Best In Show 2009 Was something amiss? I had drawn the drapes across the windows, seeking to keep out the cold. The one window where sits my candle for Peace and Well-being, a candle that burns at both ends! - was the only one not curtained off, and the light from the candle bravely shone. Outlandish little beacon! As if a candle could bring peace, or it could restore our well-being.
Hmmm. Maybe we needed a war. Not just an old war-thingie, but a new and improved war, one that actually would be winnable. And be paid for by the oil revenues of the indigenous peoples to whom were we exporting our gunpowder. Well, if not oil revenues, then some other form of pillage. We have a ruling class that's absolutely wizard at this type of thing.
Suddenly the scene changed, and I was sitting at a lunch counter in the Narita Aerodrome ( I always use aerodrome now, instead of the common "airport" - it is not affectation, but part of my continuing effort to escape from the Abu Ghraib of the Present age. ) that serves Tokio ( ditto "Tokio" vs." Tokyo"...actually sometime I use "Edo" but that is affectation. ) I was sitting next to a gent wearing a grey suit. He looked as if he should belong to the Mazooka or Bazooka or Manchukuo, or whatever it is they call the Mob ( © US Capitalism, Ltd. ) over there. Perhaps Yakuza. That's it. Yakuza.
Maybe we were at a table, because I distinctly recall that the rest of the crowd from "Ikiru" were sitting on the other side. It is quite A-OK to say it was the funeral crowd from said movie, because I was sitting with them. I was not out-of-shot like some memorious chappie who has just finished eating and is getting his just desserts. I was among the living. At this propitious moment, She-who-must-be-obeyed harrumphed, and I woke from my appallingly boring dream. She has a way of harrumphing in the sense of the royal plural, such as "Harrumph! We are out of sorts."
I had fallen asleep holding my half filled cup of tea (courtesy The Grace Tea Company, NY, NY.), and was experiencing a general relaxation of the musculature, which is the consequence of Morpheus ( being the god of sleep, not Morphine, his kid brother.) I have had a history of dozing off while sitting in various places, always with a cup of tea or coffee in my hands. I suppose it is because I am at ease. Since I have never been much of a social gabber, this is as far as I go with the social amenities: cup of the right stuff and sleep, thereby editing out all that annoying chatter that one comes across so often on social visits...a species of conversation which reminds me of a platter of lady fingers or water cress sandwiches; many, not varied, and not particularly tasty. Ah, the lady fingers of polite conversation!
So I took my reality check and got my version of reality back from the coatroom attendant, with whom I had apparently stashed it for a while. I was not in Dulce Domum, my home sweet home, but in loco alius - some other bloke's domicile. And I was watching the Westminster. Or, to be quite precise, others were watching, while I dallied with the Odalisque of Sleep.
Every year, my singular nephew - I call him that because he comes one to the pack, not like the 3-pack of the Brothers A - hosts a "dog party" as he calls it, and we gather from the waggy tail ends of the Earth to sit and gaze upon the world of canine pulchritude and discipline for two evenings. And these two evenings follow hard on each other's heels! They are much, much more closer together than any other two evenings of the year, I assure you. I mean, it is as if you have just finished rolling the old tacky tape on your sweater and trousers to get those remaining dog hairs off, and - bingo! - it's time to go to Westminster yet again.
We vote on the winners by breed, then Best in Show. We all prepare food.Points are given for the best dish. Then there is a Trivia portion. All of these endeavors give you points. And if you have the highest score, you are awarded the honor of hosting the event next February. She-who-must-etc. not only won the food event this year, but she was doing her usual " I am smarter than you are " routine by pulling ahead of the entire pack in picking individual breed winners. I mean, she was sprinting like Atalanta on evening one, and it would be all over but the shouting come evening two.
