March 20, 2007 Bonus Blog
One of the benefits of being "Kid Crazy" is that everyone alerts you when anything Billy the Kid is in the air. Such was the case this morning when I got a call from my lovely wife at 9:30 saying, "Some guy is going to be talking about Billy the Kid on Diane Rehm at ten this morning."

Next came a phone call from Mad Coyote Joe alerting me to the same show. Then I got the following email:

"Just heard that Billy will be the subject on KJZZ at 10:00 a.m. today. You likely already know, but just in case."
—Larry Willis

So, having heard about the show three times (see marketing saw, or maxim, below), I went into production and Robert Ray turned on the Diane Rehm show and there was Michael Wallis talking about his new book on Billy the Kid. I must say Michael is very good. His ability to spin out the story in an enteraining way, yet keep the facts, is quite impressive. Michael's book is full of my artwork and even a photograph (I took a panorama of Cook's Canyon in 1993 when Paul Northrop took me out there and it is the opening spread of the book).

And our Billy the Kid issue is being shipped to subscribers this week. So it looks like the Boy Bandit is back in the saddle. Just wait until the Hutton exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum opens in May. It's going to be Billy's year all over again. Amazing.

And speaking of Paul Hutton, even Wallis poaches from the theme of the "Dreamscape Desperado," the title of the article Hutton wrote for New Mexico Magazine in 1990 (Wallis uses "Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride" as his version). In my editorial for the May issue I deem Hutton's paragraph (below) the most potent ever written about Billy:

"Billy the Kid just keeps riding across the dreamscape of our minds—silhouetted against a starlit Western sky, handsome, laughing, deadly. Shrewd as the coyote. Free as the hawk. The outlaw of our dreams—forever free, forever young, forever riding."
—Paul Hutton