Good morning. Behind the scenes at the Westminster dog show, the entrants were affectionate. Or at least they acted like it.
Vanity fairI was advised before entering the stalls of competitors at the Westminster dog show that I should think of the dogs as celebrities. Some are friendly and ready to socialize, like Habiba, a Sloughi who somehow managed to still be charming after 12 hours in a crate from Los Angeles to New York City. Others, I was told, are standoffish, and they’ll just give you their backs, don’t press it. I expected to encounter some haughty poodles who wouldn’t give me the time of day, but even the ones with the fussiest looking hairdos were warm and welcoming. Twinkle, a Brussels Griffon, gamely met my gaze as members of her entourage lifted each of her little limbs, one by one, and placed them back down. “She’s doing her yoga,” the attendant explained. A dachshund mid-neck trim, a Norwich terrier undergoing a sponge bath, an Old English sheepdog who had some serious rolling around to do: Not a one declined to sniff my hand. My mind was on “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary about the handlers and dogs of a Westminster-esque competition. Clueless as to the particulars of dog shows, I had assumed the movie was a complete fiction. But wandering the stalls of dogs at the Javits Center this week, I felt almost as if I’d wandered onto the film’s set: the blow-drying and coat-spraying, the handlers in sparkly blazers, the seriousness with which the humans took the proceedings all appeared pretty accurate. “The first time I watched it, I was highly insulted,” this year’s best in show judge, David Fitzpatrick, told The Times. “I was like, ‘This is just awful, these people making fun of us.’ Then I watched it again and I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, they really have some of us pegged.’” The movie starred Catherine O’Hara, who died last week at 71, as Cookie Fleck, the owner of the terrier Winky who (spoiler alert) wins the title. At the final round of competition on Tuesday, a video tribute to O’Hara was shown. As daffy and over-the-top as Cookie and the rest of the characters are in “Best in Show,” watching the movie, one cannot help but be moved by the dogs, abiding valiantly not only through their fictional owners’ shenanigans, but also through the larger charade that is filmmaking. They have no idea they’re in a Hollywood production, just as the dogs at Westminster are clueless to the stakes of the competition. In all cases, they obediently go along with our human choreography, playing the role in which they’ve permanently been cast: Man’s Best Friend. It was tempting, as I encountered one genial canine after another, to draw a contrast between the mounds of snow banking Midtown Manhattan and the feeling of warmth inside the convention center, where one could pat Jet the Puli’s extraordinary corded coat and then be greeted cheerily by Mulder the Basenji, fresh off his award of merit. “There’s so much love in here!” I found myself thinking, and then wondered how much I was projecting. I, a human, perceived Greta, a piebald dachshund, to be showing me love because she lifted her glorious snoot to look at me as I touched her head. But Greta was having her dog emotions, whatever they were, if they were, and who knows how much she cared for the cooing and ogling of this admirer, never mind the rest of the besotted throngs. I started to feel self-conscious. After several hours of meeting and greeting, of reflexively pitching my voice into marshmallow register as I chatted with entrants, I asked a man and a woman ministering to a particularly adorable 3-year-old beagle named Stitch, “When you work with dogs, do you learn not to speak in baby talk to dogs all the time?” At this, Stitch stood up on his hind legs as if to show me he was no baby and I could have addressed my question to him. “I never spoke baby talk to my daughter,” the woman said, with the weariness of someone who had been listening to people babble at dogs all day and was just about done. “But it just comes naturally when you see something cute, right?” I asked, a little defensive, knowing that I was helpless to act dignified around these creatures. “They teach you in the behavior world as well, just speak to them normally,” the man said. He watched me melt as I noticed how big Stitch’s paws were compared with his body. “But everybody breaks the rules,” he said charitably. I like to believe Stitch nodded in agreement. And for more on dogs …
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