Dancing Dogs (15 page)

“What are you doing home?” Greg asked, yawning. “Isn’t it early? You didn’t quit, did you?”

She told him what Mrs. Harrington had said.

Greg nodded sympathetically. “That bitch,” he said. “Can’t blame you.”

The corgis were still doing their dancing thing, and Kara laughed. She clapped her hands and stomped a foot, and the corgis were all up on their hind legs, dancing around her in a circle, barking.

Greg laughed. “You ought to be in a circus act,” he said, vanishing through the front door.

Greg liked to say that she liked him just fine, but she
loved
the dogs. Sometimes, she would take her boom box out in the yard on warm nights and get the dogs to dance with her. The neighbors loved the show, coming over with their kids to watch. The dogs danced in circles, jumping up and down, hopping back and forth. They danced in a row, in sync, like they were trained in Vegas. On command, the corgis would circle her and go up on their hind legs, spinning around while she tossed treats in the air. They especially loved to dance to Latin, country, and rock—music filled with percussion and fast tempos.

Pastor Steve had invited her and the dogs to a wedding reception at the church once, and they lit the place up dancing to a hyped-up version of “Amazing Grace” sung by Aretha Franklin. The dogs loved to dance to Aretha. The wedding family was delighted and gave her $50. She had
thought then, Wouldn’t this be a great way to make a living? Make money and have fun?

Kara went into the house to lie down. She put an ice pack on her head to quiet the migraine she felt rising up. She could have strangled Mrs. Harrington. Maybe Greg would finally get off his ass and find something.

She went out into the yard and Mrs. McKinney, the neighbor in the big Colonial next door, came over to talk. She loved watching Kara train the dogs, and while Kara was getting them to stand up and circle, Mrs. McKinney yelled over into her yard where her husband was trimming some hedges, “Hey, Charles, didn’t you say the juggler for the Lions Club dinner tomorrow night got swine flu? Why don’t you get Kara here to bring the dogs? They’d be wonderful.” There was no response, but Kara saw Mr. McKinney watch the dogs for a while, concentrating.

The next morning, she went to the computer to check her e-mail. One popped right up: “Inquiring about Dancing Dogs. Urgent!”

She clicked to open it, and almost started to dance herself.

“Dear Kara,” it read. “Regarding your Dancing Dogs and a possible appearance at our Annual Lions Club Members Dinner: As my wife mentioned, we had already booked a juggler. Yesterday, he was forced to cancel due to illness, and the dinner is tonight and we are in trouble. I have consulted with other members of the Lions Club Banquet Committee and we have a proposal for you.

“We have five hundred people coming for dinner at the Praetorian Inn near Schuylerville tonight. Are you available? I was impressed by the dogs yesterday. Can you advise me as to your fee? We had budgeted up to $1,000 for the juggling
act. We can’t really go higher than that. Thanks, your neighbor, Charles McKinney, Program Director, New York State Lions Club.”

Kara fired off an e-mail. “Charles, as it happens, we have an opening in our schedule. We can make it, and $1,000 will be fine. Thanks, Kara and the dogs.”

She included her phone number, and hit Send.

Then she panicked. What was she thinking, agreeing to a big show in front of the Lions? All sorts of people from the area would be there, and the dogs had no experience with a group that size.

Then she remembered the “Star-Spangled Banner” number that she had worked up, where the dogs danced in circles while the national anthem was played. That had brought tears to Greg’s eyes when they’d practiced.

The phone rang. It was Charles McKinney.

“So, we’re on?” he asked.

Kara gulped. She accepted. “I don’t usually take gigs on such short notice.…”

Mr. McKinney added that he was on the board of the county fair and the Lion’s Club had lunches and dinners all over the area, so there might be a chance for more business.

Kara put down the phone and screamed. Greg came running.

“We have a gig! A thousand bucks.”

He grabbed her in a bear hug and spun her around.

She didn’t have time for rehearsing. She had to drive forty miles to Schuylerville. She patched together a kind of outfit—it was the best she could do on short notice—red patent-leather pumps, a sequined miniskirt, a sleeveless blouse, and one of Greg’s old cowboy hats.

She had six orange cones and some ramps she had
bought for an agility class she and the dogs had attended for a while. The cones and ramps and two hoops were the only props she had at this point.

