The ‘old girls’ got gussied up and strutted their stuff on the weekend – all spit and polish and putting it out there like super models. They lifted their hoods, exposed their mufflers and invited gawkers to take a peek at their manifolds. The ‘old girls’ were on display, best tire forward.
I’ve been to a few car shows over the years, my old boy loved them. He could lean on a tailgate and shoot the shit with perfect strangers for hours. He knew his stuff when it came to talking about and working on ‘old girls’ – he loved them. He loved the atmosphere, the camaraderie and the culture of a car show – he was in his element.
Car shows never held the same allure for me but I didn’t mind walking the concourse with him. I’m a people watcher, an observer, and a car show is good entertainment for someone like me. While my old boy was eyeballing engines and appreciating paint jobs I was noting hairstyles and wild outfits. Old girls who hang out with old boys who appreciate ‘old girls’ are an interesting bunch, they can keep an observer like me happy for the same hours the other ‘old girls’ are entertaining their admirers.
People usually come to a car show with a bias. Some have an honest appreciation for a suped-up muscle car while others look down their noses at anything that isn’t ‘stock’. You’ve got your Ford people, the truck guys and others who think anything but a Chevy is crap. And then there’s people like me who can’t tell a Mustang from a Pinto and don’t give a hoot how many horses are under a hood. For me car shows are much more than a car show.
The interest in classic cars doesn’t seem to diminish with passage of years, in fact it grows. The classics get younger even as the old boys and their old girls get older, it doesn’t seem fair. A splash of color and a little bling gussies up an ‘old girl’ in a jiffy – us human counterparts require considerably more effort. Age is a relative thing – for cars it seems to enhance their value – a mint ‘old girl’ is a treasure. Mint, or not, us human old girls seem to depreciate with time, that doesn’t mean we don’t like to strut our stuff. Best tire (or foot) forward, old girls on parade make a car show a show.