A brief video of two young women twerking on the subway tracks went viral yesterday, leading to predictable tsk-tsking from lame bloggers and at least one MTA spokesman. “One word, dumb,” chided the MTA’s Kevin Ortiz. But for those wondering what the hell the girls could have been thinking, the answer is simple: “U know, yolo,” Jarisa Fuentes, one of the twerkers, wrote in an e-mail to Daily Intelligencer. “I was only having fun.”
Fuentes says the twerkage took place at around 1 a.m. on Sunday morning at a D train station in the Bronx. She and her friends had been waiting for a train for nearly an hour, and started talking about a video they had seen of people jumping across the tracks from one platform to the other. “But because I’m short I knew I wasn’t gonna make it,” Fuentes said. Recalling a trend she’d noticed of people taking photos of themselves in various restricted areas, Fuentes decided that something along those lines was more feasible.
“We were down there for only a couple seconds,” Fuentes says. “Also we made sure we were careful when we went down there.” The girls and their videographer “made sure that no train was in sight” and that the “third rail wasn’t near us.” (Depends on your definition of near, of course — when standing on the subway tracks, the third rail can’t be more than a few feet away.)
We asked Fuentes if she had felt any hesitation about, you know, climbing down into the tracks to film a twerking video. “I wasn’t scared,” she says. “I was just cautious.”