She didn’t know if the inn had a sound system, so she grabbed her boom box and two CDs—Shakira and Jencarlos’s
Búscame
. She gathered up the three jeweled collars and stuffed them in a bag, along with a Ziploc bagful of kibble. She grabbed the box of liver treats and the leashes, then she rushed out to the Honda with the three dogs. Greg came out and gave her a kiss and a hug, and wished her luck.

An hour later, she pulled up to the inn and parked in the rear. When she and the dogs got out, a security guard came up and yelled that no dogs were allowed. When she told him they were part of the entertainment for the Lions, he looked dubious. He got on his walkie-talkie to check with someone inside, then waved her on.

Inside, she found Charles McKinney. They decided to keep the dogs in a storage room until dinner was nearly over and it was time for the entertainment. He led her down a hallway that ran alongside the big hall where the Lions were noisily working through their chicken dinners.

There was a kind of homemade stage in the front of the big banquet hall, raised up a bit in front of the scores of big round tables where all the Lions and their spouses and guests sat. The platform was a bit cramped—maybe fifteen by thirty feet, with a satin curtain in the rear and a backstage area. The dogs had not been on anything like it before, which worried Kara a bit. There was a sound system, so she handed McKinney her CDs.

“We appreciate your coming on such short notice,” he said, adding that she would be paid after the performance.
He said the Lions’ chorale would be singing on the stage after she and the dogs were through. She was a sort of warm-up act, he continued, smiling thinly.

“Thanks for the opportunity,” she said.

McKinney quickly showed her the storeroom, and asked her if there was anything she needed, then left hurriedly to attend to other business.

There was a freezer in the back of the storeroom, the motor of which kept clicking on and off. Ned and Sasha seemed anxious. Ned walked over to a cardboard box marked “Napkins” and lifted his leg. She shouted at him to get off. Candi growled at the freezer. Then the overhead pipes started clanking, startling all four of them.

She could see her reflection on the side of the freezer. She looked a bit Vegas, she thought, in her short skirt and revealing blouse. She put the sequined collars on the dogs.

Fifteen minutes later, McKinney opened the door. “It’s time to go on. I’ll show you the way to the banquet hall.”

Kara thought she was going to faint. She took a deep breath, took the dogs off leash, and jogged down the hall after McKinney. They waited outside while the announcer said the group was about to get a rare treat—a hot new act called “Tara and Her Dancing Dogs.” Kara heard murmurs of approval and some clapping, and then at Mr. McKinney’s cue, she opened the hallway door and charged in.

Onstage, she waited for the music. There wasn’t any. She looked around the room at the two hundred or so Lions, many of them still working on dessert, waiters and waitresses scrambling around the tables. The lights in the room went down, and two spotlights hit her right in the face. She wasn’t sure what to do until the music began.

The dogs looked at her expectantly, and she clapped her hands, reached for some treats and started to stomp her feet—the signal to the dogs that she was about to begin.

But the dogs didn’t dance.

Suddenly, Ned and Sasha bolted off to her left, while Candi waited, staring at her treat bag.

She heard some guffaws from the audience. Then she heard a crash and bang offstage where two of her dogs had run. A few people booed. Worse, a few more laughed.

A stagehand appeared at the end of the platform, hissing at her and pointing to the rear. She called Candi over to her and yelled to the audience, “Wait a second, folks!” and ran off to the side. More laughing.

It seemed the dogs had startled a couple of stagehands carrying some chairs and a lectern, and these had fallen on the floor. Sasha was still sniffing madly toward the rear wall, while Ned was circling in confusion.

Kara clapped her hands and stomped, and the three dogs more or less gathered around her, except for Sasha, who had her nose down and was trying to get around the curtain. Kara looked out at the crowd and put her hands up, a signal to the dogs.

Suddenly, Shakira came blasting over a loudspeaker, and Candi and Ned hopped up on their hind legs, circling twice before there was another crash from backstage somewhere and both dogs took off out the door they had come in through.

Kara was beet red, the audience was chuckling and murmuring. McKinney appeared, sweating and uncomfortable. This was bad.

Kara bowed, fighting back tears, and called to Sasha.
“Hey!” she bellowed in a voice that could be heard distinctly from the back of the room. Sasha looked up and froze, as if she’d suddenly been awakened from a trance.