She had also done middling well on canine Trivia - name of dog in "The Absent-Minded Professor" and such - and that had always been her weak suit. But not this year. No. This year she had filled out her Trivia packet by doing them with my nephew's 5 year old son, who knows nothing about dogs, except that he is all for them. Of course, they both scored 70%, which was even better than random guessing...I guess. I mean, they actually answered "Dumbo" for the name of the absent-minded professor's dog, based on nothing more than a touch of the Disney.
And both did better than I. I watched with growing apprehension, knowing full well the battle between her innate sense of superiority over the lesser breeds - which were not the dogs, I may point out! - and her realization that she hated to host such an event for two nights come next February. But the glowing sense of victory was now, and the fear of hostessing was in the future. In case anyone like myself did not fully grasp her status, she took pains to point it out to me, documenting her entire thought process in picking this dog or that, her evaluation of the "oohs" and "aahs" of the live audience in New York, and her analysis of the attire of the individual dog trainers, an analysis which started very superficially and gained in complexity until it attained the level of a Freudian or Reichian analysis which seemed to me to contain hints of improprieties going on somewhere in the Id...rather who is pulling whose leash, and who domesticated whom?
Obviously, the dominatrices and dominators had shaggy coats, wagged their tails quite a bit, and panted. The helots ran alongside their masters, or they sat in seats and wagged their hands together in clapping noises a good deal of the time, and tended to spread a general blanket of palaver over everything - much like wolves howling at the moon.
Upon returning home at the end of evening one, I said, "You're doing it again." She sat down and the dogs gathered at her heels. She managed to pull her own boots off. She looked as if she had just come back from the hunt in Scotland, rather like the Queen. The comparison to the Queen is apt, for it was noblesse oblige that was in her mind. She was wondering whether she should run roughshod over the rest of us, thereby setting the bar up quite a few centimeters from the previous mark, or should she give it a rest, and let the younger crowd - whose party it actually was - have a chance at the "rubber bone" of glory.
Of course, I could not mention that eminence noire at the back of our minds: the obligation to host the event next year. It would not do to intimate that She-who-must-etc. might shrink from her duty, no matter how burdensome. Not at all. One must always appeal to the higher virtues of the gentle sex. If you imply they really don't belong on that pedestal after all, they will turn on you and leave you as stuff for the CSI lab guys to huddle over.
The second evening saw a noticeable diminishing of her powers. She began to fall back in the Sporting breed event, pull up short during the Working, and positively limp in the Toy breed. Many a schnorrer who had bet with her, thinking to ride to a pay-day on her coat-tails, was seen dashing to the betting wicket with a dog handicap sheet in hand to see whether they could recoup.
The tension mounted as time passed and we discussed how many dog rescues various people had performed. There was one local celebrity who had recently flown to Kenya to stage a massive dog rescue event. I think there were problems getting them into the country. Something about shots. I kid you not. And I used to refer to those numbers who gathered packs of dogs about themselves as "crazy old ladies"!
By the time Best in Show rolled around, four other individuals were within striking distance. The crowd was frenzied. There was nothing left to do but run the race. She-who-must-etc. pulled out the biggest reversal in sports history with aplomb. She picked the Puli instead of "Stump", the Sussex Spaniel, and she did a slow dive into downtown Mogadishu.
She nudged me twice, sitting as I had been with a cup of tea in my hand, and pointed to her score sheet where she had obviously circled the Sussex, then crossed it out and wrote "Puli". "Ah...", I said. "Discretion is the better part, eh?" "Yes." She smiled. "Yes, Rumsfeld. You are right." She smiled. She was referring to Rumpole of the Bailey, an old B.B.C. series we loved. She liked to think of me as Leo McKern, who had portrayed Rumpole.
She was quite happy, having the best of both worlds - canine and whatever other putative universe cosmology may imagine. I did not have the heart to correct her that is was "Rumpole" and not "Rumsfeld". Besides, "Rumsfeld" has its own little comic cachet, in a grim sort of way. I think "Rumsfeld" can be a funny name. If I were "Rumsfeld" , a night out would sort of be like clubbing with the Duke of Hell. Oh, well. Rumsfeld of the Bailey it is.
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