David Roth, live and direct from the Westminster Kennel Club Show:
Most of the guests, though, had come dressed and otherwise geared-up to spend an entire day with dogs: to watch them bounce dutifully through their paces, to applaud each competitor, to scratch and compliment and baby-talk various dogs in the benching area and ululate for their dogs of choice—this weirdly uniform lady-voiced “woo-wuh-WOO” could be heard around every ring; for a while I was fixated on one woman near Ring Five who managed an especially loud and consistent version of it without ever changing her facial expression. When the school day ended, the kids rolled in, these ones a little bit older and more studious in their giddiness than the little girls from the morning. “You know what makes these good,” a boy of maybe ten told a French Bulldog breeder while scratching her dog’s belly on the Garden’s Astroturfed floor, “is they’re not too big.”
