Lee Harrington's Open Salon Blog

Birthday Parties for Dogs--Who, Where, When and Why

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:03:08 -0400

Like many people with rescued dogs, I do not know the exact age or birth date of my French Spaniel mix, Chloe. When I adopted her in the fall of 2004, I was told she was between six months and one year old—which is a wide margin, considering how much a dog grows in that first year. And while part of me wanted to believe she was at least a year old (because she weighed 55 pounds at the time and I doubted that I could physically handle anything beyond that), I decided to give Chloe a March birthday.

Why was this important? Because I wanted to throw Chloe a birthday party, of course. We always welcome a reason to celebrate our new shelter dogs, and what better day to celebrate than March 20—the first day of spring.

Spring in New York City is particularly glorious, in part because we New Yorkers have to endure such harsh and miserable winters. One could argue that New York dog people are exposed to more than our fair share of the harshness in winter, because we have to take our dogs outside at least four times a day. This is not to say that having to walk our dogs is anything to complain about at any time of year, because we love, love, love our dogs. But, to be perfectly honest, walking a dog through ankle-deep slush in the freezing rain (rain that somehow manages to rain sideways) is not fun. I can’t say I unequivocally enjoy it. Just don’t tell my dog I said that. (But sometimes, not even she enjoys walking in the sideways-sleet. So there.)

Anyway, winter is behind us now, and signs of spring in New York City are everywhere. On the sidewalks, you’ll pass dozens of mini-gardens planted in the city’s tree beds and protected by low iron fences. Because volunteers or townhouse owners or neighborhood associations take charge of these mini-gardens, each one is different and beautiful in its own unique way. Beneath one tree you might see clusters of purple hyacinth mixed with white dwarf daffodils; the next flower bed will contain clusters of colorful primroses arranged within tight tangles of ivy; next: a riot of eye-popping tulips in pink, orange and red. It’s wonderful to see so much color after so many months of gray. We start walking our dogs almost 10 times a day because we just want to be outside, soaking up all that beauty.

Often you’ll see little signs posted at the base of these tree beds, with the message: Please do not let your dog urinate on the flowers, and we dog people always respect that request, because spring in New York City is a time of happiness and renewed hope. Every New Yorker is in love with the world in spring, so we are kinder to one another, and more considerate. We smile and make eye contact. We take time along the way to smell the flowers, as they say. Thus, no one messes with the flowers. Plus, as I always tell the dog, there are plenty of other places to pee in New York.

But getting back to Chloe’s birthday. Many people scoff at the idea of throwing a dog a birthday party, but those people are usually not dog people. They might not understand our belief that each of our dogs deserves his or her own “special day” just as we all deserve one. Or two or three or three hundred and sixty-five. One could argue that with shelter dogs, the desire to create a special day is even stronger, because these dogs may have suffered cruelty or neglect. These dogs may have spent months in cages, without being treated as “special” at all.

So bring on the marching band because we’re having a party.

Now, New Yorkers are known for going over the top when it comes to parties. I know people who have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for doggie birthday parties and doggie weddings. There are bakeries that make chicken-andoatmeal birthday cakes frosted with liver pâté. There are doggie daycare centers that rent out party rooms for more money than you’d pay for your own wedding reception. There’s even a boutique that sells tiny rhinestone “Happy Birthday” tiaras for lap dogs to wear to parties on the Upper East Side.

I am not judging any of this. I celebrate any occasion at which a bunch of dogs get to play and have fun. But, being a writer, I was on a limited budget; therefore, Chloe was not going to have artisanal foie gras “pupcakes” at her party; nor was I going to rent a 3,000-square-foot space and hire an agility instructor to teach all the dog guests to leap over hurdles and shimmy through plastic tunnels and hoops (bummer). Also, I don’t cook, which meant there wasn’t anyone in my household who was going to spend four days constructing shepherd’s pie cupcakes from organic buffalo meat, vegetable terrine and mashed fingerling potatoes. No, I was going to keep this party simple.

Plus, I reasoned, dog people—when you get down to it—are easy to please. Know what I mean? We’re more down to earth, in a way, because our dogs constantly ground us and teach us to focus on the simple pleasures of life: nature, exercise, food, play, sleep. So who needs fripperies when the guest of honor is perfectly content with a dirty old tug-arope, a couple of dog pals to steal it from, a gingersnap and some praise?

I decided to hold the party at our local dog run, which happened to be one of Chloe’s favorite places in the world. The invitations consisted of a handwritten notice posted on the community board inside the run and a quick announcement on NYCDog’s Manhattan Dog Chat site. I requested “No presents, please” and encouraged well-wishers to make a small donation to Animal Haven instead. March 20 happened to be on a Friday that year, which was great, because on Friday evenings, we held our weekly Yappy Hour at the run. We’d bring wine and music (and our dogs, of course) and spend a few extra hours socializing while the dogs tore around. Technically, we were not supposed to bring any food to the dog run because the presence of food can instigate food fights (among the dogs), so our rule for Yappy Hour was that you could bring snacks that would have no appeal to a canine: tapenade, tofu (raw, not fried), garlic pickles, seaweed salad, hot green salsa and so forth. None of these things paired very well with red or white wine, but that was part of the fun. Sometimes someone would sneak in a baguette or a bag of chips to accommodate the tapenade and the salsa, and that person had to stand on top of the picnic table, doling out slices of bread or some chips to the humans, one at a time. The things we do for our dogs ...

On the morning of Chloe’s assigned “birthday,” I fed her a special breakfast of lamb chunks (which she loved) and presented her with a pretty new collar. This collar was quite chintzy—a pink faux-velour band with fake pink crystals and rhinestones and embroidered flowers. But that is why I liked it. It looked like spring—something a six-year-old girl would wear as a belt to an Easter parade. And no, I did not spend hundreds of dollars on this collar: it came from Target and cost 12 bucks.

Chloe looked very pretty with her new collar, and I also had her groomed for the occasion, so her white-and-brown coat was sparkly and fluffy. At the party that evening, friends noticed the coat and new collar, and everyone went out of their way to praise Chloe and scratch her belly and tell her happy birthday. Chloe seemed to enjoy all the extra attention she was getting. It’s always nice to be told one is pretty. It’s always nice to be told one is a “good dog” and a “special girl.” Her tail wagged nonstop for hours.

People brought the usual assortment of sour, bitter and pickled foods to the party, plus a few bottles of wine—all of them from dog-themed wineries such as Mutt Lynch and Faithful Hound. Many of my dog-run friends cheated on the no-presents rule and brought presents for Chloe—toys and small packages of treats—and one friend actually made a little birthday cake (peanut-butter-flavored, with yogurt icing). I asked this dear woman to hide the cake until the party was over. Chloe, it must be said, had been the instigator of many a food fight, and I just didn’t trust her anymore. Not even on her own special day.

There is a famous line from the movie Casablanca, in which one of the male characters is described as “like any other man, only more so.” I guess we could say that, to a dog, a birthday is “like any other day, only more so” as well. At her party, Chloe played with her usual pack of friends: Greyhound mixes and Jack Russells and Lab mixes and Pit Bulls. They chased one another around the perimeter of the one-acre run, rolled in the dirt (or rather, mud, given that this was spring) and played tug-of-war and keep away. Their joy was a celebration of play itself.

After a few bottles of wine, we humans sang a rousing and slightly off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” to Chloe, trying to coax some of the hounds to join in. Barley the Bassett obliged, adding a singular high note to the finale. Then we brought out birthday hats—those little cone hats with those elastic strings that wraps under the chin. We managed to get the hats on several dogs, including Chloe, and we watched as they each tried to shake them off. Some might have considered this game mean (why torture the poor dogs?), but we laughed at their cute, comic struggles. After about 10 seconds, the hats became play things as one by one, the dogs got them off, took them in their mouths, tossed them in the air and/or ran off. Soon, the run was littered with mushy piles of chewed-up cardboard and string.

