DESERT DESPERADOS’ COMEDIC CAMEO

Originally conjured up by Cheryl and Audrey as one of the characters in a long-spun tall tale on a road trip, Jackalope Jack came to fruition in the flesh on the set of Desert Desperados.

“This was probably about 20 years ago when the story first started, telling it to all the boys,” Audrey and Cheryl recalled. “We started just making it up as we went. The plot was basically the Wizard of Oz, more or less, but our story was about an Indian princess who was lost in the desert. She had to overcome these obstacles, and she had a long, long braid that got tangled in a cactus at one point, she had to cross a ravine full of rattlesnakes. Anyway, she made friends along the way, a rag-tag group of characters, and one of them was Jackalope Jack.”

“A jackalope is basically a jackrabbit with antlers, if you don’t know,” interjected Hedy. “City folk might be scratching their heads like, ‘what in the world are these hicks talking about?!’”

Well, this jackalope made its way into the designs of Desert Desperados, in some of Dolan’s collaborative contributions and he even got his own jacket (which we called Jackalope Jerry, for some reason). Where we (well, some of us) weren’t really expecting him to make his way was into the photoshoot.

“Does anyone even know where he came from?” laughed Audrey. “Is he ours? Did we seriously haul this strange little thing all the way to Arizona?”

We sure did! And we managed to work that little hopping horned wonder into every single section of the Desert Desperados catalog. And, well, some other places.

“EVERYWHERE I looked, there he was,” swore Mitchell. “90% of the time on a shoot, I’m looking through a lens. I never know what the rapscallions behind me are getting into. Which on this shoot, was apparently playing Elf-on-the-Shelf with this dang Jackalope. New spot, new pose, new accessories every time I turned around. It got a lot of laughs, I have to admit.”

And in case you, too, are wondering where the character came from… well, it belongs to Hedy, of course, who else?!

“We got him in Santa Fe,” she said. “He’s mine now. They can call him Jack or Jerry or whatever else they want, but his name is Little Bunny FuFu.”