KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Deirdre Day
February 3, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of a favorite sidekick — whether real-life or fictional.

TRAMPAS

The world seems as black and white as the pictures on the small television into which I escape. I’m away from Saint Patricia and the baby and rules of parents and gone into a world where there are mustangs loose in the canyons and prairies that stretch to the horizon. The Virginian is my show and I take it seriously. I believe everything that happens to the Virginian (James Drury) and Trampas (Doug McClure), his square-headed, square-jawed sidekick, as if it were coming straight out of the Bible and not the BBC. From them I learn life’s most important lessons about…

SIDEKICKERY

Trampas gets in trouble on the range but usually off in the wide world where gunslingers and over-enthusiastic sheriffs, cattle rustlers and their ilk lurk looking for trouble. The Virginian saves him. The Virginian gets in trouble; Trampas saves him.

The only difference is that when trouble happens to Trampas, it’s more likely that he has brought it on himself. He’s a jump-first kind of guy. While the Virginian is wise and careful, Trampas mugs and doubletakes and right near stamps his feet if he can’t go to the big dance in town. I’m the oldest so I know I should be more like the Virginian. But I’m not. I’d rather be a sidekick than the main act, I think. I’d rather not be rousting the boys in the bunkhouse at dawn to get them out rassling cattle. The sidekick has a much more informal relationship to rules.

LOVE

I learned about how when you fall in love the object of desire will be either secretly dying, secretly married, secretly insane or part of a gang. Love was something that took place outside of Shiloh and didn’t end well.

FASHION

Over nine years and 289 75-minute episodes that The Virginian ran — from before Kennedy gets shot all the way past Woodstock — neither Trampas nor the Virginian ever change clothes. Trampas sports a pale blue shirt and a tan vest to match his buckskin, Buck, while the Virginian rides the range in rust corduroy with a shapely black leather vest. Classics are classics, so when you find your look, you best stick with it.

GUNS

In England, the policemen were armed with quaint little truncheons and wore very unthreatening rounded helmets. In America, not only could you get arrested, kidnapped, and nearly lynched (maybe even multiple times in the same season), but you could get shot extremely easily. And you might also find the need to be the one shooting. I believed that in the USA if you walked away from the law, the law could shoot you in the back.

When we packed up to move to Rochester, New York in the late Sixties, I prepared myself to be shot in the back at any moment.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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