Though I had used to make fun of dog shows before I took Rhiannon from Marty and Stu, with the animals posed in stances and trotting around the ring, my new experiences had demonstrated that there was a whole science to it that many people just didn’t understand. While often thought of as a beauty pageant, dog showing in the conformation ring is not that unlike a sporting event, such as horse show competitions at the upper levels where there are money trophies—and no one laughs at that. This competitive “fancy” takes into account, solely, the work for which the dog was originally bred, even though most dogs are no longer required to perform in this way. Each of the different breeds—from cockers to poodles to Irish setters—have certain physical and character requirements that enable him to hunt a fox, or to tree a badger, or to flush a covey of quail, or to dig a badger out of its burrow.
For the Dalmatian, originally a “coaching” dog that had to run many miles—often fifteen to twenty daily, in the traces just behind the horses’ hooves as they pulled a carriage—this meant he needed a strong and level top line coupled with the good angulation front and back that would produce an easy drive, a smooth and fluid motion built for endurance. A capacious chest was requisite so that the dog could breathe deeply for long periods of time, and his feet needed to be well padded and tight, ready for the rough roads and many miles he traveled.
Because the carriage took its passengers from inn to inn, he also served as a guard dog, protecting both the coach and its travelers. He was to bark at strangers, but never to attack, to warn off those who did not belong and alert those who did. It was only after horse-drawn fire engines made their debut that Dals became better known as firehouse mascots.
Naturally, Dals had to have a strong affinity for horses. Enter Sherlock. Enter “road trial” competitions, where the dogs work side by side with the horse, heeling at the rider’s side, over miles of rough terrain—another sort of sport in which Dalmatians participate.
There was also the requirement that set the Dal apart from all other breeds: his spots. They were to range in size between a quarter and a dime, and were to be separate and well distributed. This was the only “cosmetic” requirement for the dog, but nevertheless an important one, for without it, the breeding pool could be altered by the inclusion of other dogs that did not share the traits so essential to a coach dog. Although not widely known, there are actually two kinds of Dalmatians—some with black spots and some with deeply colored chocolate spots, and with hazel eyes rather than the more common brown. This latter variety is called “liver.” The liver gene is recessive, and so livers are more highly prized by some due to their comparative rarity.
And it was all these qualities, taken into consideration on a percentage basis, which decreed a winner in the breed ring. Rhiannon and her less-than-perfect show qualities had been my introduction into the world not only of dog showing, but also of dog breeding. Nevertheless, even if Marty and Stu had told me she wasn’t truly a show dog, I would still have taken her because the boys and I had so badly wanted a dog to complete our family, just as Clover, Penny, Gidget, and Daisy had completed the family at Black Oak Road.
I had begun to handle Rhiannon in the ring myself after a year, because Marty soon had a new puppy who was a better candidate and she became too busy and distracted. I discovered I wanted to participate in the ring more often, even though it was rare for Rhiannon and me to win. The show bug had bitten me again, but my dog wasn’t ideal: forget “going to Westminster,” as friends not in the know sometimes suggested; it was in question whether she would ever become a champion. Tia would become my new opportunity in conformation.
•••
The odds in the ring were often stacked against the new and the barely visible—like me. There were the politics of showing: well-known breeders, whom judges had seen in the ring for many years, and well-known handlers, whom judges had observed handling dogs to perfection since they had first come onto the scene, often did most of the winning.
Sometimes handlers arrived late to the ring because they had too many dogs to handle and were dashing from one class to another. Sometimes they even rode bikes back and forth from one ring to another, arriving to take from an assistant the dog who had been groomed to the nines and was waiting for the handoff.
Once, at Marty’s insistence and in hopes of getting some points on Rhiannon, I hired Allyn Adair, a nationally known handler seen on television every year at Westminster with one of the top winning specials in the country. That particular day, I got more and more nervous as Dalmatian judging began. Rhiannon’s class approached, and there was no sign of either Allyn or my dog. I had thought if he were going to be detained, there would at least be an assistant holding her ringside, ready to hand her off to Allyn. But I tried to calm myself, thinking of the many tales of Allyn’s arriving late—one in particular when he’d taken off from the show grounds to go and buy a new pair of shoes and barely made it back in time. But legend had it that he’d never missed one yet. I reminded myself of all this as the males entered the ring, as it was customary that they go first and the bitches shortly followed thereafter.
I had been told many times never to question a handler, especially one you were paying top dollar, lest they cross you off their list (it was obvious who wielded the power in this relationship), but as the females began to file in, I ran back to the grooming area to discover Allyn sitting atop Rhiannon’s crate eating a powdered donut. “They’re in the ring,” I cried in distress.
“Dogs are in the ring,” he corrected me, laconically.
“Bitches are in the ring!” I responded, with temper.
He craned his head in the appropriate direction and was up in a flash. With all the white sugar on his suit, he looked like he’d walked through a blizzard of cocaine. Wiping himself down as he hustled Rhiannon out of her crate, he got her over to the ring after the “ring gate was closed.” I was furious.