The dog hopped up on her two legs—Shakira was still blaring over the loudspeaker—and started dancing, although she seemed to be looking for the other dogs.

“Forget it,” said Kara, and shooed the dog from the back of the stage and out the door, where they found Ned and Candi also hopping up and down and dancing to the music. Kara clapped her hands and led all three dogs back into the storeroom. McKinney followed her in.

“It’s no big deal,” he said. “These things happen.” He gave her back her CDs and a check for $250 “for her trouble.”

Kara was sobbing when she called Greg on her cell phone. “We made fools of ourselves because I put them in a position they weren’t ready to deal with. I could just shoot myself. Now, nobody will hire us.”

When she got back, Greg was on the phone. He was smiling. He even greeted the dogs. Something was up.

“I just called Old Man Frazier,” he said. “He needs a driver to deliver mulch. He called me a month ago, but I blew him off. It pays fourteen an hour. Not great, but there’s overtime if I want it.”

Kara was speechless. This is not what she expected.

“But honey, driving a truck with mulch?” It wasn’t what he had wanted. It was below his capabilities.

Greg walked over, put his arms around her, gave her a big hug and a provocative kiss, tongue and all.

“Kara, you need to make this thing with the dogs work. You’ve been cleaning houses and running cash registers
while I’ve been sitting around, and now it’s my turn to go to work and your turn to give what you want a shot. I’ll help you.”

Kara burst into tears. She hugged Greg, and patted him on his ass. He blushed. Enough said.

A
S IT TURNED OUT
, Greg actually liked his new job. In a couple of weeks, he was making enough money to cover the mortgage and most of their monthly bills, enough to give Kara some time to get her act together, he joked.

Kara decided to make the most of her chance. In exchange for maintaining the grounds and cleaning the clubhouse, a local Border Collie Association gave her morning use of their agility field, which had ramps, cones, hoops, and platforms.

Greg went off to work at seven
A.M
. But Kara was up at five, cleaning the house, doing chores, going online, reading her manuals and books. By sunup, she and the dogs were already at the agility course. She swept up the office, dusted, and emptied the trash bins. Then she went outside and cleaned up the dog poop, set up the cones, made sure all the bills and beams were set up properly.

After that, it was time to work. Dogs have short attention spans, so she decided to train in fifteen-minute intervals. She’d gotten chopped liver and raw hamburger and mixed the meat with a bit of molasses to make her own training treats. She’d also bought a rubber fishing pouch—the kind fishermen used to put their catch in—to hold the treats.

She tracked down two dancing-dog troupes in Florida, and they graciously spent hours on the phone with her, talking
about routines and training methods, especially about how to keep the dogs focused on the work when there were so many unnerving distractions.

So Kara arranged for other dogs to appear suddenly, to bark and run around. Sometimes Greg came by in his mulch truck to bang metal drums and dance and yell to make noise. Other times, people came by with their intense border collies and Australian shepherds, and they ran through the agility course right in front of the corgis. Kara threw treats on the ground and made the corgis stay. She turned on her boom box and played sound-effect CDs with cheering crowds, traffic jams, thunder. All the while, she had them dancing through the mayhem. When they paid attention, they got the liver-burger-molasses balls. When they ran off, looked away, barked, growled, or acknowledged the parade of loud and raucous distractions, they got nothing. No treats, no praise. She would simply walk off the portable platform she and Greg had built as a practice stage.

She carved out a dozen fifteen-minute training periods, beginning at seven
A.M.
and working through to two
P.M
. She began each hour with a different dance or act. First, they hopped around to a Latin-beat selection. Then, they did a rock segment, where they jumped up and down to the Who and the Stones.

She worked on a “Born in the U.S.A.” number, where the dogs raced in from offstage, jumped through three hoops, climbed to the top of a seesaw ramp, and did a kind of shake-’em-up corgi jitterbug.

There was one slow dance, where Ned and Candi sort of waltzed with each other to a Gershwin tune playing in the background. And then there was the Shakira finale, where
all three dogs charged onstage and did a Rockette-style line dance. In between, they jumped through hoops, circled the agility cones, and then they danced in a circle around Kara while she raised her arms and did a cha-cha.