Hey, Y’All Sure Not Actin’ Nice

To live in Sacramento is to have a thick skin, a gracious heart and, yes, a sense of humor. You can’t survive here without them. Just like you can’t live here without being a yokel, right? Or a hayseed. A red neck. And a member of many fan clubs, including:

The Dukes of Hazzard, the Beverly Hillbillies and Conway Twitty. Yessiree! We chew with our mouths open.

We move our lips when we read. We laugh at knock-knock jokes.

We just discovered that albums aren’t called albums anymore. We love the smell of manure in the morning.

We all speak with a twang--even the Russian folk.

And when Lakers’ star Shaquille O’Neal claimed the only way to beat his team “starts with a C and ends with a T,” we collectively said, hmmm ...

Did he mean Cat? Doesn’t that just sound like us? Or rather, isn’t that the image Los Angeles has of us? Yup.

You heard that stuff all last weekend when the Lakers were in town to start the Western Conference finals against the Kings.

In fact, you heard it before the series even started. Friday, I was in the Southland and tuned into sports talk radio to catch the Laker-King buzz.

What came across were L.A. sports writers declaring that they wouldn’t fly here until game day to avoid spending one unnecessary minute in “Cowtown.”

Some even invoked the word “cooties.” Caller after caller made it sound like the Lakers were traveling to an FFA show rather than a basketball game.

(Memo to L.A.: FFA means Future Farmers of America).

Funny. Yeah L.A., we get it. We’re inferior to you in every way

We in Sacramento aren’t like that.

We love our city. We have thick skin, we can take a joke.

Behind all that bravado, L.A. is scared of losing to Sacramento. Watch for it: If the Kings win a game this weekend at Staples Center, the Lakers’ Hollywood facade will crumble and they’ll do more crying than they do on “The Young and the Restless.”

And that’s another thing. We give L.A. its food and water. L.A. gives us bad television, bad movies and bad attitude--and yet we don’t hold a grudge.

We offer our own fig leaf. A cowbell. Just say the word and we’ll send you some.

Take them and you know what you can do with them.

Ring them the next time you’re sucking exhaust fumes on the Harbor Freeway.

Ring them when your car is burglarized for the fifth time this year.

Ring them the next time you’re accosted by drug-addled freaks downtown.

Ring them when you pay six figures for an outhouse posing as a real house.

Ring them the next time you see silicone and plastic substituting for a real body part.

Then you’ll discover what we know here in Sacramento--that a cowbell sounds a lot nicer than a police car’s wail or a building burning to the ground.

Y’all come back now, ya hear?