With Snoop Dogg and the wild tummy shirt girls at Mardi Gras

As the brawl entered its second minute, a stream of suds cascaded from a nearby balcony. The beer drenched the punchers and extinguished the fight as though it were a campfire. The unending crowd separated and swallowed up the combatants, who quickly became indistinguishable from the rest of the thousands. The horde suctioned itself together.

There was nothing so nasty as that going on up on the Girls Gone Wild balcony. The Girls Gone Wild crew rented the balcony, which was part of a barbecue-stained peach-colored "event room" that perched atop a Bourbon Street watering hole. Down by the bathrooms, there was a doorway to the bar proper. A seven-foot wrought-iron gate had been swung tight against it. A zoo-like mass of people pressed up against the gate, peering between the bars for a blinking glimpse of the strippers as they passed by to relieve themselves.

Not that there was much urination. Everybody seemed to be rolling on something other than liquids. The Girls Gone Wild cameramen were genuinely endowed with an unending flow of good times -- they had the best job in the world, and they knew it. They wore a uniform, a white T-shirt with blue long sleeves and a company logo. They looked like a softball team, and they roamed the balcony and the streets below in perfect unison, while operating cheap palm-sized video cameras.

The massive collection of partyers down below turned their faces to the balcony, where a handful of brassy blondes simpered in Girls Gone Wild babydoll shirts. A chant churned through the crowd. "Show your tits. Show your tits. Show your tits." That's all it took. Breasts spilled out into the open air: 50 degrees and hard nipples. The crowd roared an animal approval. It sounded like the call for an encore at a Sabbath concert -- a steady stream of white thunder. Hundreds of flashbulbs cracked off simultaneously, bathing the Girls in the light of the most temporary stardom. The balcony quaked under the excitement, and everyone sensed that it could topple any second. Bead necklaces were flung through the air like ropes of jism.

The cops blew into the party. "Who's in charge?" bellowed the lead officer, a middle-aged potbelly with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a stiff navy blue hat. Everyone tried to ignore him, meekly muting their conversational tones, as though this would compel him to vanish. "Who's in charge here?" he asked again. No answer. He visibly harrumphed. "OK then," he said. "We're in charge!" The cops trudged onto the balcony, where they disappeared in conversation with the man who was actually running the show. His name was Joe Francis, head of the Girls Gone Wild franchise. Francis looked like a prep school quarterback. In fact, he looked much like his target demo -- fresh-faced, athletic and a little dopey. Then again, any guy who manages to pull an estimated 100-to-1 return can't be all that dense.

The cop's entourage was still filing in when a bright light filled the room. Another camera, yet this one was shoulder-mounted and broadcast quality. Two Girls Gone Wild guys in headsets and softball shirts huddled in the center of the room, where they whispered like teammates on the pitcher's mound. "Dude, whose camera is that?" the one with the experimental facial hair asked the one with a tart on each arm. "I think it's the cops'." The first guy looked stunned. "They got better equipment than us."

The cops wanted the Girls to stop going wild on the balcony. Foot traffic on the street had ceased, creating a bottleneck that was crushing people down below. The police dispatched the cavalry, and pretty soon cop horses were doing doughnuts on Bourbon Street, knocking people down, frightening them away, for their own good, of course.

In a minute, the party ratcheted back up to its former pace. How could it stop? The plastic badges that guests were required to wear around their necks contained the words "Snoop Dogg" in big bubble letters: "Special Guest," it said. Was this the source of all the whispers? With so many parties to go to, was Snoop Dogg actually coming to this one?

Next Page: You could argue that without Snoop, Girls Gone Wild would not exist

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