On the wall of my tack room is a calendar that is only in season one month in twelve. As I write this it’s only off by eleven months. You see, someone gave my wife one of those cowboy beefcake calendars for Christmas several years ago. You know the kind, where handsome cowboy hunks are posed in all kinds of scenic settings with their clothes torn half off supposedly by women like my wife. Well, my wife took a liking to a certain scantily clad bull rider so the calendar stays stuck on June. To her that’s much more important than the fact that the month is wrong or that next Tuesday isn’t really the dog’s birthday.
Based on the number of calendars available at my local feed store, and the price of the things, it’s obvious that women have fallen hard for cowboys on calendars. This despite the fact that they aren’t very authentic… personally I’ve never seen twelve cowboys in the entire universe who look that good! (Not that I go around checking out other men’s bodies, mind you.)
The calendars are all pretty much the same, they feature cowboys playing a guitar that is covering up his you-know-whats, or riding a rank bull while wearing only a pair of chaps. Now I ask you, what kind of bull rider goes to work with his shirt off? He is more apt to be wearing one of those bullet proof vests to keep the bull from relocating his kidneys.
There is just no realism in these cowboy calendars… no beer bellies, missing digits, love handles, skin cancer or farmer tans. They are supposed to represent typical ranch scenes but they are clearly contrived. One picture on my wife’s calendar features a cowboy putting up oat hay in August wearing only a pair of very short shorts. Anyone who has ever put up oat hay knows the haying hunk would be red all over from a rash. September features a muscle-bound aspiring cowboy actor bending over shoeing a horse while not wearing any shoes himself! Mr. May is standing over a spit barbecuing a side of beef and you can’t tell me he’d be smiling like that after a gob of grease spattered his bare body. And what kind of a cowboy cavorts in the snow wearing only his Fruit of the Looms? He’d turn blue at the points. When the camera man said, “FREEZE”, he would have.
Mind you, I am not jealous that my wife occasionally glances, okay, okay, perhaps stare is a better word, at another man on the tack room wall. Okay, okay, so maybe I am just a little jealous. In an effort to depict a more realistic picture of cowboys I had my wife take a few real life shots of me in various beefcake poses. Talk about your Kodak moments! The photographs featured me doing real cowboy things like mucking out the barn, drinking beer, picking my teeth at the auction, shooting pool and arguing with the dog.
When we got the pictures back from the drug store (my wife is still stuck in the 20th century and still takes her photos with a 30 year old camera and real film) I was a little disappointed in the cameraperson’s professionalism. There were a few problems to say the least. In one shot the photographer had asked me to “show a little skin.” So I took my hat off and the glare created a big sunspot right in the middle of the snapshot. And several other photos are a little blurry because the photographer (my wife) couldn’t hold still because she was laughing so hard.
I pasted the pictures of myself right over those drug store cowboys on my wife’s calendar and she quickly replaced it with a calendar from the bank. I did get free double prints so if there is one women out there who would like a copy of my calendar just let me know ($59.95). I can’t send the calendar through the mail though because my wife says if she got caught she could go to prison for sending obscene photos through the mail, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take if it launches an all new career for me and opens the possibility I might be named People Magazine’s “Most Sexiest Man Alive”.
