Cowboy up to your outer nakedness

New York City is not without its western-related travails.

It seems that the NYC street entertainer who calls himself the Naked Cowboy (but isn't) is suing another street performer who has started a similar, bawdier, street show under the name Naked Cowgirl (though she isn't either).

The Naked Cowboy, whose given name is Robert Burck, has been a popular fixture in Times Square for 10 years singing and playing guitar dressed only in cowboy boots and hat and a pair of briefs.

He has also trademarked and franchised his Naked Cowboy persona.

According to Burck's official Naked Cowboy website, it would cost you $500 a month or $5,000 a year to croon to gawking tourists dressed in your red and blue accented white cotton briefs, boots and hat. And he's totally serious about that, dude.

Burck once sued Mars Inc. for a commercial in which an M&M character mimicked the Naked Cowboy style.

The two parties officially agreed to disagree, and the lawsuit was dropped after they came to an undisclosed settlement agreement.

So watch out Sandy Kane. If a national chocolate icon with a hard candy coating and the backing of a mutli-million dollar candy conglomerate doesn't scare the Naked Cowboy, a 50-something ex-stripper turned comedian isn't going to either.

Kane, whose given name is actually Sandra Brodsky, recently decided to fall back on her scantily clad performance skills to earn a few bucks. She has donned a larger-than-life blonde wig and a patriotic red, white and blue bikini with matching cowboy hat and boots and has been picking and grinning in Times Square under the name Naked Cowgirl.

Burck's Manhattan federal court lawsuit, according to the NY Daily News, claims that Kane's not-for-theentire- family rated performance is "inconsistent with the manner in which the Naked Cowboy conducts business" in a family-oriented fashion — despite, y'know, singing for dollars as a naked guy in public. The lawsuit also says, according to Reuters news agency, that Kane is "appropriating his intellectual property for her own commercial benefit."

OK, I don't know nothing about nothing when we're talking intellectual property, but I say, good luck with that, man. Just watch your back, because I do know cowboys and I do know naked.

I'm advocating that all the real cowboys and cowgirls sue your tighty-whitey behind for defamation of character because, dude, you are not a cowboy.

You do not dress like a cowboy and you do not work as a cowboy. I'm also quite certain that the cowboys and cowgirls I know would not hang with you in Times Square panhandling for money with your half-naked gimmick, so to speak.

You do not own cowboy. You don't even own naked.

In fact, I challenge some industrious lawyer to file a class action suit for false advertisement on behalf of every tourist who ever paid for a picture with the so-called Naked Cowboy because, dude, naked is as naked does.

It is not boots and a hat for your north and south extremities and man undies over your possibilities in between. It's naked as the day you were born. It's Adam and Eve before the fig leaf. It's Lady Godiva tax protesting down the street on that horse — the logistics of which I don't want to consider. These folks know naked, dude. It isn't you.

Strip thee to the nether regions, and we'll talk out of court settlement.

(You keep the guitar for modesty's sake at http://viewnorth40.wordpress.com.)