Episode 2: A Slim Jim in a Meat Locker

October 12, 2007

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To watch Episode Two, click here.

Episode 2 kicks off with James getting an invite to learn line dancing at a dude ranch. Dance lessons? Don’t they wrestle bulls and brand them with hot rods on dude ranches? Ang Lee really has changed the tenor of the Western genre.

Some words, if I may, on the host Dani. She’s very polished, professional. She clearly knows what she’s doing -- perhaps a little too much. It’s as if someone grabbed a hot blonde from off the street and implanted Robin Leech’s brain inside. But with James as stoic as he is (score one for breaking gay stereotypes by the way), Dani is sorely needed and she tries to loosen him up by giving him a cowboy hat and a handkerchief. It does make him more animated. He looks like Woody from Toy Story now.

On the limo ride over to the dude ranch James manages to look even less like a cowboy. Now he looks more like a dancer at a hen party. He and the boy-testants arrive to the open arms of cowboy dance instructor Jorge, a swarthy Latino with hips that don’t lie and jeans painted on by Sherman Williams. It is in times like this I have to pause the video and stare at my latest issue of Maxim. I mean this is gay -- really, really gay. Jorge asks, “Where are the girls?” as if anyone, including him, really cares.

One of the boys, Jim, is dancing all goofy. James is taken aback by it and, for some reason, really impressed. Maybe it’s the overalls but Jim’s moves remind me of the sounds of a violin, and not that red one they use at Russian concertos, but a cheap wooded one stashed away in a bail of hay inside a barn.

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