"There are cowboys and horses at Chicken Corner!" my husband said early this afternoon, so I hightailed it down to Magic Gas, where I found a horse and pony, a herd of white trucks, a man in a cowboy hat, a reporter from the Eastsider, and the usual-looking crew. A commercial for vitamin water. But did I mention the pony had green spots? Blobs of paint (or something) spotted its torso and back legs.* Reference points perhaps for when the CGI folk morph the pony into a mythical creature. Eastsider and I were ordered off the sidewalk, the P.A. explaining that they didn't want to have to pay a special effects worker to erase our images, which apparently didn't say "vitamin water!"

So we stood in the doorway of El Batey grocery and watched several takes in which a pony wrangler trotted the pony and its rider down a cone alley and then across Echo Park Avenue. At one point the pony balked and our rider fell off. But he got right back in the saddle (so to speak -- as there was no saddle), and when he successfully rode that pony to the curb he yelled "Hell, yeah!"

Hell, yeah, indeed. A green-spotted pony at Magic Gas.

*Eastsider captured the spots, here.