Big Brown's Wild Night Out

WHAT an amazing horse. No, I didn't take the picture.

So, my friends Brian and Ryan were with me Saturday in Baltimore just a couple of miles from the Preakness when it all went down. We were at the H.H. Backer Pet Trade Show, and we had ourselves one great time Saturday night discussing all the nonsense that goes along with 8,000 people showing up to put on a giant pet show, and the additional 20,000 or so that come by to gawk, stare, buy, and get all excited about what you're making and selling in the pet industry. What I noticed however, was that after the show, while we were standing in line to get our drink tickets for the private soiree, that the talk of the trade show group had turned to more important matters such as the big winner of the Preakness! Whoa! Big Brown won!

OK, so we put our heads together and thought how we could totally capitalize on this event. It had to be something that we could do to make money but not put any money into. It had to be something we could brag about, but not really be responsible for in case it went sour - you know....bad. It hit me. I think it was my idea, I had run out of drink tickets and had to send Ryan out for a couple more. I promise we only drank tiny drinks, it wasn't like we were trying to up one another in drinking. In cases like that I bail pretty fast. My 2-drink limit has been allowed to stretch to a 3-drink limit if steak, potatoes, bread and other carbs are involved, but since this diet thing - I was more than willing to keep the juice level to a minimum.

I thought "Why not breed a pretty brown thoroughbred horse with a pretty brown quarter horse, and call the baby 'Big Brown's Mistake'? Sounds good right? Well, we thought it did. Then Ryan thought 'Big Brown's Wild Night Out' would be even better. I mean sure, we couldn't register the horse in the thoroughbred world, but quarter horses are registered with 1/2 lineage so there's at least an option for us. What could we sell the colt for? $5,000,000 maybe? JUST KIDDING...please, no e-mails, we were just sitting around listening to a great band, watching the girls from the Dog Walking booth behind us sing while standing on chairs. Some of the more laid back booth guards became loose enough to share their pasta with us, and to even share a cigar with Brian and Ryan. (Who I won't easily forgive for not bringing enough for me!) I don't share cigars.

Big Brown's Wild Night Out. Could we incorporate that? Would we get into trouble for the closeness or the recognition of the name? Probably - we'd be featured on CNN as being some of the worst horse-people in the world and then they'd do a stringent background check and find out we're dog people - - but we'd still lose our licenses to travel through Kentucky! I'm pretty sure about that one anyway. Oh well, it was a great ice breaker. It helped Jenny be able to use her new iPhone so she could spend the 11 minutes it took her to look up the results on the internet. After she announced to us that some horse named Curin something won, we were all screaming "NO, we wanted Big Brown!" Then she came back a little later with the true results, having read to us from the older stories about the Preakness, I think it was just last year, but it stopped us dead in our tracks. We weren't going to cry, but we were thinking we could have at least saved ourselves a fortune for having NOT purchased a piece of the 85% of the winner that I believe was sold off before the race.

Stud fees at $50,000,000? Are you serious? Ryan and Brian both agreed they'd do it for much less...much less.