Show Dog

Show Dog

The parking lot outside the Wildwoods Convention Center in
Wildwood, New Jersey, greets visitors with a sign that reads no
campers, rvs, buses. But that hasn’t stopped the lot from filling up with
all three. The dog show has come to town.
If you were to arrive between Memorial Day and Labor Day, this famously
kitschy Jersey Shore town would be packed with sun-scorched
families gnawing at clouds of cotton candy as they prowl the boardwalk
from musty fun house to rickety carnival ride, between stops for
funnel cakes and old-timey
photos. But in early February it is a ghost
town of more than two hundred shuttered-for-
the-
season
fifties-era
doo-wop
motels and motor inns with names that seem to have been
plucked from whatever list casino builders use: Lu Fran, Star Fire, Jolly
Roger, Sand Dune, Sea Chest, Ala Kai, Beau Rivage, Tangiers, et cetera.
Though the town’s population can swell to 250,000 or more over
the Fourth of July weekend, the year-round
residents number just 5,436.
And if dog-show
week is any indication, 5,400 or so of those must fly
south for the winter along with the birds. Wildwood in winter is so
deserted that the city actually turns off the streetlights, and you could
take a nap in the middle of the main beach road and probably have to
get up only once or twice a day to let a car roll by.
So there’s more than enough room in the convention center’s parking
lot for the SUVs, vans, box trucks, and RVs that ferry around America’s
show dogs and their human attendants. To walk the parking lot
at a dog show is to see every possible seven-letter-
or-
less
dog-related
word applied in license-plate
form: dogrun, droolrs, pawsrus, lab lvr,
fidofun, dog mom . . .
If the plate doesn’t give it away, you can almost always discern a
vehicle owner’s breed of choice by the silhouette stickers that adorn
it—hulking
Great Danes, elegant Afghans, the wispy Gremlin ears of
a papillon. The lot is also a good place to tour the taxonomy of America’s
recreational vehicles, many hooked up to power—usually
in
limited
supply, and only by advance reservation—and
most adjacent
to sawdust-lined
pens that serve as combination exercise area and dog
potty. (Dog shows have official, shared-use
versions of these fenced
areas,
by the way. They’re known as “ex-pens”
and are used as indoor
bathrooms. They are unisex, though at bigger shows there’s sometimes
one reserved exclusively for bitches in heat.)*
Other vehicles come emblazoned with the names of professional
handlers, or of kennels, or of the many businesses that chase show dogs
and their owners around. For instance, Lil’ Pals, “a pet portrait studio
that comes to you,” offering the sort of high-concept
photography displayed
on the side—say
you’d like to see your Pomeranian with angel
wings, or your bichons frises imagined as a blissful couple
on their wedding
day, complete with tux and veil.

From the book SHOW DOG: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred by Josh Dean. Copyright C 2012 by Josh Dean. Reprinted by permission of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers