Word: mamou
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Mamou is a dog-eared old town, with a not-quite-finished look about it, as though its builders knocked off a week or two early. It is a low town, with one main street full of bars, set in farming country where people raise soybeans one year, rice the next, winter rye the next, and then begin the cycle again. Over the years nothing much changes in Mamou. The boys in this culture are expected to mature into good providers and two-fisted drinkers, and the girls are expected to marry and swap obsequiousness for fidelity and adulation...
Paul Tate Jr., of the Mamou law firm Tate, Tate & Tate, explained that it is a day to "do things out of character even if you don't drink. You pinch a pretty woman, or something. And then the next day you clean up your...
...interior and exterior, enveloped the men of Mamou on the morning of the great ride. Breakfast was beer and boudin (pronounced boo-dan, a muscular local sausage of rice, pork and pork liver that can quickly become an addiction). The mounted Cajun corps made it half a mile down the road before it had to find a field to relieve itself...
...midafternoon the riders were listing seriously. All they had to do was make it back to Mamou still able to function minimally. There the girls would join them on the backs of their steeds, and they could have gumbo, and they could dance until midnight. The lesson seemed to be: get drunk, hunt chickens, eat well, kiss the dickens out of pretty girls, straighten your deportment the next day, assume your place among your fellow...
There was only one casualty, a boy named Tim who lost the knack of sitting his horse. A police officer turned Tim over to a van full of out-of-town celebrants headed back to Mamou and turned his horse over to another rider. Tim said he had had eleven beers. In town the boy's mother saw her child slumped in a car packed with strangers. "Tim," she shouted with alarm, "what are you doing in there...