My 10-year-old daughter J. loves The Saddle Club television show. Ever see it? Very pretty girls in cool, hip clothes and very pretty horses having some excellent horsegirl adventures.

For two summers in a row when I was in gradeschool, my parents raked up the money to lease me a horse for a month at the local stable, which was filled with priveleged Pony Club girls who liked to rub the fact that I was just leasing right in my nose. I can relate so well to this (Or should I say I can soooo relate to this...) from The Abstract Gourmet.

The pony club on the other hand, stood for everything that I wasn’t. Privileged, polished, and perfectionist, and all the pluck and courage in the world did not stop Rocky (and I) drawing the scorn of the primped and plaited members of the pony club brigade. I despised them… Their perfect little ponies prancing around in circles with ribbons in their tails and plaited manes… They were the bourgeois and I was the proletariat. My rugged little pony and I would gallop through the bush jumping logs, tree stumps, fences, and generally causing mischief. I didn’t have a helmet, a crop, jodhpurs, riding boots. I had a hard head, a stick, some old jeans, and a pair of well holed K-mart special Traxx.

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