I'm Not Really A Cowboy...

...I only found the hat. Or so the saying goes. I thought of that because I spent the day playing cowboy at the Trail Town Round-up in Norco, CA, hammering out a couple of episodes of COWBOYS. I got to wear my cowboy hat. Actually, I love my cowboy hat, a Serratelli I bought for an episode of SHOOTING GALLERY a couple of years back. I probably got hosed on it, to tell the truth, but we were playing cred games, and I hate the fact that my competion spent as much time scamming schwagg as making telly-bission.

Amazingly enough, a real hat guy came up to me today and asked who made my hat. He was surprised that it was a relatively inexpensive off-the-racker. Here's my secret...wear the hat out in the rain. Once, twice, three times, and it starts developing what hat guys call "character." It's stained, it's getting beat up, it fits really well — soak; dry on heat; repeat — and it actually keeps the rain out of my face. I bought it a hatband today, a really nice hand-painted piece of leather that I hope will fade and stain with age, much like me.

Also got to play at Fun With Gatlin Guns, always a favorite with me. The guy who had the Gatlins (one .45/70 black powder; the other a .30/40 Krag 1897 "modern" Gatlin) was major cool, a collector turned arms supplier to Hollywood (R. Lee's Mail Call, The Last Samauri) turned obsessive "hands-on historian," who feels that people need to shoot historical guns, not just look at them in glass cases. Watch for a full feature in an upcoming SHOOTING GALLERY. And, he's got a tank! And a pirate ship.

I like cowboy action shooting because I like the guns. No, it's not the highest speed competition around — that's IPSC. And no, it's not "tactical" — not a single person here thinks he or she is a Ninja Warrior God; But the guns are works of art. Single action revolvers; lever action rifles; the wonderful Winchester 97 pump and various and sundry doubles. I wish there was a cowboy action shooting for, say, 1919, so we could compete with 1911s with nubby sights, S&W double-action revolvers, Browning Automatic-5 shotguns and Thompsons. Oh year, and wear zoot suits, too.