There's got to be a better way to rope in women

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 9, 2000

I looked at her, then I looked at the reflection in the mirror behind the bar of the aging hulk I call a body and made one of those important life decisions.

There are some things even I won't do to impress a woman.

A few nights earlier I had sat in the same bar and listened to a champion cowboy describe the sport of team penning, which involves moving steers from one place to another in a hurry whether they want to go or not. That had given me cause to reflect on the sad realization that team penning is probably not on the list of things I will experience in this lifetime.

Nor, I fear, is bull riding.

The closest I ever came was 15 years ago at a bar called Your Father's Mustache in New Orleans, where there was a mechanical bull.

Urban Cowboy had come out in 1980, and mechanical bulls were all the rage because Debra Winger had made riding one look so easy and liability insurance for bars was less expensive then.

My buddy Chris and I walked past the bar on Bourbon Street several times in the same evening, each time saying we "really should" go in and ride the bull and, of course, each time after having had a drink or three at some of the town's other establishments.

There was a lot of macho, "I will if you will" stuff going on, and even though we realized that it was a really bad idea, we were both at an age when testosterone frequently overrides reason.

Our wives, after a hasty review of our life insurance status, decided that it wasn't such a bad idea and that we had certainly done things that had embarrased them worse than this would, so we finally went in, bellied up to the bar (you have to "belly up" to a Western bar, and never, NEVER order a pina colada) and expressed our interest in becoming aluminum cowpokes.

I remember that we had to sign a detailed release that said something like even if the bartender came around the bar and hacked us to death with a machete while singing the Your Father's Mustache fight song, the establishment still wasn't liable, and we had to produce two forms of identification to prove that we were who we said we were.

I remember that Chris went first and got thrown in about five seconds and that I got a great picture of him hitting the mat.

I managed to stay on to the second level, which looked very elementary when someone else was doing it and looked entirely different from the perspective of being on the thing ... and then it was my turn to hit the mat.

The next morning, getting ready to fly home, he and I both tottered into the hallway of the hotel and compared the massive bruises on our thighs and ribs while our spouses cackled loudly.

It was about a week before either of us could walk normally again.

I thought of doing a re-enactment when I was back in the French Quarter last year, but that discovered there wasn't that much bourbon on Bourbon Street and that the bar was (whew) no longer there.

So I told the sweet young thing at the Dade City bar all about my mechanical bull-riding career, and she looked at me with what I'm pretty sure was disdain. (I have a lot of experience with women and disdain lately.) And when I pulled out the big gun -- that I am seriously thinking about buying a truck -- it was obviously too late.

She was apparently unimpressed with the fact that it was the first time I had ever uttered the words "buying" and "truck" in the same sentence and immediately became involved in a discussion with the guy on the other side of her about the weather.

It dawned on me that I could probably impress her by cutting a deal with the publicity folks at the Odessa Rodeo and Festival people for a chance to ride a bull and get a column out of it during this weekend's festivities there.

But they probably limit that sort of thing to the pros ... and ... even if she were impressed by a body cast, it probably would be a hollow victory.

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