Chloe’s pretty new collar was also ruined within seconds, because her dog friends kept tackling her and biting her on the neck. And whose idea was it to groom a white dog two hours before taking her to a muddy dog run? Consider it a birthday splurge—much less costly than hiring a marchingband. At the end of the day, I found bits of rhinestone and pink thread all over the run. “Made in China,” one of my gay friends said, with a smile and a shrug. “You get what you pay for.”

Eventually the wine ran out and the dogs got tired. Chloe returned to my side, panting, with bright eyes and a smile on her face as if to say, This is fun! I put one last birthday hat on her head and watched her run away and try to shake it off. She did so with a grunt and then stepped on the hat, looking up proudly, like a conqueror. This seemed to signal the end of the party, and we all gathered up our bags and leashes and dogs and said goodbye.

Once Chloe and I passed through the exit gate, my friend handed Chloe’s birthday cake over the fence, making sure that the other dogs did not see. It was packaged in a little pastry box tied with string, and as I carried it to the car, Chloe kept leaping up and twisting in the air—because somehow she knew this was her birthday cake. For me! her leaps seemed to be saying. Cake for me!

I always enjoy watching her leap like this—with such joy—because she spent much of her early life in a shelter. As she continued to bark and spin, I thought of all those shelter dogs, still waiting for homes. I hope that each one will have the chance to celebrate—and be celebrated—in such a way: with fun and sun and glorious weather, with trips to the dog runs to play with friends, with long walks in the park amidst the spring flowers, then lamb chops for dinner and a wellearned nap. A life like any other, only more so.

When we got home, Chloe wanted to snarf down the entire cake in one gulp, of course, but it was big enough for three meals, so we split it into thirds. As I put the two extra slices into the refrigerator, she looked at me rather forlornly, as if she had been betrayed somehow. She seemed to know (being a smart dog) that it was still her birthday and would remain so until 11:59. “Oh, all right,” I said, and gave her another spoonful. And then two more. The rest, I decided, we’d give to a neighbor—an elderly woman who was constantly bringing home abandoned Pit Bulls from the streets. “Is that okay?” I asked Chloe. “Do you approve?” She thumped her tail a few times, which seemed like a yes. Those poor Pit Bulls deserved a special treat to celebrate their new lives too.

The postscript to this story is that my 55-pound dog soon blossomed into an 80-pound dog. This had nothing to do with birthday cake. My French Spaniel mix now had the long and wide-ribbed body of a Labrador Retriever. This also meant that Chloe probably was born around March after all. She was a spring baby, as welcome as a new flower. Which is always a cause to celebrate.

The Cure for the Winter Blues (Canine style)

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:02:25 -0500

In my dogless years, I suffered from depression during the winter months. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) they call it, but for me, it was more ISMICGOOB. (I’m So Miserable I Can’t Get Out of Bed). I won’t go details about my emotional state or describe the dire thoughts and feelings that whirlpooled around my sun-deprived mind. Let’s just say that during the winter of 2003, I was a mess. My beloved dog Wallace had died, I had divorced my husband and all I loved most about life—including the sun—had receded. Winter nights in the Northeast can be 14 to 16 hours long. But it seemed like 24.

One particularly dark night in January, the police actually showed up at the door of my lovely but secluded house in Woodstock, N.Y. My former husband had called them, because he hadn’t heard from me in days, and he was worried. (Even though we had parted—he still sensed these things.) I remember how terrified I was to be awakened by pounding on my front door; how disorienting it was to see flashlights beaming into my bedroom window. I remember thinking, If Wallace were here, he would have barked.

Dogs sense our emotional states even better than husbands (or ex-husbands). Wallace would have let me know that the men outside the window were no threat. That even though it was dark and bitter and miserably cold and winter, we were safe.

Anyway, that was then, this is now. I have Chloe now.

After that odd but enlightening (no pun intended) incident with ISMICGOOB, I consulted a doctor—a pioneer in integrative medicine—who prescribed vitamin D; rhodiola; structured yogic breathing to stimulate the pineal gland and produce serotonin; and a high-grade, futuristic and a $500 light box. He also prescribed the usual: rest, exercise, laughter, companionship and so forth.

In other words, he prescribed a dog.

Shortly before the winter of 2004 descended like a dark curtain—in fact, only before Daylight Savings ended, I adopted Chloe. Now, I don’t mean to imply that I adopted her because of the forthcoming winter—I had begun the process in August—but I was grateful for the timing. The universe sometimes gives us what we need, when we need it.

We lived, then, in New York City, which has its own particular version of winter. After the first half hour, the snow isn’t beautiful. It’s just this inconvenient thing you have to slog through to get some place you wish you didn’t have to go. Then, giant snowplows driven by angry New Yorkers scrape the snow violently into piles (scraping the side of your car along with it). The “snow boulders” just sit there for months, in great unattractive heaps the color of dung. With some piss-yellow thrown in (courtesy of men and dogs).

The cold in the city is more biting, more aggressive, somehow. City wind knows how to turn corners, fly up your skirt and speed through intersections as if trying to beat the red lights. And then there’s our source of heat: steam radiators that clang at night, as though some ghoul were hiding under your floorboards, banging a wrench against your pipes.

For dogs, the NYC version of winter includes all of the above, plus paw pain from chemicals spread on the sidewalks and the indignity of being forced to wear clothes, such as plaid Burberry lumberjackets and little canvas booties with “anti-slide” soles.

Don’t get me wrong. I love New York. And dogs love anything. But New York in winter? Not recommended by SAD doctors.

So we moved back to the Catskills, to Woodstock. Back to the garden, as the song goes, back to the land of peace and love. And light and space and air. One of the first things we did after unpacking was visit a local park called The Comeau Property, 76 idyllic acres of meadows, woods, streams, swimming holes and grassy fields. Chloe had plenty of land to roam on our own six-acre property, but I wanted her to make new friends. I wanted new friends, too; people with SAD should avoid isolation.

Thus, we met Greg, a way-cool musician and conceptual artist in his 50s, and his handsome Setter, Rainbow. (It was love at first sight for the Rainbow and Chloe; they have now been engaged for seven years, but have yet to set a date). Next we met Lilly, a witty photographer and her dog Sparky—a Pointer mix who had the air and expression of Nietzsche. The three of us humans not only had dogs in common: it turned out that we were all recent transplants to Woodstock. Greg and his family, up until then, had lived full-time in NYC, and Lilly came from Miami by way of Los Angeles. All three of us were also prone to SAD and facing our first Woodstock winter with trepidation. But, we had our prescriptions and we had our dogs.

Prescription 1: Avoid isolation. In the winter, those of us with SAD mostly want to hibernate. We want to hide in our emotional cocoons of lethargy and also in our literal cocoons of heavy down jackets with giant puffy hoods, which we zip from head-to-toe and cinch tightly around our faces. Nothing shows except a nose, which is always red and runny from the cold.

Dogs, on the other hand, expand in winter. We’ve all witnessed this. They get friskier, more energetic. They tend to bounce around more, run in circles at every occasion (a ringing doorbell! A trip to the mailbox!) and exhibit new hidden talents for leaps and pirouettes. As the temperatures drop, their coats thicken and their pupils shrink to focused pinpoints, which somehow makes them look more alert, and feral.

At Comeau, our dogs seemed overjoyed with the new weather and their new pack. I loved to watch their ecstatic, bright-eyed faces as they ran through the white fields, and the way they seemed to smile as they leapt through the high drifts in buoyant, dolphin arcs. I loved the way they threw their bodies into the snow and shimmied on their backs, pushing themselves upside-down through the drifts, only to leap to their feet again and shake it all off. Rainbow saw any dog on his or her back as fair game, and took the opportunity to get in a playful nip on the neck, rump or leg. I loved the way they would dive, twist, and nip, exhausting themselves with their clever dog maneuvers, and how they would pause from play, just slightly, to scoop some snow—powdery and pure—into their mouths for quick refreshment. Chloe always seemed rejuvenated by her “snow snack,” as we called it, like a hearty Russian explorer clearing her head with a shot of ice-cold vodka. Snow, I realized, was like a drug to dogs. A puppy upper.

