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Show To Every Season . Life on the frontier is a lot more complicated than it used to be. For instance, there was a time you could tell a lot about a man by his hat, his boots and the cut of his jeans. Not so any more. In fact, we know several bona fide ranchers who refuse to wear their Stetsons into town for fear of being taken for tourists. Well, you might say, surely the rancher's hat bears the mark of trail dust and certainly his jeans show evidence of fade lines around the chaps. Not necessarily so. For $120, a city dude can buy a broken-in Stetson, not unlike the rage a few years past when teeny boppers could buy preshrunk, prefa-ded, prefa-ded, prepatched denims. And to tell the truth, a real . cowboy wouldn 't wear his range jeans into town. Out of respect for the ladies, he would most likely spruce vp -a bit. It is not surprising that the cowboy hat has come to be a symbol of the American spirit. Out on the trail nothing beats it for protection protec-tion from the sun or from low flying scrub oak. It 's just that when you pack a 10 gallon hat into a Honda Civic with a pair of designer jeans and only take it out to dance or to informal company picnics that it starts to lose its meaning. It's like the Noco-nos Noco-nos boot ads which are aimed at those people who are least likely to encounter a scorpion. scor-pion. "Let's Rodeo" invites a diamond ring on a hand which is nonchalantly flicking flick-ing a gila monster off a pair of $400 lizard toed boots. ' 7 need a pair of those, " says a young real estate broker who is rounding out his preppy image with a bit of urban cowboy flair. In the meantime, the ranchers themselves, ever wary of camera bearing tourists looking for a photo of a real western cowboy, hang their hats on a special wire rack on the ceiling of their pickups and slip on a simple baseball cap to relieve that empty feeling on top of their heads. The net result on Main Street is that the guy in the ten gallon hat is least likely to be the native. For those of us who are neither ranchers or heaven forbid tourists the question of how to keep our ears warm in style is even more perplexing. We have a cowboy hat that we refuse to wear on the aforementioned principals, we have a matched mat-ched crocheted hat and muffler from Aunt Tillie too cute, an Icelandic cap too preppy, a fedora too metropolitan, a riggers hat too macho, a stocking cap too frumpy, and more. Rummaging through our cedar trunks nothing seems to fit these complicated times. . NC |