Celebrity Horse Moments (Bogus Edition)

Author Sara Lewis Holmes tells us, at her Read Write Believe blog, of a worthy New-Year’s-resolution of a cause:

Flying Horse Farms is a magical, transforming and fun camp for children with serious illnesses and their families. It’s an Ohio based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and working to become a member of Hole in the Wall Camps, the world’s largest family of camps for children with serious illnesses.

I talked with the director, and he said that rather than one central library, he would love to have books available at several spots around the camp—the stables, the craft room, the main activity hall, the cabins, maybe even the dining hall.

The books would be…

For kids to read while they wait for their turn on a horse.
For kids who suddenly discover they love pottery or archery or fishing and want to know everything about it.
For kids to share and discuss a cool quote or an inspirational person during nightly reflection times.
For kids who need a fast idea for a drama skit, or a nature craft, or a easy recipe.
For kids who need to rest.
For kids who love to read.
For kids who are kids and want to be kids and must be kids even if a serious illness complicates their lives.

Sara offers several suggestions for supporting Flying Horse’s “horse and camp books for kids” project, including making purchases from her Amazon Wish List, blogging about one’s own experiences with horses and/or camps, and so on.

Now, I was convinced I wanted to help somehow, but none of those suggestions were really options for me, for one reason or another. What to do, what to do…?

I’d heard about the Flying Horse project via the Seven Impossible Things… blog, so there I posted my characteristically muddled questions: what if I can’t, for now, make a purchase or donation? what if I can’t blog about horses because I don’t know jack about them?

An answer came from Sara Lewis Holmes herself:

If it helps, I know nothing about horses either, except that I’m rather scared of them. :) I imagine it’s the same for some of the kids who will come to camp too.

Heck, blog about what you DON’T know if you want. Any little bit that spreads the word helps. I’m thrilled by all the ideas so far, and I’ve updated my original post with the links.

And that provided the (ha ha, hehe, I crack myself up) spur I needed for the rest of this post — with a twist.

A few months ago, inspired by The Misssy M Misssives (sic the triple s’s), I wrote a bogus post about celebrities I never knew but very well could have — if only my life, and the lives of everybody I really did know, and the lives of the celebrities themselves, had only been 100% different. (I know, I know: so close, yet so far away.)

Following that precedent, I present you now with:

Bumping Fetlocks: Famous Horses

• When I was in fourth grade, Miss Denneler took our class on a field trip to the annual New Year’s Day Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. It was cold that year, way too cold for a gang of twenty-odd 10-year-olds (myself included) already distracted by the onrushing apocalypse that was the end of Christmas vacation. So I almost missed it. As I recall, I was doing my locally famous W.C. Fields impression for my friend Jimmy, who kept rolling his eyes because of the cold, when there he was: Mister Ed, the famous talking horse with his own television sitcom.  Of course he was working that day, but not as an actor or anything. Instead, he was working undercover as the steed for one of Philly’s famous mounted policemen — a uniformed officer who looked strikingly like Mister Ed’s human co-star, Alan Young. Ed had even gone to the extreme of dying his fur (it IS fur that horses have, isn’t it?) pure black. Jimmy insisted that it couldn’t be Ed but the horse just nickered and sneered, which pretty much sealed it for me. It was THE horse, of course.
• Large animals always freaked me out when I was a kid. (This fear probably would have pursued me into adulthood except that I saw, in Marty, how gentle Ernest Borgnine could be.) One of my most traumatic experiences, predating even that Mummers Parade I just mentioned, was at a small traveling circus which came through my grandparents’ town one summer. The top-billed star there was a chubby horse named Butch, with a barrel of a belly and legs like a professional football lineman. But Butch also had the largest, most expressive, charming, and even endearing eyes you’ve ever seen on an animal. Even when I left the tent to try to find a bathroom and found Butch leaning up against a circus wagon, chain-smoking Luckies — even then, as long as I just concentrated on his eyes, I thought I might someday like to be brave enough to even consider some even later date when I might think about riding Butch. Many many years later, I learned that Butch had inspired someone else, as well: the anonymous Hasbro designer of My Little Pony. (The marketing people, damn them, deep-sixed the Luckies.)
• By the time I arrived on the scene, the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, of course, had long since departed. So I never got the chance to know him as intimately as I did Mister Ed and Butch/My Little Pony. But he appeared once to me in a dream. Just as in the movie bearing his name, Seabiscuit was being ridden by Tobey Maguire. Oddly, though, Maguire was dressed not as jockey Red Pollard, but as Spiderman (in the famous black-Spidey tights from the third film). Seabiscuit won the race but Maguire/Spidey was disqualified for having launched himself at the finish line via a well-slung web and arrived .014 seconds before his horse. Later I dreamed that the case is still tied up in court, and both Seabiscuit’s and Spiderman’s names now have asterisks next to them in their respective record books. What a shame.

So there you have it: at least three solid reasons not to let children grow up ignorant of horses. Go check out Flying Horse Farms for yourself, and do whatever you can to keep these great kids from following in my, er, shoes.