New Yorker Gets Kinky

You know you're for real when the that yankee rag the New Yorker writes about ya, right?

Kinky has no stump speech; he just talks. “Seventy-one per cent of eligible voters in Texas did not vote in the last gubernatorial election,” he told a crowd of six or seven hundred at a public fund-raising event later that night in a Houston design store. “And what that means to me is that Texans aren't happy with the choices they're being given.” The crowd ate it up, buying Kinky posters and T-shirts (“KINKY2006: WHY THE HELL NOT?”) like fans at a rock concert desperate for proof that they had seen their idol. There were a few hundred more of them than anyone had expected—Republicans and Democrats, blond society ladies with industrialstrength hair styles and balding hippies with ponytails, heavily tattooed bikers with necks like fire hydrants, lawyers in three-thousand-dollar suits, and hipster twenty-somethings with T-shirts that said things like “Jesusland: pop. 59,459,765” (a slightly inaccurate reference to the number of votes cast for George W. Bush in 2004). The size and the seriousness of the crowd, as well as its deeply strange composition, seemed to take Kinky aback a little, and he shot Jewford a bemused grin.