It’s my birthday and I’ll squeeeeeeeeeee if I want to. Which, generally, I do not, being far too dignified, not to mention Canadian; the last Canadian who squeeeed in public was Margaret Trudeau, and look what happened to her!
*crickets*
Exactly.
Where was I? Well might you ask, even though you were too shy to ask and I had to do it myself (do I have to do everything myself? Right, I’m single. I do. NOW I understand why women get husbands. Wow, the things ya larn in a common blog post parenthetical (although whether parenthetical is a noun or an adjective is not, apparently, one of those things, just FYI)).
I was in the second row of the floor seating to watch the Lipizzaner Stallions travelling show, which is one of the better places on Earth for a horse nut to be except for the front row of the floor seating to watch the Lipizzaner Stallions, especially when Front Row has a great big honkin’ cowboy hat in it obscuring the airs above the ground. Dude, I don’t care if you’re Kenny Chesney, the whole world can tell you’re Bruce Willis bald anyway, and you’re lucky I didn’t have anything more offensive in my handbag than a paperback of Pistol Packin’ Madams: True Stories of Notorious Women of the Old West . Although now that I think of it, I could easily have split your thick skull with it, as it is a weighty tome.
We moved to some empty front-row seats and all was well. Since it was my birthday and all, which is why I had the ticket in the first place, I felt somewhat licensed to squeee; indeed, I felt it a sacred duty to do so, in homage to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, that girl in Hidalgo who almost ended up with Viggo, “The Daughter of Sheikh Maktoum al Maktoum” (you’re not allowed to use her personal name, apparently, but she was one of the winningest jockeys in the Middle East, no lie) and all those other horse-crazed girls throughout history (one wonders if they were all so fond of horses when they had to ride sidesaddle…but I digress…). I was, however, too Canadian (in the end, and everywhere else as far as I know) to squeee.
I need not feel ashamed, nor unloyal neither, as an entire stadium of presumably favorably-disposed-towards-the-pretty-horsies people sqeeed not, not one among them, not once. It was no Jonas Brothers Concert, despite the superior beauty of the performers.
Which is really just a very long-winded way of getting to the point that the rather surprising gender balance was as follows:
Horses: 100% stallions. And one of them took the opportunity to prove it, too, but that’s enough of THAT kind of talk.
Riders: Head rider male, subordinate riders female. T’was ever thus, since that double-agent Percheron assassinated Catherine the Great.
Audience: 55% male/45% female.
That’s right. Predominately male, and I’m not just saying that because I will NEVER AS LONG AS I LIVE FORGIVE FRONT-ROW HAT-WEARING DUDE. Is the horse-loving tween girl an endangered species? Most of the females in that audience, my friend and myself aside, were what is colloquially known as “popcorn heads” ie old enough to buy their own perms since shortly after they were invented.
Où sont les cavaliers d’antan? Margeurite Henry, we hardly knew ye!
