The Joe Bob Report

Joe Bob's Wild America
Girls! Girls! Girls! (The Final Tally from the Dinah Shore Classic 20,000 Wild Women and One Confused Cowboy)
by Joe Bob Briggs
July 2000

They are woman, hear them score. They come over the hill and head down the 18th fairway at Mission Hills, and they are all wearing The Shorts. Huge shorts. Rapper shorts. Shorts billowing in the wind like America's Cup entrants with legs. The kind of shorts sold at Wal-Mart in sizes that begin at XXXL, destined to be stretched across thunder thighs and draped over bulging bewtocks wherever fine Herbalife products are sold. But here there's an army of them, advancing in splendid hues of black, beige, drab olive and khaki, matched with the kind of sandals normally found only in R. Crumb cartoons.

The party began four days ago, and for most of that time I've felt like a black man at a Ku Klux Klan convention, the only male among 20,000 women, many of them hoping to make the sign of the triple-tongued couch lizard while hot-tubbing in Palm Springs. They started pouring in by plane, truck and SUV from the first day of the Dinah Shore Classic, which is not called the Dinah Shore Classic anymore even though the sisterhood still insists on using the old name. The "Nabisco Championship" just doesn't seem to cut it with the pilgrims of Lesbian Spring Break, and they are not appeased by this year's unveiling of a permanent statue of Dinah at Mission Hills Country Club. The conspiracy theory holds that Nabisco was increasingly embarrassed by the associations of the words "Dinah Shore" with Sapphic libertines, but I just don't get it. Not only was the beloved Tennessee singer and wholesome party girl one of the most white-bread acts in American entertainment history, but she was also famous as the erstwhile girlfriend of notoriously hetero horndog Burt Reynolds. I frankly don't think anybody was in the kitchen with Dinah.

No matter. Whatever the politics of the LPGA, which is no more eager to talk about homosexual jock-worship than the women's tennis tour, the merchants of Palm Springs are overjoyed to be invaded by the week-long plaid-shirt love-in. After all, these aren't rowdy frat boys who pee off the balcony or throw beer cans into the pool. The lesbos tend to pair off and walk around like sweaty-palm high school couples, linking their fingers into each other's belt loops and sharing a backpack full of Power Bars. By Friday night, when the Birkenstocks start stampeding into the Wyndham Hotel and the Doral Resort, traffic backs up for miles along Interstate 10 and everybody makes money except the toenail- polish vendors.

For three days I grooved with the girlie-girls, accompanied by a friend who drove over from San Diego, assuring me she could "pass as lesbian." She coached me on how to do a Rupert Everett sorta thing, as the tag-along neutered male. "You'll do better if they think you're gay," she told me. "The only thing they [don't] like is some guy like you standing around going 'Wow! Look at that lesbian! Whoa! Look at that one!"

Nevertheless, I couldn't help thinking "Wow! Look at that one!" when I saw a woman who turned out to be from suburban Chicago, dressed as a perfect Charlie Sheen look-alike. "Yeah, people have told me that," she said, neither impressed nor unimpressed by the observation. She'd improved on the usual k.d. lang hairdo by greasing it back, and she'd been doing some serious Nautilus work. Most of the women don't go that far with muscles, but they are proud of their spiky hair, bladed in front, short on the sides, shaggy against the collar.

After two or three tries I had to abandon the Rupert Everett thing, having neither the genes nor the wardrobe for it. I was further hampered by not being able to tell a lesbian from a straight woman even when surrounded by a dozen people who could. "Look," said my frustrated friend, "just assume they're all gay. Don't try to figure it out." I whimpered, not unlike Rupert Everett, that things were simpler in the nineties.

At one disco-fever event, arriving lesbyterians were asked to wear a glow-stick button, advertising their color as either red, yellow or green. Red means "married," which doesn't necessarily mean married--that would involve some kind of ceremony in Amsterdam or something--but it does mean that you've already found your Levi's belt-loop partner. Yellow means "I'm picky." And green, of course, means "I'm a slut." I would say about 40 per cent of the group went total all-out slutty green with it. (Later I would describe this system to straight women, who all thought it was a wonderful idea--not realizing that, applied to the heterosexual singles-bar world, all men would be green and all women would be yellow, solving none of the problems it's intended to resolve.)

