So I hooked up with the Ted Nugent tour for a couple of dates in Texas and wound up, per plan, with a few days to spend in Dallas with my sister-in-law, whom I never see, and her two-yearold daughter, my niece, whom I had never met. (Brother was somewhere in the Central American jungles helping Uncle carve totem poles.)

Anyway, the idea being that I'd get my girlfriend, who just so fortuitously happened to be a C&W fan, a Christmas present supreme: a pair of flashy and authentic-to-the-sole cowgirl boots, something like she'd never turn up in New York in a hundred years. In four days of searching I learned that it's the cowboys, however, who are the real girls out West. What I mean is that Sis and I went from Fort Worth to Mesquite and never in my time have I seen such a dazzling array of footwear for men: Lizard-skin, ostrichskin, camel-skin, snake-skin, whatever-varmint-you-want-skin. Varieties and mixes of colors that defied the rainbow. Not to mention leather cutouts and overlays, fancy stitching, rhinestone studding—and the Bicentennial Boot on sale. Red, white and blue, of course, all cutout and laid over, with 1776 on the right shoe and 1976 on the left. Remember: it's never too late to be patriotic or thrifty.