Handlers were the only ones always asking for late admittance, and most of the time, they were granted such, at the judge’s discretion, because they were politically visible and because they were often flying from one ring to the next. Everyone groused about it, but no one did anything. There were certain things that were immutable at dog shows: if you didn’t like them, I was told, don’t show. It was a hard lesson for me—always so bent on fairness. Soon I lost that sense and just accepted the norm.
Allyn made it just in time to slide into line before the judge went over the dog in front of him—the only requirement for a late admission—but at that point, Rhiannon was too rattled to do much beside stand there with her head down. I never used Allyn again.
One afternoon, after coming in second to a dog I thought not as worthy as Rhiannon, I petulantly stripped off my armband number and tossed my red ribbon into a trash can beside the ring. Arriving back to the ringside chair, a friend gave me a look. “You could get sanctioned by the AKC for poor sportsmanship!” she cautioned, like a mother, and I resented this, even as I saw the truth in it.
It reminded me of what I had learned as a child, after a jumper’s class I’d entered at Highlawn Farm: having fallen off my horse during the round over the fences, I threw my riding crop in my mother’s lap and stalked off as I exited the ring. Thirty-some-odd years later, and I was still learning the same lesson.
I sat down with a sigh, Rhiannon at my knees, just in time to hear my number called out, as I had forgotten that I might need to go back into the ring for Reserve, always a possibility when the dog who beats you goes Winners—all part of a complicated system with which even dog show people sometimes have trouble keeping track. In a rush, I scrambled over to the trash can and began digging through the garbage as I looked for my paper number with its elastic band.
I began to draw away from Marty, wanting to be out on my own, and slowly I developed tighter relationships with new friends like Kathryn and Dawn. I had also begun to believe in myself as a handler. In spite of my weekly handling class, I still made mistakes, but I was eager and co
ntinued to try to show in both rings once I had picked up obedience. Despite all this, when Rhiannon and I failed to gather enough points to finish her championship, I began to resent that she had been sold to me as a viable show dog, when clearly she lacked both the aptitude and the qualities to do any real winning. Still, I wouldn’t have traded her for the most beautiful dog in the breed ring. She never stopped trying, and when it came to obedience, she excelled—drawing on her relationship with me to develop an extremely focused attitude—perhaps the single most important quality it takes to become a champion obedience dog. It wasn’t much longer before I began to rely solely on my new friends, all of whom were Dalmatian people.
seven
IN SAN RAFAEL, THE afternoon before the first day of the National had true Bay Area summer weather: the sky blue from horizon to horizon, the late sun gentle without being hot. As Dawn and I pulled up in my minivan to the show grounds, a breeze puffed and lifted the corners of the white tents that had been erected up and down on the grass, running alongside the rings that had been marked off with white chains. At this particular venue, the designated squares of green were carefully mowed and tended, and the rings were likely to be smooth and without too many holes that could trip up either dog or handler.
In the adjacent parking lot, the large recreational vehicle slots were already beginning to fill up. From forty-five-foot “buses” to the smaller trailers that were pulled behind cars, nearly all of them had awnings under which fellow Dal addicts could congregate out of the sun. As people set up their tents, they grouped themselves as near friends as possible; it was a nomadic tribe dominated by intricate relationships that rivaled those of the campers at Highlawn Farm.
It was the Dalmatian Club of Northern California’s turn in the rotation to host the National Specialty, and as always, we had also worked out a special rate with the most decent hotel that would accept canines, the Embassy Suites in San Rafael. It was the first time the hotel had ever signed on for a dog “event.” As we surveyed the lobby’s furnishings and atmosphere, Dawn and I remarked that the hotel didn’t know what they had gotten themselves into.
At the National, the only kind of dogs shown was Dals, and the classes stretched out a full five days including the Regional. The competition for Best of Breed took an entire day all by itself, sometimes with upward of over a hundred champion dogs entered, and then there were all the lesser classes, including the prestigious Futurity, where puppies were shown, solely by their breeders, as the future exemplars of the breed. First an upcoming litter had to be nominated before the bitch’s due date, and then individual puppies had to be nominated before the pup was four months old. Everyone wanted to win this class, which was second only to Best in Specialty Show.
After the fourth day of the National, DCNC (as our club was known) would host its own specialty, still devoted solely to the Dalmatian. Other guests at the hotel would follow us with their eyes wide: most people had never seen so many Dalmatians in one place.
I was nervous, certain that there was so much Rhiannon and I could have worked harder on, so much more proofing we could have done to be certain that she wouldn’t break on her downs or lag on her heeling. But I calmed myself, thinking that I didn’t want to be like another friend who never seemed to take her dog into the ring because she was such a perfectionist.