How all this quaintness ended up in Palm Springs, where Don Rickles is headlining at one of the four nearby Indian casinos and Bob Hope's name is on a principal boulevard, is not entirely clear. It's hard to imagine that the Rat Pack would approve of the Ladies of Lesbos, but on the other hand it's hard to imagine that the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who were here first, would approve of the Rat Pack. Without irrigation Palm Springs is a brackish brown scrubland surrounded by bleak mountains, with mid-day heat that can burst blood vessels. Those same Indians, proud owners of the Spa Hotel and Casino, were more than happy to watch the big-purse older lesbians line up at the nickel slots and the video poker machines and not waste valuable gambling time at the slower-action [male] games like, say, poker. (Casino poker rooms in California, the most poker-crazy state in the union, remain 95 per cent male.)

Meanwhile, on Dinah's beloved golf course, Karrie Webb was the featured attraction, with her pale lime-green shorts (yes, she, too, wears those shorts) and her near perfect game. (She began the year by winning five of six tournaments, including the Nabisco, which is the first major on the women's tour.) Webb is a little stocky but not chunky, unlike the players who have World Wrestling Federation biceps and Sequoia legs. In fact, the truck- driver physiques don't seem to do that well on the women's courses, which tend to reward fairway-to-green shots more than big drives. The biggest gallery in the early rounds belonged not to Webb, even with her "female Tiger Woods" hype, but to the veteran Nancy Lopez, which may have had more to do with the elderly population of Palm Springs than anything else. But by the last day, when Webb played in the same threesome with 13-year-old phenom Aree Wongluekiet of Thailand, Webb owned the crowd. When she won by ten strokes and took the traditional victory plunge into the lagoon surrounding the 18th green, an overexcited amateur named Celine Dion decided to join her. The two superstars splashed around just long enough to be informed by defending champion Dottie Pepper that her victory swim had resulted in something green growing out of her ear.

Maybe a third of the Lesbian Spring Breakers actually attend the tournament, the rest of them spending their days frolicking poolside in some of the most horrifying thong bikinis ever strapped onto a torso. At night they fan out from the Bee Charmer Inn or the Casitas Laquita and head to night clubs, concerts (Janis Ian is a favorite), or all-girl comedy shows at which the biggest laugh comes when comics screw up their faces and make painful cunnilingus noises. (You kinda have to be there.) The comics tend to repeat the same themes over and over-- hatred of Dr. Judy, appeals to Ricky Martin to fess up, jibes at Martina Hingis (who apparently wants the whole world to know how un-lesbian she is), and affectionate references to Ellen DeGeneres, Anne Heche, Sandra Bernhard and, for reasons I don't quite understand, Wynonna Judd.

After a while, I have to admit, I started to feel less and less like an extra in "Mars Needs Women" and more like the class geek who can't quite get into the cool party. Gay women don't party like gay men. For one thing, gay men have much better clothes. For another, there tends to be a brooding seriousness, not unlike a convention of Young Republicans, pervading everything. Although the girls come from every state in the union, it's the small-town couples who seem to be having the most fun.

"We're the only ones in our town," I was told by a couple of cute twentysomethings from Ozona, Texas, in the lobby bar of the Wyndham. "Well, the only ones who admit it anyway." Hours before I had watched four drunk women group-dance to "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" in the late-night lounge of the Spa Hotel, and the image was fresh in my mind.

"You girls from the boonies," I suggest, "seem to have more fun than the city girls."

"That's because we're not really butch," says one of the Ozona Two, the cuter one, the one with the lipstick. "We just like the wardrobe."

Was she flirting with me, or was I just being a hopelessly egotistical male?

"I mean, we can ride horses," she said. "Things like that." Yes, she was definitely flirting with me.

"But most of those girls are not really butch. Doesn't really make sense, does it?"

"Are you telling me that barrel racers are girlie-girls?"

"We don't know them."

There was a brief lull and I wondered if this would be an appropriate time to do the Rupert Everett thing. But then I made the mistake of looking down and seeing that they both wore shorts. They both wore the shorts. The spell was broken. Where lesbians born or made? Do lesbians fantasize about guys like Rupert Everett? I would never know. For once in my life, I didn't wanna find out.