Something else I found endearing was that Chloe was the least athletic among her new country-dog pals. Rainbow could clear six-foot fences and outrun snowplows, and Sparky—thick in the middle—could take a hit like a seasoned defensive lineman. Chloe, however, walked around puddles and, when she ran with the boys, was always a few yards behind, her ears flopping behind her as she ran with cure girly determination.

She didn’t mind being at the bottom of the hierarchy. She was just happy to have friends. She always trotted back to us with a smile on her face, as if to say: See, I’m hanging out with the cool guys. That smile warmed our hearts. This was much better than hanging out isolated at home with a SAD woman.

Prescription 2: Sunlight. For those of us with SAD, doctors prescribe at least 40 minutes each day in front of a light box or in direct sunlight. When our pack gathered at Comeau in the mornings, we always stood in the open field, in the sunshine. As the weeks passed, our positions shifted slightly so that we could get as much exposure and vitamin D as possible. We seemed much more aware of time after winter solstice, because we gained a full two minutes of sunshine every day. I loved the way the low, slanted light sieved through the bare trees in the morning. The sun seemed put in extra effort, just for us.

The dogs seemed to be putting in extra effort, too. If our conversations started to veer toward the negative some mornings (it’s cold, it’s dark, we have no mental or physical energy, Woodstock has no decent coffee), the dogs would increase the intensity of their play. They’d position themselves right in front of us and take turns spinning, biting, chasing, pouncing and wrastling. (I know wrastling is not an actual word, but it should be). Usually, Chloe was on the bottom of the play-pile, pushing the male dogs off with her hind legs. As she twisted her body to the right to get in a defensive leg-nip, Rainbow would leap over her head, Sparky, as if choreographed, would circle around them and then swoop in for another chomp on her neck. It was kind of like a canine Cirque du Soleil. After several minutes of dramatic play, they’d pause, gulp some snow and then smile at us, as though expecting applause. Which they always got.

Prescription 3: Laugh. On weekends, Greg’s wife Mindy joined us, along with their seven-year-old son, Clayton. Clayton was the instigator of many a dog game. In fact, he played as exuberantly as the dogs: he’d dive, tackle, roll, and had no problem falling face-first into the snow. He would insist that we bury him neck-deep in the higher drifts so that the dogs could play “find the avalanche victim.” Clayton insisted on riding his toboggan down the hill by himself, so the dogs could follow along, like a great team of bodyguards, and pig-pile on him en masse at the bottom of the hill. Once, Clayton somehow wrangled Rainbow onto the toboggan, wrapping his legs around the dog to keep him in place. Rainbow looked positively miserable, his tail curled underneath him as we pushed them down the hill, but still, he submitted because he loved his family. Dogs will do anything for love.

Prescription 4: Establish a routine. We met at the park at 8:28 am exactly. Greg had to drop Clayton off at his school bus at 8:17, and it took him 11 minutes to reach Comeau. This meant I had to leave my house at 8:21, and also that around 6, Chloe would be at the door with her nose pressed to the crack, tail wagging, dancing up and down with excitement. Our small foyer was narrow, and it was it difficult to open the door with an exuberant, 60-pound dancing dog trying to wedge her way through. Her enthusiasm made me smile. And smiling is a nice way to start a day.

It took me seven minutes to drive to Comeau, and in those seven minutes I always tuned in to Writer’s Almanac on NPR. I loved listening to Garrison Keillor recite poetry in his smooth, soothing voice. (Poetry: another wonderful antidote to SAD.) Meanwhile, in the back seat, Chloe would be pressing her body forward with a serious and focused look on her face, as if she alone was responsible for guiding us.

When we arrived, Chloe leaped [LEAPT?] out of the car and ran in circles, looking for her friends. Lilly, Greg and I usually arrived at the same time. Lilly drove a Jeep. Greg drove an old but elegant Mercedes wagon, which, being a Mercedes, ran quietly. But if Greg was late, we could hear Rainbow yowling in excitement from a quarter-mile away. Rainbow, the most vocal of our dogs, greeted Sparky with a chummy grunt and a body slam; his girlfriend Chloe got a more emotional “a-woo-woo-woo.” Chloe—not much of a barker—whimpered in a cute, coquettish way, and Sparky would just do a little leap and then stand calmly by Lilly again. Sparky kept his real thoughts to himself.

After this brief canine greeting, the dogs greeted the humans with kisses, tail wags, crotch-poking and figure eights. Then, led by Rainbow, they tore off into the fields, bounding through the snow. Next, we humans would walk to our spot in the sunshine, drink our coffee, complain about the cold, absorb our daily dose of vitamin D. After the prescribed 40 minutes of sunshine, we would start the official walk.

Prescription 5: Spend time in nature. Comeau is a large park, but the hiking trails are modest. It would take a dogless person probably 20 minutes to walk them. Our pack liked to amble, so it would take us 45. We liked to pause and point out the beauty of ice clinging to pine needles, we liked to stop and listen to the sound of water flowing intrepidly beneath the frozen surface of the Mill Stream. And, of course, we liked to watch the dogs: blazing their own trails through the snow, chasing the squirrels who chittered at us from the trees, or—glory of glories—finding deer poop to roll in (Rainbow ) or eat (Sparky) or both (Chloe). Somehow, Chloe’s rolling offense seemed less gross in winter, because I could quickly wipe it off with a handful of snow.

Seeing beauty is also important for a person with SAD—or anyone, really. And while winter beauty can be lonely and stark, it is a beauty that points forward somehow. With the trees bare, we could see the mountains beyond and the steeples of white churches, and soothing curls of smoke rising from chimneys. There is something about being able to see through the distances, especially in winter, which reminds us that there is always a beyond.

Plus, we had three bird dogs, the sort of dogs who always roamed far ahead of us and pointed at things worth seeing: bright red berries on the holly bushes. Chickadees and cardinals. Our dogs were our rangers, our trail guides. I liked following their paw prints in the fresh snow. It felt as if we were doing something entirely original and new.

The trail led us straight back to the parking lot, where we would say goodbye for the day. It took a lot of coaxing and bribing and promises of bacon to lure the dogs back into our respective cars (Chloe usually wanted to go home with Rainbow). But they always gave in, knowing that they were going home to hearty breakfasts and warm fires.

Prescription 6: Take care of your body. On the way home, I stopped at Sunfrost Café for carrot juice with a shot of wheatgrass. The juice rejuvenated me in a way that, I suppose, Chloe’s gulps of snow rejuvenated her. There was a sense of freshness, of eating something clean.

Then we’d go home. In the foyer, I’d remove my boots and Chloe would shake off the final flakes of snow. I loved the way she smelled—it wasn’t so much the smell of wet dog as the smell of cold. Of winter at its best. After Chloe had licked the final chunks of ice off her leg feathers and from between her toes, both of us would go upstairs, where I’d light a fire and brew a cup of tea. As soon as I latched the door to the woodstove, Chloe would curl herself up on the hearth.

Prescription 7: Rest. The hearth—that’s the best thing about winter. The center, the source of warmth, the fire element, our own personal sun. Whenever I see a dog lying by a hearth, I have the sense that life is exactly as it should be. That winter is a time to be home.

Prescription 8: Practice gratitude. Some days, the mornings at Comeau were the only sane hours I had that winter. But those hours accumulated and built upon themselves, as did the vitamin D in my body from the sunshine; the number of times I laughed at the dogs’ antics; and the number of great, deep breaths I took in that pure mountain air. Slowly but surely, I found my frame of mind shifting from, excuse the pun, SAD to glad.

Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi once wrote: “If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything.” Dogs seem to instinctively know this.

I remember that during one particularly grim winter, before I had dogs, I had to work very hard to find things to appreciate. (Such a statement might sound obnoxious, but this is the state of mind of a person in the throes of SAD.) I have always loved stars—their calming presence, their cool, serene beauty—but that winter, not even stars made me happy because, well, because of SAD. The fact that I could not even appreciate stars made me feel even worse. Then, I decided to be grateful that other people appreciated stars. And that one shift in perception and attitude lifted everything up again.

