven, since they didn’t know Larry, nor had they maybe fully assessed his parading stride, for having mistaken all that skin for a woman’s. But they went on and on about “that’s what we’re talking about, hubba, hubba” etc, having Larry stop and pose repeatedly the better to acknowledge their construction worker catcalls.

Then one of the DJs thought to ask Larry to bend over, to which Larry obliged, and the bare backside bent with him, which left the DJ really pleased with himself. “I’ll bet you didn’t think of that” he chided Larry, as if the Jock had snuck an indiscretion past him. The crowd was presumed to be laughing along as Larry was being cuckolded by the clever jock’s too easy conquest of the “girl” on the cape. But Larry was eating it up.

Certain they could milk this for a bigger laugh, the DJs asked their mark to repeat his bow in the middle of the street and Larry ceremoniously complied. The figure on his back mooned us all, or beckoned us with its beguiling bare bottom, depending on how you saw it. Larry addressed all sides before standing erect, beaming. Read that as you will, it’s only conjecture. The Manitou crowd clapped and clapped, nothing lost on them. Then Larry gave us a wink before parading back whence he had come, all parties immensely pleased with the encounter.