Misery Loves Cow Poop

Anticipating a collective springtime urge to move a little sawdust on the dance floor and let out a honky-tonk yawp, Cathy Hawes and Betsy Faubion of Leavenworth’s Doolittle Farms have set aside Saturday night for their first Barn Dance and Spring Cow Pie Fling. In case the pastoral setting isn’t enough to elicit that yawp, the duo has scored Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys to provide entertainment.

“As the weather gets warm, people want to kick up their heels,” Hawes says.

“Or their pointy toes if they want to wear the fancy boots,” adds Mr. Misery himself.

A major draw for Kansas City’s honky-tonk crowds since 1997, Hobart relocated to Buffalo, New York, last year. Hobart says he was planning a trek through the Midwest on his way to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, when Doolittle Farms contacted him. Not having played with the Misery Boys since last year’s Your Favorite Fool tour, he saw the barn dance as an opportunity to shake off winter as well as the band’s “barely accumulated” dust.

“We’re looking forward to it,” Hobart says, laughing because he’s currently mired in Buffalo’s snow and eagerly awaiting spring. Heck, he may even be convinced to participate in the Cow Pie Fling.

Cow Pie Fling? That’s right. Weather cycles effectively freeze-dry bovine manure, producing aerodynamic disks that Hawes calls nature’s perfect Frisbees.

“Anyone who spent time on a farm as a kid has thrown one,” Hawes says. “It’s a sign of spring!”

Urban dwellers who could not be enticed by all the hand sanitizer in the metro to handle cow dung — freeze-dried or no — need not let this rustic competition pass them by. Though the Spring Cow Pie Fling will be judged in the traditional categories (distance and accuracy), the cow pies themselves will be of a faux variety, whipped up in the kitchens of Doolittle Farms from a secret formula guaranteed not to include real poop of any kind.