The winter night sky in the Catskills is beautiful beyond description, with stars plentiful and bright and acute. When I step outside at night and look up and out, I feel as though I am seeing all of eternity. And I realize I never would have experienced this feeling if I didn’t have a dog. Because, believe me, I would not be outside in below-zero weather for any other reason.

In the mornings, I am the one who has to coax Chloe inside after our walks. But at night, it is she who rushes back to the house first. Now, even on the darkest, longest winter nights, I feel as if I could stand underneath that starry sky forever. It reminds me that there is no such thing as sadness. Just an infinite number of worlds, working in harmony. “Look,” I say to Chloe, pointing up. “Sirius. The dog star. That’s you!” She wags her tail, and her breath forms a cloud in the air, which seems like a loving answer. And we go inside. Where it is happy and warm.

The Chloe Chronicles/Part IV: A Canine Cure for the Winter Blues

By Lee Harrington

On Being a Female Lead Singer in a (Very) Male Tribute Band

Sun, 4 Dec 2011 10:12:43 -0500

Hello Fellow OSers and Who fans,

To those who don't know me: I am a writer by day (with Random House), and a musician at night, and I happened to sing lead in a band that sings mostly Who songs (with a bit of Led Zeppelin, Stones, U2 etc thrown in...and songs by a solo artist you may have heard of named Pete Townshend). Nothing brings me more joy that singing songs by Pete and The Who. I am sure you can all relate.

Friends and editors have been asking me for a while to start blogging about my experiences singing in a Who tribute band--especially as a woman putting forth and interpreting very male songs. But I held off, thinking there is only so much one can say about interpreting male lyrics and delivering them in a more female way. [ And please note that sometimes I do not even attempt to mimic Roger stylistically and/or note-by-note in certain songs, because in my mind the only woman who can really pull off Roger-at-his-most-Rogeresque (or Robert Plant for that matter) is Janis Joplin, and my voice is quite different from hers. So what I usually do, when I sing the Who at least, is study Pete's demo versions and infuse some of the emotion of those versions into my vocals.]

With Led Zeppelin, I simply stay away from certain songs that would sound preposterous coming from a woman (ie: squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg)

And I should mention that my band rocks full-force no matter what. And there's always plenty of sexual energy to channel!

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences with you. I certainly would welcome your input as to how you personally interpret certain Who songs. And I'd be curious to know how Roger or Pete have varied their vocals in live shows.

I want to honor the band I am serving when I am up there on stage. (And by that I mean I want to honor my own fellow musicians and I want to honor and serve The Who. Because the Who have given so much to me--to us--throughout the years.

I look forward to corresponding with all of you.

Bright Blessings,

Lee

What to Name the New Shelter Dog

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:11:32 -0500

When I adopted my dog Chloe sight unseen from a shelter in Michigan via Petfinder.com, she came with the name of Buffy. And she certainly looked like a Buffy in her profile photos—sweet and soft and eager to play. A dog who would buffer your emotions, and remind you to stay soft and gentle and happy yourself.

But somehow I could not see myself—a then-edgy New Yorker—calling out the name “Buffy” in Riverside Park. I mean, it’s a cute name, but for some reason I wanted to avoid being interpreted as “cute.” I’m too darn serious, thank you very much. And I’ve never seen that Vampire Slayer show—I don’t even own a television set. So the name Buffy would be misleading on many levels.

So that was Silly Reason #1. What was most important to me, however, was that Buffy’s new name be a reflection of her—her looks, her personality, her distinctions. I wanted a name that would summarize all that was unique about her dogness. Thus, I decided I would not give her a new name until I met her face-to-face.

I wrote about meeting Buffy/Chloe in my previous installment of “The Chloe Chronicles” (“Home, Again,” Sept/Oct 2011). In short, she was a 55-pound Spaniel mix, mostly white with brown markings, with a big bushy tail and a classic Spaniel face. The white stripe down the center of her head and snout was perfectly straight and proportional, as if hand-drawn by da Vinci himself. And personality-wise, she was totally a Buffy. Sweet and soft and friendly—just as her pictures had suggested. She was also quite anxious at the beginning, so I knew I wouldn’t see the real her right away.

I remember when I first brought the dog to our local, marvelous two-acre dog run in Fort Tryon Park), the first thing everyone asked me was, of course, her name. They all though it rather comic that I hadn’t chosen one yet. So I explained that her name had been Buffy but that I was going to change it once I got a sense of what her name should be. “Plus,” I said. “I’m not even sure Buffy was the name given by her first owner. ‘Buffy’ could have been the name the French Spaniel rescue group gave her when they pulled her from the shelter.”

In many spiritual traditions and creation myths, each human being has what is called a True Name. It’s the name of our soul, really, our Original Self, the part of us that lives on and on through many lifetimes. For those who don’t believe in the idea of reincarnation, our True Name is the name St. Peter has in his register at the Pearly Gates. In any case, it is said to be a very powerful experience to be called by your True Name, because the name brings forth everything that is, well, true in yourself: goodness, compassion, generosity, loving kindness … that sort of thing.

All of this is to say: I wanted to give my new dog a name that would call forth her Original Self. The dog she had been before she was abused and neglected and abandoned. But try explaining that in a New York City dog run.

“Well, what are you going to call her in the meantime?” one of my new dog-park friends, Chantay, asked. She was a tall, gorgeous, African-American woman with an historic brownstone townhouse in Morningside Heights and an excellent sense of humor. Her dog—a Weimaraner mix—was named Boo. “It’s easy,” she said. “One syllable, no mistakes.” She said that some day, she wanted to have three dogs so that she could name them One, Two and Three.

“I’m not sure what to call her,” I said. We stood and watched the erstwhile Buffy enjoy the dog run: happily romping, nipping and rolling in the dirt with her new dog friends. There was a Ridgeback mix named Lexie (who was Queen of the run); a French Bulldog named Myrtle; and a tiny, timid Terrier mix named Bird. “How did you come up with that one?” I asked Birdie’s human companion, Jenn, who was associate director of a prominent animal shelter in Queens. “I don’t know,” she said. “She just looks like a Birdie. Small and cute and sweet. Buffy does look like a Buffy, you know.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I guess I shouldn’t rule it out entirely.”

For a few days, my new friends and I watched my dog run and play, hoping that her True Name might reveal itself. She was sweet and submissive—always the first dog to give up the toy in a game of tug; always rolling onto her back into a “love-me-I’m-submissive” pose when a new dog approached. “So she’s a lover, not a fighter,” Chantay said. As she said this, Lexie zipped past us, ready to take down an old Bassett Hound (Beatrice) who was lumbering through the entrance gate with her lumbering human. I loved to watch Lexie run; I loved to watch how much she enjoyed being the run’s top dog. She was never mean about it. Instead, she seemed rather exuberant, like a bride ready to take down her wedding party if they dared do anything to ruin her Big Day. And every day in a dog’s world is a Big Day. We joked that Lexie’s name should be Bridezilla.

But back to Buffy. As we watched her play at the dog runs, we shouted out various names to see if she would respond. We experimented with human names (Mavis, Blanche), food names (Carrot, Ginger, Pepper), Buddhist names (Tara, Maitri, Pema), literary names (Rumi, Edith, Colette) and rock-and-roll names (Townshend, Daltrey, Percy, Bron-Yr-Aur). But Buffy did not respond to any of the above. She romped and played and rolled in the dust, oblivious to the odd string of words we humans were shouting to her.

By Friday the names had gotten sillier because, as it turns out, Friday night was happy hour (Yappy Hour) at George’s Dog Run, and people brought beer and wine. Buffy was called, in no particular order: “Dogtella Versace,” “Compassionate Conservatism,” “She Who Shall Not Be Named,” “You Gotta Problem With That?” and “The Artist Formerly Known as Buffy.” Chantay concluded we should call her “You” as in “Hey, You!” But that seemed too impersonal and even a bit rude.

