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Schnauzer kerfuffle
Saturday, July 5 2008
Unseen America is "a program to promote the first person photographs and stories of people who are frequently ignored by the media and mass culture." Gretchen became involved with the Kingston-area instance of this program back in the winter and her participation involved advise and instruction on the captioning of photographs. Most of the participants in the program had been reached through local labor unions, though many of them were both white and white collar. Today Kingston's Unseen America had its big opening at the KMOCA gallery on the Rondout in Kingston, and Gretchen went there at 4pm after an afternoon spent making things in the kitchen. I showed up KMOCA at around 6:30pm, driving with the dogs in the hatchback (which still isn't street legal) via the back way (DeWitt Mills Road to Abeel Street). We got permission from Deborah (who runs KMOCA) to bring the dogs in, and they circulated amid the photographers, friends, and passers-by at the gallery and spilling out onto the sidewalk along Abeel.
The photos were black and white, and familiar to me, since I'd participated when the show had been prepared by Gretchen and Deborah on our dining room table. I found it difficult to participate much as either an appreciator of photography or as husband-of-one-of-the-instructors because I felt the need to continually monitor where Sally and Elenor were.
At one point Sally wandered down the sidewalk as far as the Armadillo restaurant and I had to go retrieve her. Near the end of the show, I was sitting out on the stoop in front of the gallery and I could see a fussy woman walking a fully-cropped miniature Schnauzer coming and I could just tell from her energy and her interaction with her dog that things weren't going to go well if my dogs interacted with that Schnauzer. Eleanor came bounding out of the gallery to say hello and the little dog immediately jumped at her. A brief kerfuffle ensued, with the woman scooping up her precious purebred and me pushing Eleanor (and now also Sally) away. "Whose dogs are those?" the woman snipped, but I didn't offer an answer. Sally and Eleanor had served shelter dogs poorly as their ambassadors; this altercation had merely confirmed the snippy woman's belief that the only dogs you can really trust come from a reputable breeder and have a pedigree.
After the show, Gretchen and I went with a woman named Erin to the Pupuseria on Broadway for dinner. Erin had come down from Albany; she's the director for Unseen America for the entire State of New York. Originally Deborah was going to join us but fireworks were freaking out her dog so she flaked out on us. It's rare that Gretchen and I go to the Pupuseria on a Saturday night, and the music was so loud that I could barely hear what Gretchen and Erin were talking about. As usual, about eight or ten Salvadoran guys were hunkered over the bar eating pupusas and drinking beer (Coronas and Budweisers mostly). Aside from the kitchen and waitstaff, Gretchen and Erin were the only women in the place, and when we left, we left a sausage party in our wake.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080705 feedback
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