The first prerequisite to running wild and looking pretty is to regard Bourbon Street as your Mecca.

With that established, I was at Mecca one Saturday night when I ran into a girl whom I went to high school with. Being from the area, it isn’t uncommon to run into fellow Chalmette High alumni while grocery shopping, or rather, driving past Central Lockup on the way to the grocery.

What made this encounter exceptional was that I would have rather burned my eyes out with cigarettes than see this girl ever again.

“Mona” was on Rue Bourbon with her boyfriend “Benny,” who also went to Chalmette High. They weren’t a particularly fetching couple, which I realized while “Mona” relayed their evening at a strip club.

“Josh,” she said, “Benny had the time of his life just now. He gave that dancer so many 20s.”

While I was trying to get the image of “Benny” stuffing anything out of my head, “Mona” continued, “Josh, remember when I used to babysit your sister because your parents didn’t trust you to watch her by yourself? She was the sweetest girl.”

She grinned that clueless, Hare Krishna grin mental patients and puppies have, and I couldn’t bear to tell her my name wasn’t Josh and my parents didn’t trust me to watch my sister because I didn’t have a sister.

If I did have a sister, I would have let my laundry basket watch her before I let “Mona.”

“Mona” was a lucky girl in high school. She had a wonderful Bosnian boyfriend named Yasco who loved her with all his eastern European heart.

Unfortunately, Yasco was not real.

According to “Mona,” Yasco would return to the U.S. when he was finished performing with Justin Timberlake who, coincidentally, was the man she left for Yasco.

“Mona” would practice white magic everyday for her lover’s safe return home. With the noblest of intentions and with Yasco always in her heart, she would occasionally use her powers for the good of others or to hex the jerks who called her fat.

When my friend Kym and I confessed that neither of us had seen snow, “Mona” promised she would recite an incantation to give us a white Christmas.

When the snow never fell, she admitted that the Goddesses had mistaken New Orleans for Chicago and directed the snow there.

I forgave her, not only because she seemed genuinely apologetic but primarily because I didn’t want a voodoo doll named Justin to have pins sticking in its spine.

You couldn’t help but forgive her. She was a charmer who could melt the hearts of the popular, the not-so-popular and Danny Bonaduce.

When a high school history teacher decided to grow a beard, “Mona” flattered him like a PR pro: “I like the beard, Mr. Bradley. You look like Ulysses S. Grant.” So what else could I do but grin and tell her that my sister would begin LSU in the fall and that she remembers her fondly.