•••
Dawn and I often shared expenses in cheap motels, gas, mileage, and sometimes even food, depending on how strapped we were feeling. We spent many hours on the road, driving from California to Portland, California to Seattle, California to Denver, California to Arizona, from Northern California to Southern, across the country in her white minivan or my green “Dalopy.” My van had been nicknamed by Jim—a jalopy for Dals. The trips were always filled with raucous laughter about ourselves, our competitors, our dogs—even our sex lives or what we thought of men in general. Hilarious girl talk, something I hadn’t experienced much of in my all-too-serious and sensitive past as a child.
My own family of Jim, Nathaniel, and Gabe seemed very far away, far away from all the responsibilities that went along with being a wife and mother—and, much to my surprise, it felt good to be taking this break. I still called home every night, but I had to remind myself to do it, as the pace at the National was quick.
•••
It was past five o’clock when we finally finished our unpacking, and though I was dying for a drink at the bar, we had to feed and potty the dogs first.
By then I had learned the trick of walking two dogs at a time without wrapping myself around trees and bushes, or falling off the curb. The dogs watered the bushes.
At last, Rhiannon and Tia and Dawn’s Basha and Davenport were tucked safely in their boxes. The room had remained at 83 degrees, and I checked the air conditioner only to find that it was still blowing warm air. I reported this to the front desk when we went downstairs, expecting that they could fix it by the time we were back from dinner, but they told me the repair engineer wouldn’t be in until the next morning. We resigned ourselves to a hot night tossing on our shared double bed.
We put on our lipstick, donned our Dalmatian “garb” for the Welcome Party, and made our way down to the bar, where the horde of other dog owners had already claimed the entire place for their own and were well on their way to getting sauced.
Nearly everyone was from somewhere else. Minneapolis and Denver, Boston and D.C.—anyone who owned a show Dalmatian came to the National Specialty, complete with various accents and different sorts of clothes, from string ties to sundresses. I didn’t know it then, but I was becoming part of a big new family, another one dedicated solely to Dalmatians.
There was always a lot of interclub competition for the social end of things year to year, and activities ranged from a BBQ (for the West Coast clubs) to picnics (the East and the South), and all manner of other things in between. In those years, none of them were particularly original, especially the food (usually hamburgers or hot dogs and store-bought coleslaw), but they all had something special attached to them. The Welcome Party, often given at the hotel bar or a private room, always had a theme: this time everyone was to dress in Dalmatian finery of some kind, and it didn’t matter if it was denim or diamonds. I had on a denim jacket made from a pair of upside-down jeans with a huge Dalmatian face, which was really the backside of the pants, embroidered front and center across my back.
With nothing to eat but a few carrot sticks and a handful of nuts, there was only booze—Dal owners were happy, and sometimes downright enthusiastic, drinkers—and this event had these few key aspects of an Irish wake, except for lots of shouts floating across the press of bodies in tightly clustered groups—good natured clowning around as old-time friends reunited with those they hadn’t seen since the last year’s National.
There were people who’d been coming for fifty years, or more, as well as newcomers. Some of these breeders had kennels that had been in existence for decades, and some were just starting out, using all the tomfoolery to get to know people, barhopping and glad-handing in an attempt to learn names, make new friends, and develop contacts. In some ways it was similar to the business junkets Jim went on when he was away: have fun, but work on those business contacts as well.
There were all kinds of people in different situations: those who couldn’t afford the hotel and lived out of their overstuffed cars like vagabonds; those wealthy enough to drive in style in their enormous RVs; those who bunked four to a room to economize, fighting over bathroom space; those who had their own rooms and didn’t have to share anything at all. There were more overweight women than you could find at a Jenny Craig convention, many dressed egregiously—and quite a number of gay men, who sometimes flounced around the ring in gaudy suits that put the heavyset women to shame, as well as many who dressed conservatively in suit and tie. (The stereotype begun with the movie Best in Show was only partially accurate.) And there were the judges, kept in secret rooms under lock and key, so that they couldn’t fraternize wi
th the competitors, many of whom they knew on a first-name basis anyway.
There were also, once in a while, liaisons, with handlers emerging the morning after from the bedroom of owners, shoes in hand, spotted by those busybodies who regularly trolled the halls looking for gossip. These were the news items that didn’t get printed in the tame and quickly-cobbled-together newsletter that arrived each morning under your door, but they circulated, rampant, anyway. In years to come the newsletter would be replaced with an email version that listed winners and congratulations to all.
At that year’s National in Marin, there was going to be competition in and out of the ring. On the second afternoon before the sunset, there was a softball game that nearly everyone participated in. I hated softball because I was inept at it during high school, but I donned my required black-spotted jersey with feigned enthusiasm because I was trying to meet people and fit in. (All this social activity gave me anxiety and made me cling obsessively to Dawn, who knew absolutely everyone and flitted from group to group, with me hanging on her elbow.) At our game, where I struck out four times, the blacks vigorously opposed the livers, wearing black and brown respectively, with the reward for the winning teams of T-shirts emblazoned with the name of the National’s sponsoring club and the year.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 7
