Bucks and Snorts and Bluejeans, too. This Flatbush Avenue or El Paso?

By Fred Bruning

Aug. 18, 2024

     Bulls in Brooklyn?

     Please continue.

     An unlikely crowd was moseying toward Barclays Center at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues last weekend.

     On the street, vendors sold knockoff cowboy hats.

     Fun-seekers ambled along in tight blue jeans and cowboy boots. 

     This might have been what you’d expect in El Paso on a Saturday evening, but, come now, we are talking Brooklyn. 

     “What’s up?” I asked a young woman dressed in Western regalia and accompanied by a burly fellow likewise costumed.

      She answered pleasantly and kept moving.

      “Oh,” I said. “Bill Ryden, sure.”

      As mentioned in a previous instalment, I recently paid a visit to the audiologist and subsequently spent lavishly on hearing aids. 

      Here’s a brief report. You’ll see why.

      In general, the tiny devices work although there are times when I feel stuck inside a public address system.  How odd to hear your own voice amplified when you say nothing more interesting than “Two slices and a Coke.” 

    Wink, my wife, sometimes sounds – don’t tell her – a little like Alvin the Chipmunk, and I wonder if she might, while discussing a news story or suggesting lunch at the diner, break off for a moment, and croon, “…Me, I want a hula hoop.”

     Oh, and water running in the sink now has a dramatic, Niagara-like quality and, in restaurants, I can pick up conversations across the room.

      “You’re voting for who?!”

      “You heard me.”

       Of course, I can regulate volume and tone – through the iPhone, yet – and have returned to the friendly audiologist for adjustments. (Am I being adjusted or the hearing aids? Hard to say.)

       Imperfections aside, I hear Wink more clearly and no longer reply “huh?” throughout the day. Yes, a passing breeze sometimes can sound like a Nor’easter and birdsong can make me wonder if Tweety has landed on my Mets cap, but the little earplugs are a great improvement.

       Nevertheless, I still wasn’t quite sure what the urban cowgirl said crossing noisy Atlantic Avenue.

     “Bill Ryden?” I asked Wink. “Country singer?”

      Close to Barclays entrance, I stopped an arena worker to inquire again.

      “Who’s here tonight?”

     “Professional bull riding.”

     “Bull riding?” I asked. “Not music – you know, Bill Ryden?”

      The worker stepped closer to leave no doubt.

     “Bull riding,” he declared, smiling a bit, as if to say, yep, ol’ timer, you never know what’s next.

        A small group of animal rights demonstrators made their case as fans, heedless, stepped toward the doors.

       My thought was that whatever is required to make an otherwise unperturbed creature buck and snort – promoters say the bulls are treated well and given “a nice, easy retirement at the end of their careers” – might not match the trauma of being shipped to the venue through the racket and roar of downtown Brooklyn traffic.

       Could a cinch around the waist be worse?  The bulls should organize.

       Anyway, for sure, there is such a thing as the Professional Bull Riders league with teams like the Austin Gamblers, Kansas City Outlaws, Texas Rattlers, Nashville Stampede and, yessir, the New York Mavericks.

       “Bull riding?  In Brooklyn. Does that make sense?”

       “Much as anything else,” said Wink.

       Sometimes, that’s the best explanation, right?

       We spent the next afternoon with friends at the Brooklyn Museum, not a Stetson in sight.

       On exhibit was a collection of more than 250 photographs by Paul McCartney, the one and only.

       McCartney has an interest in photography, we learned, and many of his shots, vintage stuff, mostly black and white, brought us back 60 years.

       How young they looked, the Beatles, landing in New York, for the Ed Sullivan show and next in Miami where one shot showed a schoolgirl – maybe 13 – in knee socks and Peter Pan collar being held back by police as, overtaken and ecstatic, arms open wide, she tried to reach the group’s motorcade.

       “It was a time,” we said.

       “Sure was.”

       Outside the museum is a giant yellow sculpture in the shape of two letters, “O” and “Y.”   

       Approach from one direction, it says “YO,” the other “OY.”

       For me, the McCartney exhibit rates a “yo,” as in, “Yo, dude, don’t miss it.”

       Bull riding at Barclays?

       The Mavericks won two matches in a row.

       But, sorry, podners.

       Oy.

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive