The Durango Herald
Dh
October 09, 2000
Oct. 9, 2000
By Stephanie Spear Special to the Herald
Baxter Black was as earthy and comical as a cow with a prolapsed uterus Friday night. Cowboy humorist and former large animal vet Baxter Black, who calls himself a "rambling entertainer," performs Friday night for the Durango Cowboy Gathering. His monologue will be broadcast on KSUT-FM on a date to be announced.
A packed Diamond Circle Theatre audience enjoyed a 120-minute guffaw as the world's most famous cowboy poet and former large animal veterinarian delivered a hilariously irreverent monologue about agricultural life to a sold-out audience as the 12th annual Durango Cowboy Gathering's headline entertainer.
Looking like a "cross between Porter Waggoner and Dennis Rodman," the cowboy humorist covered four-legged ruminants, cowfolk styles, wild cow milking, horseshoeing, cowboy marriages, Rocky Mountain oysters and urban "gentiles."
"A parakeet has more fun being a bird than a sparrow," reasoned Black in his drawling, deadpan baritone, clad in a loud white and red-yoked cowboy shirt. A green scarf billowed from his neck, under a dense and sprawling mustache. He stood on a stage decorated with bleached cow skulls and yards of sagebrush.
The literate and educated Black - who grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., graduated from Colorado State University veterinary school and lives in Arizona - coveyed over-the-top hilarity in a physical performance where he punctuated words with waving wiry arms and jaunts across the stage on polelike legs.
Black percolated with one-liners, like an observation about Idaho cowboys: "If you'd a waited five minutes they'd a finished blockin' your hat."
On a neighbor's appearance: "She looked like the Aurora Borealis and a Budweiser sign."
And on bovine prolapse: "When a 1,200-pound cow prolapses it won't fit in your car trunk."
Black launched into his poems when only verse would do.
Concise and colorful lines rolled out one after another. One on the violent business of tagging a calf : "If you've been under a dryer at the local Laundromat with a bear and 50 horseshoes, you'd know where I was at."
A cowboy bride "caught the preacher's eye and impaled him with a glare."
The eyeballs of a resentful horse resembled "lookin' down the smokestack of a furnace room in hell."
Black allowed himself a "a social commentary or two that I'm not allowed to do on public radio." He said a recent census concluded only two percent of the U.S. population is actively involved in the production of agriculture. He defended genetic manipulation, noting it is one way to feed the world.
"Not a person in the third world is complaining," he said.
Black turned his eye on a 1988 range fire with the night's only serious poem that offered powerful imagery. Its sounds were "louder than the nightmare screams of Abel's brother, Cain." The verse concludes with the notion that the finally quenched fire is "only biding time (until) a fallen angel tosses out a solitary match."
Those who missed Black's performance can hear his show when KSUT-FM 89.5 and 90.1 airs a taped broadcast in about two weeks, according to Beth Warren, the station's development director.
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