I finally decided I should limit my dog-name choices to French names, in honor of Chloe being part French Spaniel. And in honor of my own part-French heritage. For some reason, I liked old-lady names, and came up with several: Babette, Claudine, Delphine and Chlothilde.

Actually, my new dog reminded me in some ways of an elderly French lady—une grande dame. The soft, slightly crimped hair on her ears took on a reddish color in the sun (all the grande dames in Paris dye their hair red). She had lively amber eyes. She was a pretty dog—very sweet-looking and feminine. She liked to stand on her head and wag her rump and her tail in the air in a manner that had something of the burlesque about it. So that was it: my dog would be named after a retired Folies Bergère showgirl. Thus, she became Chlothilde.

And how, you may ask, does that name call forth her Original Self? It turned out that my dog liked, above all, to entertain people. She liked to make people laugh. When someone came to our apartment, she’d run to the door with a shoe in her mouth, or a toy, or half of a chewed-up stuffed animal; present the gift to the visitor; then stand on her head. That’s a showgirl. I announced to my friends at the run that, after careful consideration, I had ruled out "Dogatella Versace” in favor of Chlothilde.

The only problem was, no one could pronounce or spell Chlothilde, and the explanation I had to give people who inquired after this odd name took a lot of time. And we New Yorkers are all about saving time. Could I live with a Chlothilde, whose name took 10 minutes to explain?

When I took Chlothilde to her first vet appointment in NYC, the assistant came out into the waiting area with a clipboard in her hand and a confused look on her face. I knew she had to be looking for me. “Ch…?” she said, reading the file on the clipboard. “Chlo… Cloth?… Cloth-ilde?” She pronounced the latter like Rothschild. I wondered how long it took the French nobility to get the pronunciation and spelling of that name down. Centuries?

Then again, I have a few name issues myself. My real name is Eileen. Don’t ever call me that—I won’t answer you. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I have had to tell people how to spell my name and/or having to correct customer service representatives on the telephone. “No, not Irene, Eileen.”

“Aileen, did you say?”

“No. Eileen.”

“Ellen?”

“Never mind. Just put down ‘Lee.’”

I have probably wasted the equivalent of seven weeks of my life trying to convey my own name. I didn’t want to spend the next 10 years going through the same thing with my little Chlothilde.

Thus, she became Chloe. And she really did become a Chloe. Who loves the snow-ee. On walks we go-ee. Her dog-boyfriend’s name is Rainbow-ee. Frenchifying her name, I officially dubbed her Chloe du Bois. Chloe of the Forest. And a fine white wine.

Some say it’s best not to change a shelter dog’s name. I get that. Many shelter dogs are already confused and frightened and traumatized. So a new name—a new foreign word—could actually add to the confusion. Dogs need consistency and a sense of safety, and keeping their name is one way to do that, a constant in the midst of many changes.

Others say that if you do change an adopted dog’s name, the new name should rhyme. That had left me with Muffy, Scruffy, Toughy, and (Chantay’s suggestion): “I’ve Had Enough-y.” Nah.

In Native American and many other spiritual traditions, a person is given a new name at certain milestone passages in life—the transition from childhood to adulthood, for example. Or when a major feat has been accomplished. I myself have been given quite a few spiritual names in the past two decades, ranging from Sangye Lhamo (Buddha Goddess) to Mirabai (Goddess of Poetry and Song). A Peruvian shaman even once told me my True Name, which I cannot reveal. These names are bestowed by teachers—by masters—and they usually involve elaborate initiation ceremonies. They are meant to not only name what we are, but what we aspire to be. (Eventually, I came to realize that they are actually one and the same, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, I told myself that by giving Chloe a new name, I was somehow initiating her into a new life with me. I hoped it would be a better life for my shelter dog—a new life full of romps through the forests (for her), and fine white wine (for me). I’ve taken her to France twice, by the way, and everyone there knows how to spell and pronounce Chlothilde.

I don’t have room in this column—or in this lifetime—to share with you all the nicknames I have now given Chloe. We all have zillions of nicknames for our dogs, after all. But when Chloe is acting cute, I call her Cute-tilde. When she is looking plump, I call her Fatty-tilde. When she is tired, she is Sleepy-tilde. You get the drill.

Sometimes I even accidentally call her Wallace—the name of my former dog. Wallace was the subject of the “Rex and the City” columns which used to appear here on the pages of Bark. For the past few months, I have been working on Volume II of Rex and the City. When I write, I go very deep into my “writing zone”—into the world of my book. Thus, when I take breaks, I often remain in that writing zone, and am not quite in the present moment. I’ll be staring out the window while waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to finish brewing, and this Spaniel mix will walk into the room and I’ll say: “Hi, Wallace,” before realizing it’s Chloe. She doesn’t seem to mind. A greeting by any other name is still a greeting. Plus, we know it’s nothing personal. My father often calls me by my sister’s name. But I know that anything said in kindness and joy is perceived as such.

Joy. Last summer, Chloe and I were out by the pool, tending to a rather unruly Provençal-type garden in upstate New York that was teeming with coneflowers and black-eyed Susans and giant hibiscus. They swayed in the heat, as if dancing in woozy love-bliss to a slow song. Chloe snuffled through the flower beds looking for rabbits (“Chloe, no!”), then took a dip in the nearby pool (“Who’s a Swimmy-tilde?”) and then barked at some deer who were hanging out near the pear trees, waiting for fruit to drop (“Who’s a fierce guard dog? Who’s a Fiercy-tilde?”). She looked so happy, and I felt so blessed to be living in such a place. (“Who’s a Happy-Tilde?) Then we walked back toward the house, through a small orchard with views of the Hudson River. Chloe trotted ahead of me with her tail held proud and high, as if I never would have found my own house without her guidance. (Who’s a Smarty-tilde?”). I had called her by five different names in a matter of minutes.

I decided, in the spirit of the moment, to call Chloe “Buffy” to see how she reacted. She was running ahead of me at the time, and when I called out this name, she turned and looked at me with a big dog smile on her face. She remembers! I thought. And she’s smiling! Maybe her life as a Buffy hadn’t been so horrible after all.

The bottom line is: dogs just like being called. Period.

And perhaps no dog—or anyone—can truly have only one name. Chloe is a Chloe and a Buffy and a Goofy and a Sweetie-tilde. She has all of these qualities, each of them expressed at different times. It’s the same with humans. We express different emotions, thoughts and feelings every moment of every day. No one person remains the same; nothing remains fixed. So, perhaps instead of one True Name, we have many.

Recently, I added yet another nickname to Chloe’s list: Buffy. Buffy the Stuffed Animal Slayer. Be afraid, toys. Be very afraid.

Doggie Halloween Contests - how far will we go to win?

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:10:47 -0400

In honor of my appearance—as a “celebrity judge” at the 17th Annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade in New York City tomorrow (10/22), I thought I would re-post a chronicle of my own experiences forcing my poor dog to wear a costume, and how I became a psycho-stage mother in my desperation to win the contest.

Rex and the City: The Curse of the Three-Headed Dog

There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.

At that point in time (1998) we had just started taking Wallace to the Tompkins Square Park dog run. Each run in the city has its own flavor and “First Run” as it was called (because it was the first in NYC) was known for 1) the youth of its doggie parents (most were East Village kids in their twenties); 2) the number of pit-bull mixes (most of the young doggie parents adopted pits from the ASCPA in the East 90’s, or found them on the streets); 3) the number of dog-brawls that occurred daily (it was a transient neighborhood, with a lot of new dogs); and 4) The legendary First Run Annual Halloween Costume Contest, which drew the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

When I first saw the sign for this Halloween contest in early October, I felt my entire universe expand. Dogs in costume! At the thought of this, something latent was awakened in me—something ancient and profound. I told my then-husband Ted in no uncertain terms that we had to go to this contest.

