Boy Sprinkles

Last week - before the bills came - I briefly flirted with the notion of trading my extra Steppin’ Out for an Appaloosa Stoneleigh Surprise. Since the prices on the Apps were/are still stratospheric, I thought I could possibly sacrifice one of my "less special" samples to sweeten the pot. The lesser one being a CH Sprinkles:

(Yeah, I know, I have so many samples now I can actually categorize them by their level of specialness.)

A few days ago, however, as I was lurking through the "Sample" thread on Blab - mostly to reassure myself that I had "done good" - someone made a passing reference to their sample Sprinkles being a boy.

That struck me weird. Yeah, the real CH Sprinkles is a mare, but Breyer - and Reeves, until recently - never took anatomy as destiny. Those parts - especially on some of the older molds - are kinda sketchy anyway, partly by design. ("Mommy, what are these bumps for?") OF judges are fairly forgiving about that area, too. If the model looks like a mare, showing it as a mare is generally not a problem, regardless of the anatomy down under.

I didn’t think to look at that part of the model - my sample, or a production piece - to see if there was a difference.

But there was. The production Sprinkles’ that I saw on the shelf at one of my local Breyer dealers? All girls. My sample? All boy!

Like the Man o’ War from last year, Sprinkles was another model that got "handed off" to me by a friend. I had seen some Sprinkles in passing earlier in the week at the hotel, and I thought hey, even if it’s just an ordinary "no VIN" sample, it shouldn’t be too hard to resell. The Five-Gaiter never looked better, and the Gloss Sprinkles prize models from the Open Show were already shaping up to be a hot item.

Most samples only have subtle differences - slightly better shading, cleaner masking, no box rubs, the absence of VIN numbers - but the absence of production mold alteration kicked this Sprinkles a couple notches up on the specialness scale. Needless to say, he/she isn’t going anywhere.

More proof that whenever someone hands you a model, just take it. The Universe is giving you something special.

(Oh, in the matter of "doing good": yes, quite so. Better than many of the people who were ahead of me in line. Proving my point, again, that your position in line is irrelevant, as long as you know what you’re doing. So neeners!)