It's about eight in the evening at the old school auditorium in Nara Visa, New Mexico.  The place is packed, and it's hot and dusty.  The school has been shut down for some forty years, but the buildings and grounds have been preserved as a community center.  Nara Visa, a tiny town of less than 100 people, sits in the prairie just across the New Mexico line, about fifty miles west of Dalhart, Texas, maybe the same distance to Tucumcari, New Mexico.  Buck Ramsey and I chose this place to host our cowboy gathering because we loved the prairie there . . . grass as far as the eye can see.  This is cowboy country, pure and simple, the perfect place to do our show.

This is our second Cowboy Chautauqua Company show.  The first one was a big hit, one that folks raved about, and now we're doing it at Nara Visa before the most pure dee cowboy crowd anyone could ever hope to assemble.  Three time the number of people in the small town have come.  This is the big test.  We want our show to be cowboy to the core, something real punchers could take heart in and be proud of.  I'm nervous as the show starts.

And then there's the church on the mesa about a half mile away, sitting there with the sinking sun behind it.  Rays of sunlight are coming through the stained glass windows of that little Catholic Church, and it's an inspiring sight indeed.  I've got a stage full of cast members, all of them squinting against the dying sun . . . but still bright.  They're too mesmerized by the sight of the light through the windows, the grey form of the church against a pink horizon.  We're a quarter of the way through our show, and the audience is sitting in silence, staring at us like they're at high mass, not a cowboy show.  They look almost stunned, and I'm thinking that maybe we're laying a big egg.

Then Rick Martinez and his band Everywhere West rise to play, and it's a beautiful old cowboy song they're singing.  Joe Stevenson plays the fiddle, they sing in perfect harmony, and I know for sure that we've caught a groove.  The show is going just the way I hoped it would.  When they finish, I see that Buck Ramsey has lowered his head, and I know he's fighting back tears.  He's moved, and so am I.  But we go on with the show as the sun fades away, leaving us in darkness.  The crowd still has not moved, has not shown me anything one way or another about how they are taking our performances.  And then it ends, and we all move forward to take our bows.  The place erupts in applause as people leap to their feet, and the standing ovation goes on for some time.  We did it.  We won them over.

For the next five or six years, we won over audiences in a number of places.  All of our shows didn't go as well as that one.  I never again experienced anything like doing that show and watching that sunset, seeing that church on the mesa with it's glowing windows.  Maybe I never will again, but we did recapture some of the magic of that moment a few more times before we stopped doing shows several years later.  Some of the original members of the Cowboy Chautauqua Company are gone now. A few have died, some have retired from the business, which was the case with me.  I haven't been on stage in ten years.

But lately . . . just in recent months, the glow of that sunset is in my head again.  I'm lonesome from old friends, old days . . . and old ways.  I make some calls, send out a few letters and emails, and the response is enthusiastic.  I ask, should we do it again?  Is there enough left in us to bring back the magic, do good shows?  Can we find some young guys to carry on where the old have faded away?  And the calls come back to me, and my guys are saying that maybe we should give in another go.  It was good back then, and there's still a few of us around who saw the sunset back years ago, the church with the rays of sun streaming through the windows.  We remember.  

And sometime . . . remembering is enough to start again.

PMC, 4/24/08