Rodeo

The hat is the most exciting part
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The day of the big rodeo. We are due to leave the hotel by coach at 6.45 pm so we arrive at the foyer just before the time and discover a large queue outside on the pavement. We join them and wait.   And wait!   And Wait!

At 7.15 pm a coach passes the waiting queue by as it is completely full from another hotel.  Five minutes later our hotel's first coach arrives and the throng moves slowly forward.  Whilst the first coach is filling up a second coach comes down the street but is unable to pull up outside the hotel because the first coach is still in the way.  Pauline & I are towards the back of the queue.  This now becomes the front of the queue as the people at the back begin stampeding down the street towards the waiting coach.    We finally board the coach and we are off.   By the time we arrive it is almost 7.45 and there are massive queues at the food counters.  Why that should be the case is a mystery to us as the food consists of large corn cobs dunked in hot butter, sausage in a dry roll and (in our case) various completely inedible Southern Texan style fare such as Hot Chicken Wings, Tacos and Burritos.  By the way Burrito means little donkey in Spanish which is a damn sight more attractive proposition than the edible version being offered up here.   The booze counters are less busy and offer a good selection of beers and a nice Californian Woodbridge red wine.    Mysteriously in these here parts there are no food trays and therefore no way of transporting drinks and food to the stadium.  So you have to precariously balance the food and drinks in your hands; in the process leaving a well defined melted dripping butter trail all the way to your seat.  The pre-rodeo entertainment is very curious as it is a loud and tuneless rock group singing old Elton John and Abba style songs.  The lead female singer sounds like a howling banshee on a bad day and what is more the stage on which they are performing is about a mile way at the far side of the stadium so, unless you have binoculars, you can’t see them anyway.  This act is accompanied by various cowboy clowns intermittently turning cartwheels and running around with empty buckets of non-water material to throw at the audience supplemented by young kids riding aimlessly around the ring.

“He’s so tough even Clint Eastwood would run away”

How about that corn?
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Finally the rodeo proper is due to start and what suspiciously looks like an old chuck wagon enters the ring accompanied by loud music and a running commentary from the rodeo announcer asking us for a big Texas welcome for our revered president of the American Dental Association. As the president is shaped rather like me perhaps it was appropriate for him to enter in that way rather than by galloping in on his white charger but I can assure you that the welcome was not perhaps as wild as one might expect in Good Ole Texas.

Dark in the Landings
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That reminds me that we once attended a “Black Rodeo” in Fort Worth, Texas; black because the participants in the rodeo were all black cowboys. At the start of the rodeo the local Senator and his wife and kids were introduced to the audience and rode their horses around the rodeo ring whilst accompanied by the American National Anthem with the audience rising as one man to their feet to join in the singing.  Unbelievably however the senator’s horse and his wife's and kids horses were as conspicuously white as the Senator and his family were! The  commentator was great fun uttering a series of ever escalating phrases to describe the cowboys and their attitudes to life.  These were mainly related to a theme of their toughness; you know “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”.   As each competitor was introduced we were given a toughness rating such as “Man this guy is so tough he eats nails for breakfast” or “He’s so tough even Clint Eastwood would run away”. Invariably the tougher the guy, the harder he fell and tough guy after tough guy failed to last too long on those bucking broncs. All in all, a great show, fantastic bravery and tremendous skill.

Turning back to this ADA rodeo, it turned out to be not a little akin to root canal therapy in that provided you were anaesthetized you would not have felt too much pain BUT unfortunately we were still sober.  It was a boring unadventurous show consisting of a limited number of events and mainly featuring rookie teenagers.  Anyway mercifully it was all over within 50 minutes (about the same time as a complicated root canal therapy) and we exited early just as the crap band reappeared.  As we were early we boarded a coach early and headed back to town and our hotel.   In  our hotel there is a jazz venue called Jim Cullum's Landing that I first visited in 1983 when I attended a business meeting with my then employer Audi Volkswagen.  Being early and still hungry we dropped in at the Landing and there we found that Jim and his 7 piece band were in full swing.   Now I have to say that Jim, who has been playing at the Landing since 1963, has slowed down a bit since I first saw him but the clarinetist and pianist were absolutely top drawer.  Unfortunately the steak sandwich tasted as it had been there since 1963 as well.  Anyway by the time I had finished my Martini bath, yes you have read that right, a giant sized Martini served in a miniature bath, I couldn't of cared less.