Now, before I pitch a fit about what a frou-frou instrument the tambourine is, let me tell you a little about Baker. It’s right on the border of Nevada and Utah, an intersection of attitudes obvious even in the open range signs: in Nevada a silhouette of a rearing well-hung bull dances across the road, horns menacing, while Utah’s nursing mother stands with all four feet firmly on the ground, anchored there by the weight of her full udders.

We were performing at the Border Inn, a little hotel/casino that makes the most of straddling state lines: You eat, drink and gamble on the Nevada side, then wake to a fresh start in Utah. The handful of disparate people who live in Baker are scattered across enormous physical space—miles of basin stretch in every direction—but when they come together there is no space between them. They are a community.

We had to drive seven hours across sunstruck basins and ranges for our debut, and I had to drive seven hours back the next morning. And yet there was no question of shrugging out of it because Baker is Baker. The people work hard at living there and the least we could do was entertain them.

But I was not about to do my part with a tambourine, which I think of as the thing people shake so that they can pretend to be part of the band. Besides, I saw someone try to play a tambourine for the first time and it looked really hard.

The day before our traveling revue hit the road, The New York Times ran a story on the Indian revolt in Chiapas, Mexico. A photograph showed a band playing during a celebration in a town square. A gaunt man held an instrument that would make any Westerner proud: The jawbone of a cow.

This being Nevada all I had to do was walk outside to find my first instrument. It was the jawbone of a horse, not a cow, and it had most recently belonged to our band’s accordion player, who reluctantly handed it over. She assumed her stance and began making her accordion wheeze as I whaled away at my jaw with a soupspoon.

The jawbone emitted a variety of rich staccato sounds, its chalky calcium providing a soft reverb, but it was so old that teeth literally flew out as I hit them. By the end of the first song I was covered with bone shards, shifting grey dunes of horse-dust piled on my feet. I decided to work with it: I would wear a little black dress the night of our performance.

Six hours into the drive to Baker I realized I’d left my bone at home. I stopped in Eureka at the house of a friend who wasn’t home. No matter: his yard, like any Nevadan’s, was full of rusty junk, twisted wood, old purple and blue bottles, and bones—surely there’d be a jaw among them. And there was, but it was tiny and unattractive, with dark brown tartar—the jawbone of a cat, maybe.

As I dejectedly turned to leave, I spied it, wired to the garden fence—a cow skull, firm in the bloom of youth, crisply calcified a bright white. It was a top, horns and all, rather than a bottom, but on the spot I decided I could swing either way.

At sunset I arrived at the Border Inn. As the band stood warming up in the russet desert, the bright blue sky paled to colorlessness, then slowly darkened. As we headed inside, the cowskull strapped to my chest, the accordionist hissed, “Don’t destroy it. “ I realized she harbored hard feelings about her mealy-mouthed horse jaw.

The crowd gasped when we strode in, not with awe but with horror—they were pretty tightly packed and seemed afraid that I might gore them. But I horned my way without incident to the clearing next to the pool table: our stage. The editor delivered his opening monologue as the band set up, and then suddenly he was singing and everyone was playing, except for me—I was frozen. I only made noise when a tremor of terror passed through me, faintly vibrating the rib-bone against the skull.

But then I saw a fat little kid in the back of the room pointing at me and howling with laughter, and I realized this was not Carnegie Hall, that we were here to have fun, that I did indeed look ridiculous, and I started keeping the beat. Several beats in fact. I went from a light innocuous tapping to a strumming of the teeth, and found I could make an interesting death rattle-like effect by vibrating the rib tip in the eye sockets. By the time we were on our last song, a Cajun waltz that we all sounded pretty good wailing and yipping our way through, I was keeping time, and throwing in an occasional ricocheting flourish, letting the rib bounce back and forth between the horns. We finished to silence. Then the editor assured everyone we were truly finished, and the room burst into applause. We meandered back to our places, faces flushed with success or at least relief.

The next morning as I was walking my dog in the desert a mean looking man staggered out of his room. He stood scratching himself, making muffled raspy noises on hidden whiskers. As we passed he growled, “You play a mean bone.” I shivered with delight.

At a recent concert I saw Michele Shocked drag a man out of the audience and make him play mandolin. “Music is too important and revolutionary to be left in the hands of professionals,” she told the audience, as he discovered sounds that would make cats weep.

My world has changed. I listen to songs differently now, and drum along on the steering wheel, which I understand everyone in Brazil does, and now I want to go there. When driving a washboard dirt road in the Stillwater Marsh, I go from being jostled and hostile to trying to memorize its particular rhythm. A fourteen year old kid is teaching me some licks, though he’s insisting that I use drumsticks.

It’s like an extra muscle has been added to the way I make my path through the world. And someday, when I’m in an old folks home, in response to a boring craft demonstration or fourth graders being bussed in to sing “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” I hope I’ll pop out my dentures and let ‘er rip with the opening riff of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.”

The Great Basin Traveling Revue visited Baker with support from the Tumblewords program of the Nevada State Council on the Arts. Give us a call if you’d like us to bring our literary and musical variety show to your town.