When Worlds Collide it gets Awesomely Weird

Like a lot of people, I have a number of different pieces to my life.  I worked in the music business for a long time, and have close, good friends from there.  I also have great people in the horse racing industry who have my back. Many of my closest friends are from the horse show world.

They are all incredibly important and dear to me, but  very few of these people know each other. Occasionally I’ll throw a party and invite them all, but they don’t mix much. It’s a little like the cliques at a high school dance.  The show people stay in one corner, the music geeks hang out by the stereo and the racing folks gather in front of the television watching TVG. The film friends stand in the middle and talk to everyone.

But this weekend in Del Mar, there was  convergence.  And it was completely cool. For me at least.

I was down there for a horse show. The Del Mar Horsepark,  about a mile away from the Del Mar Racetrack, is one of my favorite show venues. I don’t get to compete down there very often, because well, it’s expensive. 

I justified going this time because being by the ocean in August is a whole lot better than hanging in the Valley.  Last week it was about 25 degrees better. Really.  With evenings in the 70s and days in the 80s I felt guilty for not bringing my entire crew of horses down just to take advantage of the weather.

Clearer heads prevailed, and I only shipped Wes down. He’s probably the nicest horse I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a few. (The most talented is Lucy, but she is also, shall we say, a bit of a beeeach.) Wes is kind, loyal and tall, dark and handsome. If he was a guy, he’d probably ignore me.  He’s that fancy.

He’s also darn talented.  Between us – and my exceptional trainer Crystal – we owned the August Showpark horse show. He won every class he entered but two, and in those he was second.  To say that I was feeling pretty good about us, is an understatement. I was feeling pretty damned lucky.

If I was smart, I’d have put that luck to use at the betting windows at the racetrack. The Del Mar Race Track is going full swing right now, and it and Saratoga are my favorite tracks in the country.  So almost every second I wasn’t competing, or waiting to compete -which is how one spends most of the time at a horse show- I was at the track.

My friend Kristin, is a trainer, and she has moved most of her operation down to Del Mar from Santa Anita for the season. It’s about 30 horses. Some are fast, some not so much, but they all take the same amount of training and work. Lots and lots of work.

She arrives on track about 4 every morning and doesn’t stop until 8 in the evening.  I got there at the more leisurely hour of 7:30 every day to watch the horses work and generally get in her way.

To me there isn’t a more amazing site than watching horses work on the track in the mornings.  It’s a little bit like the 405 freeway, if that were packed with horses instead of SUVs.  There are big ones, little ones, fast ones and slow ones.  And they’re all stunning.

Because I was running to the horse show, I hardly saw any actual races from the Grandstand. I was done early on Saturday, and managed to see the second turn of the Clement Hirsch from the backside but I didn’t find out who won until later. Oops. (For the record it was Iotapa with Joe Talamo aboard) It was that kind of week. Great, but a little odd.

Saturday was when I slammed into my old comfort zone: music. The racetrack sponsors a series of concerts every season, and Saturday night Weezer were playing.  My buddy Stuart works with them, so I stopped backstage in the afternoon with Kristin and Kathy (a horse show pal) in tow to say hello.  We timed it perfectly.

 It was during that brief break between setup and the gig, where nothing is happening. That meant that Stuart, who I hadn’t seen in far too many years, actually had time to talk for a few minutes.

The thing about really good friends, is that even if you don’t see them often, you fall right back into comfortable patterns. I feel that way about Stuart. It won’t be years before I see him again. It’ll be like, next week.

It was after we left the music stage and went back to the track that things got really weird.  Kathy, Kristin and I became Where’s Waldo.  We stood at the rail on the second turn and took a selfie with the horses in the background.  We went to the gate as the horses were loading and took a selfie there.  We didn’t do one in front of the finish line only because we couldn’t get there in time.

But all good things have to come to an end, and with Del Mar, unless you take the train from Los Angeles, that glow usually comes to a screaming halt with the traffic on the freeway home.   But my lucky streak continued: even with a freak rainstorm, I only hit one small patch of traffic. I made it home in record time.