8/5/08 Testicle Festival

My friend Sally and I went to the Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival yesterday, better known as the Testicle Festival. It may very well be the most ridiculous event I have ever attended. It's sort of like Mardi Gras in Montana, with a little bit of Sturgis bike week and a swingers' club thrown in for good measure. We got there a bit late in the day because of the amount of work we had to do, so we missed Bullshit bingo, where you place bets on where a bull will shit on a very large grid drawn on the dust in chalk. However we did arrive in time for the oil wrestling match. We couldn't see much due to the crowds, other than the girls getting oiled up in the beginning.
We gave up watching since we couldn't see so we just kind of wandered around. There was music blaring that was directly from 1989. It was the same hair metal Tiffany and I listened to back in the day. It was like being in a time warp hearing all that Tesla and Skid Row. Soon this man and woman come driving by on this golf cart with a plate of cherries. They call us over, offer us a cherry, and start talking to us. At first I think they are maybe promo people for some unknown product or something but after a couple of minutes I realize they are actually hitting on us, trying to get us to go back to their campsite with them. This theme continued throughout the day. We did not actually get hit on by many men, most of the men we talked to were actually just friendly and not sleazy at all. However, we got hit on by many women, most of whom were with men. There was a lot of that "show your boobs for plastic beads" thing going on, kind of like Bourbon street. Flashing your boobs gets you a strand of beads, but you can often get up to 5 strands of beads if you are willing to make out with your female friend, or lick her nipple.
We heard there was going to be a wet t-shirt contest so we moved up to the stage to make sure we could see this time. Of course, right in front of us is the couple that was trying to get with us earlier. They and another couple whom they were apparently more successful with proceeded to engage in a form of breast hunting. They would pick a girl out of the crowd that they thought would be receptive and then one of the guys would go over and try to get her to flash for beads. This continued (with about a 30% success rate) for about 30 minutes until the contest started.
Apparently, a regular wet t-shirt contest isn't phallic enough so you actually have to put a penis-shaped attachment on the end of the hose before you squirt the girls. To deem this contest a wet t-shirt contest is a bit of a misnomer. Really, 2 or 3 girls come on stage, get doused with water, then rip off their shirts. The first group left it at that, but it escalated quickly. The second group flashed their crotch, and by the third group all the guys in the crowd were chanting "beaver! beaver! beaver!" so pretty soon all the girls were just getting naked after getting doused with the hose. By the time the second to last group came out the guys were chanting "eat her box! eat her box!" By the last group a guy next to me kept yelling "eat box to win! eat box to win!" No girls actually complied with this. The girl who won was the only one with fake boobs, which was kind of disappointing.
Having survived this spectacle, and multiple requests for breast showing, we decided it was time to get down to the business at hand. You could either order your RMOs by the 1/3 pound or you could have a "ball kebob". Who can resist that right? Unfortunately, I can report that should you ever get the opportunity that you should definitely have your testicles fried instead of grilled. When grilled they have roughly the consistency of overcooked calamari. They really don't have any flavor at all, which I guess is good. Sally made the mistake at looking at the inside of one, which I told her was a bad idea! These guys sitting across from us let us have one of the fried ones and actually I have to say they weren't half bad.
We basically spent the rest of the time there walking around taking pictures of scary people, scary hair, and scary outfits, all of which were in abundance. If Sally saw something good she would have me pose like she was taking my picture and then shoot over my shoulder or next to me so we weren't as obvious. We actually bonded with these really fun guys from Arkansas that were walking around doing the same thing we were. There were some guys walking around naked, which seemed odd somehow even if it is a testicle festival. There really weren't girls walking around naked or even topless probably for fear of undue harassment. It overall wasn't as rowdy as you'd expect. There were little pockets of rowdiness but most people were actually pretty mellow. There was definitely some people getting more drunk by the time we were leaving but you were mostly able to tell because they'd just be standing around with classic party stance.
Ok, that's almost it for my Montana adventures. I'm finishing up my paper this week, giving a presentation on Thursday, and then driving back on Friday.