More Tales from the Grooming Salon

Currently Reading: You Suck by Christopher Moore

Quite a few things to go over this week.

Friday I had "one of those days." Yeah, we all have them once in a while right? At one point Friday was going so bad it could have filled in for a Monday. Then again, since I start my work week on Friday, I suppose it WAS filling in for a Monday.

The theme of Friday was smelly dogs. Everything that came through the salon and landed on my table smelled and I mean BAD. The worst one was a yorkie who tangled with a skunk. This is something I've encountered before but never with a dog so small. Usually it's the bigger dogs that go poking around after the skunk and they tend to smell bad starting at the nose and then it fades out as you get to the tail. But with the yorkie, I think it's fair to say he had a pretty even covering of skunk smell. Very consistent from heat to tail.

Coming in second from Friday would be the Bouvier. This dog was in for a full shave which usually means it hasn't been bathed in quite a while and it's all nasty and matted. That wasn't really too big of a deal. We get those all the time. This one though, well, right in the middle of the shave, she just decided she had to GO and go NOW and she squatted down a little and WHOOSH! I actually HEARD the pee before I saw it, it went so fast. She got the table, my left leg, my left shoe and the floor all around the table. Really, it's the kind of thing that's DAMN funny later that day or the next day when you're telling someone about it but at that particular moment what goes through your mind is, "yeah, it really is better to be pissed off than pissed on."

Saturday was doggie adoption day and boy did we ever have a lot of dogs in the store. We had our usual group from one of the local dog rescue places plus we had the cat lady (same thing but with cats) plus we had greyhounds. Then about mid-morning someone came in with PUPPIES! Everybody loves puppies right?

These cute little guys are chow-lab mix. Very friendly and very adorable as you can see. I took lots of pictures but only a few of them came out. Puppies don't stand still very much unless they're asleep. After several near-perfect shots that were almost always ruined by one puppy up front turning at the last minute, I finally decided I'd gotten all the good pictures I was going to get. That's when I remembered that my new digital camera also takes VIDEO. Well now, it's MUCH easier to take video of puppies than still pictures so I shot a little video of them too. The original is MUCH clearer and larger for that matter but it would have taken forever for people to download. I decided to put it on You Tube instead.

By the end of my shift all the little brown ones were gone. I guess most people found them the cutest. They were certainly the ones who were the most out-going. You can see them in the little video crawling all over each other trying to get as much attention as possible. They just weren't going to take NO for an answer.

We have no idea how big they'll eventually get. Both the parents were probably pretty big but when you mix the breeds like that, they don't always come out the same size. We've got several chow mixes that come through and only a couple are actually as big as a chow.



Sunday was a mixed bag really. One of my regulars came in for a shave. Her name is Taj Kamra and she's a Jack Russell terrier. I know what you're thinking, shave a JRT? Yeah, we do that sometimes, especially if they're a mix between a short hair and long hair. What happens is you get a sort of weird coat that's MOSTLY short but with occasional long hairs sticking out and it just looks WEIRD. In Taj's case, she has a medium length coat and the owner likes it short so that's what we do. Now, I bring all this up because it reminded me that there's a sort of unwritten rule in the universe that says if you want to earn tips, you have to spend the tips you already have. No, no it's true, really. See, just Saturday afternoon I spent the last of my accumulated tip money from a few weeks ago by tipping my hairdresser. Then I turn right around and start earning tips again. See how it works? There's some sort of hidden tip cap and when you reach that cap, no more tips will flow in until you spend what you have. I don't know who writes these rules, I just follow them :-)

We've got a new promotion coming out. Party collars! These are for Mardi Gras. They're free if you buy a certain type of bath for your dog. So far I haven't had any luck with them but mostly that's because we're tied up in selling all the Valentine's Day stuff. Yes, I know Mardi Gras comes a week BEFORE Valentine's Day but this is what they tell me to do so I do it. Anyway, I found two eager models for the party collars in Erin and Elle. They're regulars and are just SUPER cute so I thought I'd include their shots here.

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There was a great little blurb in the alumni magazine from my university this month. The main article talks about what various students are doing over in Europe. Then in a little side-bar they talk about the program that allows the students to do the traveling. Here's what it says:

J. David Bowen's generosity is benefiting studends at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

When he died Jan 23, 1998, he left the bulk of his estate to create an endowment to fund European study and travel opportunities for undergraduates in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts. According to his will, his desire was "to expose the students to cultures where history is ever present and commercialism does not have the last word."

The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Bowen was born in New York City in 1930 and grew up in New York and Chicago. After graduating from Harvard in 1951, he earned a master's degree in Latin American history at the City College of New York while also making a name for himself as an off-Broadway actor and Latin American travel writer.

Bowen arrived in San Antonio in 1966 as part of the planning staff for HemisFair '68 and never left the city he had grown to love. In the ensuing years, he came to be known locally as the "dean of San Antonio actors" as well as the consummate "bookman" through his rare book shop and Corona Publishing Company, which he started in 1977 to feature the works of Texas writers.

Is that cool or what? This just has good karma written all over it. Here he left the bulk of his estate to the university so they could do something like this even though he never went there. Because of him, kids who would otherwise never make it out of the US or perhaps never make it out of Texas get to see Europe, Latin America, wherever. At the same time, it was awfully nice of the alumni magazine to remind everyone who made all this possible in the first place. Usually when you see articles like this they only mention the donor in passing, if at all. So I think it's fantastic that they went out of their way to print a little mini-bio like that.

I will admit, I am a bit biased in this matter though. I did a few shows with David Bowen when I was working with Offstage. It's funny how Offstage was a sort of great equalizer among the people. We had David Bowen in a few of our shows and he was a Harvard graduate, had his own publishing company, etc. We had doctors, we had lawyers, we had TV personalities. We had waiters, we had store clerks, we had computer artists. Didn't make a difference. What you did outside the theater doors didn't matter. Once you came inside, you were an actor, or set builder, or stage manager or light board operator. That's how a guy like me, B.A. English from UTSA ends up working with someone like David Bowen :-)