(“There’s a bathroom on the right.”)

When there is real camaraderie, a dinner-gathering of competitors or volunteers on the Saturday night of a weekend show can be a lot of fun. On one such evening our group had chosen a nearby but low-end steakhouse where we could noisily recount the day’s exploits and misadventures to one another.

As we passed through the bar, a ‘Luded-out, guitar-cradling Willie Nelson wannabe was lounging against the faux stonewall backdrop, picking at some chords.

Our party settled into some serious drinking–not quite to the level of Event riders but pretty good for a bunch of dressage divas. Sitting next to me was Margaret, an intelligent but malapropistically-inclined novice show rider. Margaret was known for misapprehending assorted song lyrics, one of which being a Creedence Clearwater classic.

So for a mere five-spot, we persuaded “Willie” to do his rendition of “There’s a Bathroom on the Right,” which allowed Margaret her “I told you so” moment. Ironically, in the alcove next to Willie’s stool, there was indeed a bathroom on the right.

Almost all of us have that sort of difficulty with lyrics at one time or another. My mother’s in her youth was “Jesus Coleslaw” which years later she discovered was “Jesus Calls Us.”

In other news, if you haven’t heard yet, at the recent USET benefit auction in Wellington, a 45 minute lesson on Ravel went to the highest bidder for $26,000.

To digress to the technical side of dressage for a moment, one of Steffen Peters’ themes at the FEI Trainers Conference was to encourage riders to simplify their aids. The way to do this, he elaborated, is to make your horse so attentive, so in front of the leg, so obediently in balance, so supple and surrounded by the aids that a subtle indication from your weight is all that’s required to get the result you want. His point is that if you need to make constant corrections to get a movement done, incessantly “backing and filling” and micromanaging, your well-intentioned efforts are probably distracting or even unbalancing your horse, disrupting the possibility of an optimal performance. The short version of this is “get him where he belongs and don’t hassle him.”

A lot of terms get kicked around when we try to describe the relationship you are trying to create with your horse. “Submission” is one of the collective marks on every test, but that word carries some unpleasant connotations for some who hear it. In the old days the rule book cautioned us that submission did not mean “truckling subservience,” but that moderating phrase has disappeared from the page. I remember when a prominent rider being interviewed in a national magazine declared that she wanted her horses to be “willing slaves.” That didn’t go over very well either.

At the trainers conference Steffen used the word ”cooperation” instead of submission explaining that good dressage shouldn’t be an imposition upon the horse.

This is where the conversation can start getting mystical, as in How do we really know if a horse likes to be ridden? Or wants to be ridden? Maybe it’s all he knows. Maybe he just expects to be ridden. You might argue as long as he is well cared for and not made unhappy, it may not entirely matter. More than likely your decision to ride him has not interrupted some activity that he thought was more important.

At the conference Scott Hassler counseled us all to “coach with composure.” Perhaps in his work with the young horse program he runs up against that portion of the training fraternity for whom ends justify means and emotions drown out reason.

Unfortunately, his advice amounted to preaching to the choir. Those for whom the sermon was intended were most likely either not listening or well practiced in rationalizing their own behavior to themselves.

The way I say it is Dressage should be consensual. Thanks to the New York Times and Deadspin reviews of Fifty Shades of Gray, I now know something about the S and M community—as much as I need to know anyway. Apparently, having a “safe word ” is part of the compact.

On similar lines until our horses can learn to articulate their safe words clearly enough that we can’t miss them, it’s up to us—the riders and trainers—to err on the horse’s side when the propriety of an action we take is in doubt.