Kinda Like Superman

Or, rather, kinda like Clark Kent.

When I get to the dressage barn on weekday mornings, I am dressed in my breeches, planning to ride.  I don my tall boots (I have learned through experience that although you can ride in half-chaps, you ride more effectively in tall boots), put on my gloves and my helmet (I absolutely love my new helmet, I might have mentioned that before).  I groom The California Horse and tack him up. Then I get on and proceed to be someone other than myself. I am a fancy dressage rider, doing half-passes and travers, and leg yields and all kinds of cool things.

When I am done, I untack The California Horse and turn him out in the pasture so he can spend the rest of the day hanging out with his buddies.  Then, I proceed to the barn's bathroom, Superman's phone booth as it were, where I change out of my riding gear and into my stall cleaning clothes.  Clothes that have worn their way out of 'in public' status and through stains and fading become 'barn clothes' that I don't worry about getting dirty.

And just like that, I go from fancy lady, to lowly stall cleaner.  Someone who, on a larger busier dressage farm, would barely get a glance.  Kinda like Superman turning back into mild mannered, easy to not notice, Clark Kent.

If I happen to stop at the gas station, or the grocery store, on my way home, still in my barn cleaning clothes, I get strange looks.  Wrinkled noses.  Sometimes even service that is so much less than on days I go to the same store in my nice church clothes that it's kind of annoyingly funny.  Because you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, yet people do all the time.  Judge others by how they look, that is.

I'm Clark Kent.  But I'm also Superman.  I'm not a woman with tailored clothes or perfectly coiffed hair; often I'm in jeans and sweat shirts (with a well worn Carhartt coat in the cooler months) and a braid that has fly-away hairs sticking out of it..  Yet, in my riding gear and piloting The California Horse through a series of movements, I am a person that others take notice of.  And admire.  The irony is humorous.