“Are you thinking of dressing Wallace in a costume?” Ted asked.

“Absolutely.”

“He’ll hate it.”

“No he won’t.”

Most conversations I had with Ted went like this: yes, no, yes, no, why, because, no, yes, I said no, yes, no, FUCK YOU!

In the case of whether to dress up our dog in a silly costume, I ultimately won. I can’t remember how, actually. Perhaps I had to promise some sort of sexual favor, but it’s hard to say....I’ve blocked it all out.

Anyway, I managed to convince Ted that Wallace wouldn’t mind having to wear a costume. I can’t remember how we came up with the idea, but we had decided to dress him up like a little hiker. I think it all started with this brown wool hippy hat that used to belong to a stoner friend of Ted’s from high school. The hat was handmade in Peru, and slightly pointy on top, and had two strings that you could tie under your chin. Ted had asked me once if I wanted it, but I am much too serious a person to wear silly Peruvian hats. (The hats I wear cost $550 and I never even wear those, because I always buy them on a whim, and they are really only appropriate at English garden weddings, and I have not yet to date been invited to any weddings in the UK.) So anyway, I suggested we put the Peruvian hat on Wallace, just for kicks.

This opened up a can of worms, of course, that determined much of Wallace’s future. For I quickly realized that I got a true and unadulterated pleasure from dressing up my dog. “He looks so cute,” I shouted. “Oh my God. Get the camera.”

“The poor boy,” Ted said. “How humiliating.” But still Ted got the camera.

The rest of Wallace’s Halloween costume quickly fell into place. Wallace already had his own little backpack, for camping trips, and Ted agreed to donate a pair of ratty hiking shorts he’d had for years. He started to have regrets, however, when I spent $30 on a little wool sweater and cut strategic holes in his cherished shorts to accommodate Wallace’s tail and privates, but by then it was too late. The contest was only one day away.

“You’re going overboard,” he said the next morning as I gussied up Wallace. “Everyone else will probably show up with their dogs in cat ears and witch hats.”

“So what?” I said. “This is fun. Plus, we’ll win.” For a final touch, I put a Catskills trail guide in the pocket of Wallace’s backpack, so that there would be no doubt that he was a hiker.

The day itself was one of those perfect fall days you read about: crisp, cool, clear, with the scent of autumn leaves and hot cider donuts lingering in the air. I insisted on dressing up Wallace at the apartment and couldn’t contain my excitement at the cuteness of it all. I started to have visions of Wallace being in the movies, of starring in dog food commercials, of his face gracing millions of cutesy-dog greeting cards. And a photographer from the Times would definitely be at the contest—one came every year. So maybe finally I’d get my picture in that paper. With my award-winning dog.

“Oh my god, he’s so cute!” I said for the millionth time. (If I couldn’t have my own time in the spotlight, then, by God, Wallace was going to have his.) “Will you take a picture of him before we leave? It’s his first party, in his first party suit.”

“Let’s not prolong the torture,” Ted said. “The poor boy.” Admittedly, Wallace did look downtrodden, as if he wished he had nothing to do with the human world. He kept lifting his eyelids, and twisting his head left to right, trying to figure out what was on top of his head. He also tried to pull off the backpack with his mouth, but he couldn’t quite reach.

“Let’s just go!” Ted said.

I enjoyed all the attention we got on our twenty-minute walk to the dog run. “Look at that dog!” people on the sidewalks shouted. “He’s so cute!” All around us, people laughed and pointed and smiled. I basked in their praise; I loved being in the spotlight, even indirectly.

But Ted seemed pained. “He’s such a dignified dog,” he kept saying as we walked through the East Village. “This isn’t right. You’re humiliating him. He’s going to grow up to be a pansy. He’s going to be like Hemingway, who was all screwed up because his grandmother dressed him in girlie clothes.”

“No, he’s not,” I said, undaunted. I stopped to talk to strangers and told everyone cute little anecdotes about Wallace. “He used to be a shelter dog,” I would begin. “And he used to hate us. And he would never let us touch his head. And now look at him with his little hat….”

“Wallace come,” Ted would say, pulling on the leash.

“Wallace was enjoying himself,” I said to Ted when I caught up to him.

“That’s because that woman petting him has a hot dog.”

“No it’s not. It’s because she told him he was cute.”

On and on this went, all the way to the park. It wasn’t until a horde of pretty girls in go-go boots ran up to Ted to ask what kind of dog Wallace was, that the tight, slightly pained look left Ted’s face.

When we reached the grassy area within Tompkins Square Park, Wallace went immediately went into hunting mode. His steps slowed, his torso sank lower to the ground, and his nose twitched with the precision of a sonograph as he picked up subtle scents. You could tell he had forgotten he had a little ski cap on, and a backpack, and a toddler’s sweater and silly shorts. “Look at him stalking those squirrels!” the girls in the go-go boots shouted.

“Poor Wallace,” Ted muttered. “The poor emasculated boy.” But this hadn’t stopped him from bringing along his video camera. He followed Wallace along, zooming in for close-ups, as Wallace crept slowly toward a squirrel.

When we finally reached the dog run, I was astounded at what I saw. You’re always going to find, at every Halloween contest across the country, a lab in Christmas antlers, and one or two Dog-zillas, and a golden retriever in a store-bought Yankees cap. But try to picture a Harlequin Great Dane dressed up as a giant sunflower. Or a matted grey Shitzhu dressed as a mop and accompanied by a short gay man dressed as a frumpy housewife. The costumes were spectacular. There was a shepherd mix in a curly black wig and Gene Simmons makeup, and a tiny leather jacket embossed with the logo: Kiss. There was a couple dressed up like farmers, carrying baskets of produce, and tucked within the vegetables was a tiny Chihuahua in a pea pod costume, shivering nervously the way Chihuahuas do. There were Pit Bulls sporting cow udders, and six Dachshunds spray-painted yellow to look like a bunch of bananas, accompanied by a giant man in a gorilla suit.

“Wow,” Ted said. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m depressed,” I said. One of the great, but also one of the rotten, things about New York City is that no matter how creative you are, no matter how talented or clever or smart, there’s always going to be someone out there who’s smarter and more talented and more creative than you. Every second of every day.

“Look at that costume!” Ted said. And there I beheld my nemesis. Across the run, wearing Gucci sunglasses and surrounded by adoring fans, was a man and his golden retriever, whom he had fashioned into a Three Headed Dog. From a distance the two extra heads looked life-like, and they continued to look life like even as we got close. “How did you do that?” someone asked, through a crowd that was three-people deep. “With Styrofoam,” he explained. “I’m a set designer.” And he went on to describe how he had begun constructing the heads back in August, how he had required his dog, Butterscotch, to pose for an hour each evening as he painted her likeness on the busts, and how it had taken him three weeks to find the best “suspension mechanisms” to attach the heads to Butterscotch’s collar. Then of course he had to go out and find the perfect cape to conceal the suspension mechanisms. And the cape had come from Shanghai Tang ( a high-end Asian boutique on Madison Avenue).

“That shawl had to have cost six hundred dollars,” I said to Ted as we slunk away. “And did you see that they eyes on the Styrofoam heads actually blinked?”

“I’m blown away,” Ted said.

“If I had known people were going to spend six months on their costumes, I would have put more effort into Wallace’s.” I stared at the three-headed dog’s magnificent cape. “I don’t even have socks from Shanghai Tang.”

“But look our puppy, he’s adorable,” Ted said. “And he’s being such a good boy.” Wallace always stayed by our side at the dog run, because he was still intimidated by the presence of so many dogs. “Come on,” Ted said. “Let’s go sign him in.”

When we got to the registration desk, we found out we had to have a name for Wallace’s costume. I hadn’t thought of a name. I thought the costume spoke for itself. To me, Wallace looked like a little hippie kid, a Bates student, a Trustafarian going off on a hike. “How about Happy Camper?” I said to Ted.

