Not Aunt Bea

Oops! I became Barney Fife this weekend. I can't blame anything on Otis or Goober.



Mailed my eleven year old nephew a pair of handcuffs I found in the junk drawer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn't REALLY need those handcuffs, since my Arctic Glare superpower can freeze any bad guy in place. I figured Sheriff Sky might occasionally need to jingle some cuffs as he walked down the dusty Main Street of that Hell's Half Acre we know otherwise as Washington, D.C. One of my guys HAD TO HAVE those darn handcuffs for some group presentation in a high school class, and I vaguely remember a desperate late night shopping trip.

Unfortunately, I failed to consider the possibility that the handcuffs might have keys. Sheriff Sky arrested his little sister. She's a beautiful and wily outlaw, but she never did anything to deserve this punishment! Miss Nats is handcuffed, and waiting for cross-continental mail to arrive with the keys to free her! Lucky for her, the Pony Express is a thing of the past.

My grandfather had a book called A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, by Paul Wellman. As a kid, I would try to make myself as small as possible in the farthest corner of my grandparents' tiny street-level McCook apartment, and read about Quantrill's Raiders, the James-Younger Gang, the Daltons, Bill Doolin, Belle Starr, and even Pretty Boy Floyd. Between that book and seeing "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" at the McCook movie theater with my cousins, I got hooked on Western outlaws.

I'm especially partial to Ron Hansen's outlaw novels, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Desperadoes. The writing is so wonderful, but I don't know if I can deal with big screen Brad Pitt doing the Northfield bank robbery shoot-out in the Coming Soon to a Theater Near You Hollywood Feature Presentation. Read the book! Read the book! Read the book!

Never underestimate those early childhood influences. I don't know if Sponge Bob and the Teletubbies are gay, and I couldn't care less. At the age of three, I could greet a visitor with Miss Kitty's immortal, "Sit down, Matt, and I'll buy you a beer."