off we go to the rodeo

Today I found myself somewhere where I NEVER thought I would be. The rodeo. Not the Junior Rodeo, where seven year-olds ride 25 year-old horses around barrels. I mean the real rodeo, with bucking broncos and steer wrestling. Real cowboys from Utah and Arizona. And Castro Valley, that little bible belt of Alameda County. And let’s not forget that confederate flag on one of the trucks in the parking lot.

My god daughter rides horses. She is six. Two years ago I spent countless hours on the internet and telephone finding a riding teacher that would take her at four. I found Molly.

Molly said that she can teach “the little ones” if they have good balance and are obsessed with horses. My god daughter qualified. So once a week, she goes to Castro Valley for her horseback riding lesson. And after two years of lessons (probably way before, but Wednesday at 2 PM is hard to get to for this nine-to-fiver), she can ride that horse.

Molly is involved with the rodeo. So anywhere that Molly and horses are, my god daughter wants to go. So we went. Somehow I was under the naïve impression that we were going to the Junior Rodeo, but I wasn’t so lucky. I knew when they started broadcasting John Wayne reciting over some patriotic-sounding music that I was in uncharted territory.

I suspected that the star spangled banner would be involved, and that my usual reluctance to stand up might not be in my best interests today. I was surprised by the racial diversity, and that a Native American man near me seemed to be actually singing the words, but I was indeed the real diversity today, a jewish butch dyke.

Despite the cruelty to animals part (although at times it seemed the animals had it all over the humans) it was actually quite interesting. Cowboys (and girls) pay money to enter rodeos with the hopes of winning prize money. Unfortunately, we both got tired before the cowgirls. But we did get the autograph of the “queen of the rodeo”.

So here come these guys who actually get up on a bucking bronco and try to stay up on it for eight seconds. I truly wish I had seen the women riding bucking bronco, but when it’s time to go…….What I did learn today is that to get these horses to buck, they tie a strap around its belly, back toward the rear legs. They don’t like it, so they buck. Also in the arena are two other people on horses who have to remove the strap from the bucking horse as soon as the rider falls off. Now there’s a niche job.

Then came the steer wrestlers. Two men on horses chase a steer out of the chute. One of the men actually slides off his horse, aims for the running steer, and tries to grab the steer’s horns and wrestle it to the ground. Testosterone makes people do funny things.

Luckily, after a few rounds of that, my six year old god daughter commented that there might be a lot of traffic on the way home, so I took that as a clue to get the hell out of there.

Then I went to La Pena to see the Lesbian Hip Hop group from Havana, Cuba. WOW. We live in interesting times.