And don’t they always say First Thought, Best Thought? Because then, for some reason, I decided that I had needed to have a more literary name. Something more clever and tongue-in-cheek. I thought then of Jon Krakauer, the author of Into The Wild.

“No one is going to know what you’re talking about,” Ted said.

But I reasoned that we were in the East Village, a neighborhood full of artists and writers and tortured souls. Any of the above would certainly have read Into the Wild, which was the “it” book of the moment.

So we—or rather, I—registered Wallace as “Jon Krakauer” and we took our place in line for the parade to begin. Ted gave me one of his looks—one I liked to call “The Crow.”

The contest began by everyone parading their dogs around the perimeter of the run as a group, and then each of the contestants was called one by one. The whole dog run was lined with was lined with giddy onlookers. As each contestant was called forth they hooted and clapped and cheered. The sound of so much applause was uplifting, and I laughing along, but then Wallace’s name was called. The MC said: “And here’s Wallace the English Setter, and he’s posing as, as, um, Jonathan Kra……Jon Cracker?” The crowd, who had just been cheering madly for the Mastiff-as-ballerina before us, now grew silent.

In this void, I told Wallace to heel and we promenaded along. I smiled nervously and fakely, like a beauty contestant finalist who has just found out she was eliminated after just the first round. I tried to make eye contact with Ted, who was out there somewhere with the onlookers, but I couldn’t find him in such a crowd. Then our moment was over. Wallace and I returned to our place in line, and then some other dog’s name was called. “That was our fifteen minutes of fame,” I whispered to the dog. “And it sucked!”

The Three-Headed Dog won of course, soon the dog and his costume designer were mobbed by photographers and fans. Dejectedly, I took off Wallace’s short and backpack, so that he could go and happily hump the ballerina and bite other dog’s necks. “I should have just called him the Happy Camper,” I said to Ted as I stuffed Wallace’s little hiking shorts into my bag. Across the run, I watched people congratulate the set designer. He seemed a bit too proud of his achievements; a bit too smug.

Ted thought the whole thing was hilarious. “Jon Krakauer,” he said over and over again. “Into the Wild!” He trained his video camera onto me and said, “This is Lee pouting because Wallace didn’t win the Halloween contest.”

When he saw that I wasn’t laughing, he said. “Let’s go to Veselka’s and get some lunch.” Ted, like all good city boyfriends, knew that certain restaurants could always cheer certain mopey women up. For me, it was Veselka’s: pirogues (steamed, and stuffed with potatoes, cheese and broccoli), French fries, and a cold Pilsner Urquell on tap.

We leashed up Wallace and headed off. As we were leaving the park, a nice young woman ran up and touched my shoulder. “I thought yours was the best costume.”

“Really?” I turned to her and smiled.

“He should have won first place.”

“Thanks.”

This is one of the wonderful things about New York: for every stranger who has the capacity to ruin your day—whether deliberately or not—there are always two or three more strangers who will extend to you a fresh, pure act of kindness.

“See?” I said to Ted at Veselka’s. “Someone got it. I wasn’t totally out of line.”

“Yes, Lee,” he said. “One in twelve hundred people gets you.” He touched my hand. “Make that two.”

Wallace, as if he understood us, turned around at that moment and looked at us with what we call his “treat face.”

“Make that three,” Ted said.

This is not where the story ends, however, because from that day forward, for the next two years I tried to devise schemes to out-do the Three Headed Dog and his set designer man.

It was now the year 2000 and, much to my disappointment, the world had not ended as everyone kept insisting it would. Thus, I had to continue living my drudgery of a life. I started thinking about Wallace’s costume in early August. Ted and I would be walking along the beach at Fire Island, or hiking in the Hudson Valley, swatting away flies, and I’d say things like, “What do you think of Tommy Hilsetter?”

“What?” Ted would say. “What are you talking about?” He was a serious hiker, who always kept his eyes on the trails, and therefore never really listened to me while he was hiking. Perhaps—and I am seriously just realizing this now, as I write: perhaps this is why he liked hiking so much. It was the only time he could legitimately tune me out.

“For Halloween,” I said. “We could put a little skull cap on him, and really baggy jeans that hang low off his butt. He could be a little ghetto dog.”

“I think that might be offensive,” Ted said. “A lot of kids from the projects play basketball in that park.”

“Well then how about Brittany Spears? We could get Wallace some of those big plastic tits and a shiny pink thong.”

“That’s not very original,” Ted said. “Everyone with a Brittany Spaniel has probably thought of that. Plus, Wallace doesn’t even look like enough of a Brittany to pass as one.”

Up ahead, we could hear that Wallace had flushed out a wild turkey. He let out a war cry and took off through the brush.

“It would be hard to keep a thong on him anyway,” I said.

Eventually—I don’t remember how—I came up with the idea of Dogatella Versace. It was the year Jennifer Lopez had worn that infamous, diaphanous, one-button dress to the Grammys. (And if you don’t know what dress I’m talking about, I can’t help you).

I like to think that the idea came to me in one great creative burst; a flash in which I saw the complete outfit: Wallace in a mini J. Lo dress, with a long blonde Donatella wig, and his white fur tinted to Versace’s creepy shade of tan.

Eureka! My heart began to pound and the area behind my neck began to tingle, as it always does when I have tapped into The Universal Source.

There were two obstacles to expressing my creative inspiration, however. One was convincing Ted that his son needed to be swathed in Versace, and the other was finding someone to make the dress. Fortunately, we lived in New York City, the land of oddball specialists, so the latter was a piece of cake. At any given moment, you could open up the Yellow Pages and find someone to sing opera to your geraniums while you traveled to Reykjavik; you could hire someone to sew mink to the straps of your seatbelts so that you wouldn’t chafe your chest. And you could find a handful of talented, expensive seamstresses who would custom make a dress for your dog. I found my doggie dressmaker, by providence really, on Manhattan Dog Chat. She just appeared one day in early September, answering a post from someone who had some extra upholstery fabric and wanted to make a little jacket for her “hard to fit” Maltese.

Immediately I called this woman and told her about my Dogatella Versace idea. “How big is your dog?” she asked me. And when I told her Wallace weighed seventy pounds she said, “Well, I usually only work with little dogs.” I felt myself getting defensive, and reverting into that hateful “Us and Them” mentality that, as a Buddhist, I try to not maintain: Us being big dog people (they are real dogs, after all) and little dog people.

Meanwhile, she was probably thinking I was insane for wanting a Versace dress for a 70-pound spaniel. A male spaniel with no effeminate qualities whatsoever. But because I was the customer, and because I offered to pay her a hundred bucks, we agreed that she would pick out some J. Lo-looking fabric and meet me at my apartment for a fitting the following week. “He’s really cute,” I said added at the end of our conversation, because Little Dog People love to use the word cute.

Ted wanted nothing to do with this. He tried to list all the reasons why I should not dress our dog in drag (i.e.: you’re humiliating him, you have better things to do with your time) but in the end he saw how excited I was about the project and how unwilling I was to back off. “When is she coming?” he finally said in resignation.

“Next Saturday. At three.”

“Well, I’ll just make sure I’m not around Saturday at three,” he said.

When Sheila, the dressmaker, arrived at the appointed hour, we were both relieved to find that we liked each other immediately. You never know with the Internet. She was a theater person, a costume designer, who made clothes for dogs on the side, because it was profitable, and because she loved dogs. “I used to have one,” she said, “but now I travel way too much.” As she talked, she measured Wallace’s ankles, and the length of his legs, and the distance from his neck to his tail. “Now, this will be the challenge,” she said, pointing at his privates. “We have to have the plunging neckline to mimic the dress, but it will have to fasten in front of his wee-wee. I’m just not sure it will hang right though.” She stared at Wallace thoughtfully, considering how his body would handle the complicated drapes of cloth, and I was glad Ted wasn’t here to witness this. The “wee-wee” comment would have sent him through the roof.

