A story we heard over the weekend has given us an idea we think our readers, particularly those of you in and around New Orleans and particularly those of you who don’t have much use for Mitch Landrieu as that city’s mayor, will like.

Namely, that Landrieu dropped in at Mandina’s, the famous neighborhood restaurant on Canal Boulevard in Mid-City, either Friday or Saturday night (we’re not sure which), and the crowd in the place erupted in loud boos at the sight of him.

When we were told that story, the conversation immediately turned to a wish that there was video of such a spectacle. After all, such video would be nearly priceless.

Nearly, but not exactly. We can put a price on it, which we’ll outline below.

So we thought about it, and an idea germinated. The idea is this – we want video of regular folks offering civic engagement to Mitch Landrieu as he makes public appearances around the city of New Orleans, and since we know what a very large number of folks have to offer him – and particularly what that large number of folks who read this site will have to offer him – we’re putting together a contest.

We’re designing a t-shirt we’ll give to anyone who enters this contest, and we’re going to offer a cash prize to six recipients who qualify, with a lot larger cash prize to the winner.

It goes like this. You can enter the contest by sending us video of people booing and/or heckling Mitch Landrieu (EDIT: the heckling is optional; the booing is not) when he goes out in public – send us a YouTube link, Vimeo link, Facebook video link or a video file via e-mail at [email protected], and if we get it we’ll post it to The Hayride and send you a t-shirt.

And at the end of June we’ll pick six contest winners based on a tally of the combined “likes,” shares and comments under each contest post at the Hayride’s Facebook page. Which, incidentally, if you haven’t “liked” on Facebook yet, you absolutely should.

The five runners-up will each get $100 prizes, which we’ll pay via PayPal. The winner gets a $500 prize. When you send us submissions, be sure to include the PayPal address to get paid, as well as a physical address for the t-shirt and some description of the event, location and time the video making up your contest entry was shot.

Now, we’re not trying to cause trouble here. Accordingly, while we might still post it on the website you’re disqualified from the contest if the video contains either vulgarity, harrassment or personal threats made against the mayor. And we don’t want to see any video of anyone getting in his personal space. That’s not constructive engagement, and we don’t want to see people who agree with us sink to the level of the Indivisible mob or the Gary Chambers/Alton Sterling fan club in Baton Rouge. We’re going to encourage our readers who’ll be participating in this as judges by liking and sharing and commenting to be using eloquence and creativity, rather than passion, as their criteria.

But that’s the contest. Now get out your phones, warm up those voices and keep a lookout for the mayor as he makes his rounds!