Wallace was a perfect fit model. I fed him liver treats throughout the whole process, so that he would stay still, and he didn’t try to lunge at Sheila when she leaned in too close to his head. I was so proud of his behavior, and of his progress as a formerly abused dog, that I started to get teary-eyed. “You’re like the mother of the groom,” Sheila said. “Or the bride, as it were.”

“It’s just that,” I said, wiping my eyes, “he’s a shelter dog, and he was abused, and whenever I see him interact tenderly with new strangers I am just so grateful.”

“Now you tell me,” Sheila said. “But he doesn’t seem threatening. It’s usually the little dogs you have to watch out for.”

I agreed. “They’re assholes.”

“Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you when I come back to fit the actual dress?” she said.

We hugged when she showed me the material she’d selected. It was perfect: sheer, green, bold, in a tropical pattern that mimicked the actual dress. Then I showed her the wig I’d bought, which was made of human hair and had cost me $50. “We mustn’t mention costs to my husband,” I said.

“My lips are sealed,” she said.

Then I told her about the Three Headed Dog Man.

“We’ll kick his ass,” she said.

I gave her cash and we arranged to meet for a final fitting in two weeks’ time.

In the meantime, I got a call from one of my mother-in-laws, who said she was going to be coming to New York for a visit. I absolutely love visits from my mother-in-laws (I happened to be blessed with not one but two dynamite mother-in-laws, who liked me despite the fact that I never cooked for their son/step-son, never wrote or called, never produced any grandchildren, and talked non-stop about my dog). But this visit was scheduled for the weekend of Halloween. I faced a true conflict. My manners, upbringing, and sense of general decency suggested that I should scrap the Halloween contest and act like a proper hostess. My mother-in-law was a sharp, sophisticated woman who, when she visits the city, likes to spend her time good restaurants and sample sales. But I’d already invested all that money into Wallace’s dress, and I couldn’t get the smug face of the Three-Headed-Dog man out of my head. “Do you think I could talk you into going with me to a doggie Halloween contest?” I asked her on the telephone. “It might be fun.”

“Sure,” she said. “We can do anything you want.”

Her graciousness did not put me entirely at ease, however. I worried that I was taking a risk with my reputation with that half of the family. In fact, years later, when Ted and I got divorced, I wondered if that particular weekend continued to come up in conversation, when the family sat around the dinner table discussing “signs.” As in, “we always knew that marriage wouldn’t work out; why, think of the time she forced her dog to enter a Halloween contest….”

Anyway, the big day of the contest arrived and I was nervous. My mother-in-law, had arranged to meet me at Tompkins Square Park so that she could do some shopping beforehand, and Ted had decided not to come at all. “I have to work,” he said, which I noticed was something he had to do whenever I had Wallace in costume.

He had to work on St Patrick’s Day, when Wallace wore a headband with sparkly shamrock antennae. He had to work on Easter (bunny ears) and the Fourth of July (flag hat). He was a hard worker, Ted, and that morning he apologized to Wallace for not being able to spend the day with him. “Someone had to pay for all your food,” he said. “And your clothing.

I was busy combing Wallace’s wig out. Then I combed my own hair.

When Wallace and I got to the park, the sky was overcast and the day was humid—an uncommon phenomenon for October. I was wearing a turquoise vinyl jacket to match Wallace’s costume, and the vinyl made me sweat. This for some reason made me cranky, and it was a mood I couldn’t shake. The whole vibe of the contest was off that year. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was me, but the dog run seemed less festive; less crowded. “There’s another doggie parade this year over in Chelsea,” someone told me. “All the drag queens are over at that one, I’m sure.” I felt a bit dejected by this—once again something better was happening someplace else, where I was not. And the best place to be is always Where the Drag Queens Are.

But then I got a good look at some of the costumes and felt better again. There was a Corgi transformed into a Hoover. There were two baby cocker spaniels dressed as a bride and groom. Then the Three-Headed Dog man entered the dog run and Butterscotch was dressed up as—get this—Dogzilla. I could hear Ted say, “How unoriginal,” and I couldn’t help but smile. Sure, it was a spectacular costume—he had created a twelve-foot, elaborately airbrushed Styrofoam tail, with spiky fins, savage scales, and moveable parts. But please. Even Aunt Mabel in Idaho could have come up with Dogzilla.

Two years had passed since The Happy Camper had faced the Three-Headed Dog. And Wallace was a completely different dog by this point. He was happier, and better adjusted, and the dog run no longer meant “defend thyself” to him; it meant Play. So the minute I took his leash off inside the dog run, he took off after a Border Collie and the two of them ran like mad. “Wallace!” I shouted. “Your dress! You’re ruining your dress!”

I told him to come but he wouldn’t listen to me. It took fifteen minutes to finally cornered Wallace and put him back on his leash. “Now stay still,” I said to him. “Sit!” His wig had been thoroughly dragged across the ground and was now tangled with woodchips and leaves. I told Wallace he was the worst dog in the world.

My mother-in-law showed up just as I was shouting at my dog about the state of his long blond hair. She waved to me from beyond the fence. Only dogs and their guardians were allowed in the run. I blew her a kiss and smiled. Wallace’s wig kept slipping off, and every time he moved his dress would shift sideways, and he’d step on the hem with his back paws. “Stay still!” I snapped at him. “When I tell you to sit, you sit!” There was irritation in my voice, and I looked around to see if anyone had heard.

The registration was about to begin. Butterscotch and his guardian sat placidly in line, both confident that they would win the contest.

Meanwhile, the Border Collie kept running up to us and biting at Wallace’s wig. “Go away!” I said to her, and to Wallace: “Stay still! When I tell you to sit, you sit!” But poor Wallace wanted to play with the Border Collie. He wanted to stalk squirrels. But I was convinced the whole “effect” of his dress would be ruined if he even lifted his leg to pee. So every time he tried to get up from his sit, I’d apply pressure on his shoulders and push him back down.

Years ago, I’d worked at a children’s fashion magazine and one of my jobs was to assist the art director on photo shoots. Once a month, stage mothers would arrive with their stiffly coiffed sons and daughters. I remember my shock the first time I saw a toddler girl wearing makeup and four-inch heels. Her hair had been curled a la Shirley Temple, and she was unhappy that day—perhaps because of the shoes. But her mother was even unhappier. She kept insisting to me that Kelly normally didn’t act so ornery, that Kelly knew how to be a good girl. “She’s just being very bad today,” the mother kept saying loudly and bitterly “Very bad.”

Now the line of dog-contestants moved, and Wallace stood up without permission and stepped on the hem of his dress. “Sit!” I snapped at him.

Then, suddenly, I saw myself: angry, snappy, perfectionist, dissatisfied.

I had become a stage mother. I had put my own needs before my child’s.

When the beginning of the contest line-up was announced, I couldn’t even look at my mother-in-law. I thought she might see the shame on my face and I didn’t want to see it on her face too.

The crowd roared with laughter when Wallace was introduced as Dogatella Versace, and they cheered madly when, later, he won first prize. Last year first prize had been a six-month supply of California Natural and a CD player; this year it was a $40 gift certificate to a new pet store. When we went up to the stage to take the prize, the judge hung a “Best in Show” medal around Wallace’s neck. It was brass with a red white and blue ribbon that made him look like an Olympian. As the crowd clapped and cheered, a newspaper reporter snapped our photograph, but I refused to tell him my name. I, who for years had told myself I had sought the spotlight, was suddenly ashamed.

As soon as the contest was over I took the medal off Wallace’s neck. Then I took off the dress, and the wig. “You were such a good boy today,” I told him, and then I knelt down and apologized for the beastly way I had behaved. “I’ll never put you through that again,” I told him. “I won’t even make you wear a birthday hat if you don’t want to.”

And so far, my promise has been good.

The medal still hangs on Wallace’s bulletin board, which hangs above his “feeding station.” I’d like to think he notices this medal every time the bowl of ground turkey and boiled potatoes is set down before him, and that he somehow feels wistful, or proud, but mostly he just gobbles his food rapidly. Grateful, perhaps, that he isn’t being forced to wear a wig.