100% That Bitch: My (Brief) Life as a Show Dog for Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra

People think we are color blind. This is not so. Canines can, in fact, see color; we have two cones in our eyes that detect yellow and blue. (It’s called dichromatic vision, those with thumbs can google it.) You humans have three cones, the third allowing you to distinguish red and green. Personally, the omission of Christmas colors doesn’t affect me greatly. I don’t care about the hue of the grass where I relieve myself; I don’t care if prosciutto loses its rosy luster, as long as it’s thinly sliced and there’s plenty of it. Like Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name is still as sweet. (That said, TBH I don’t love Shakespeare. Only one dog features in the entirety of his oeuvre and he’s a whelp named Crab in Two Gentlemen of Verona who doesn’t get much airtime and belongs to a servant rather than either of the titular gentlemen…but I digress.)

Back to my color regrets: I did feel left out at Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra’s 2024 “Best in Show” extravaganza when I could not distinguish the crisp shade of candy apple on Jacqueline Novak’s scallop-trim cardigan skirt suit from the highlighter green apple color of the beading on a colleague’s leash. Lately I’ve heard a lot of human chatter describing this color as “brat,” and each time my ears perk to attention since it sounds a lot like “rat” and my ancestors were ratters.

Speaking of my ancestors, my name is Magnolia and I am a Chihuahua mix who is available for adoption from Animal Haven. I received second place in Rachel Antonoff and Susan Alexandra’s “Best in Show” pageant. But I was not best in show, was I? Because second-best is not number one, and I’m not quite ready to move on. I wore a gorgeous toile puffer jacket that matched the one worn by my exuberant human, Larry Owens. We both had charisma and charm to spare, however, I lost to Elmer, as decided by a woman people seem to know named Bridget Everett who had treats in her beaded crossbody Fifi bag. Third place went to handsome Alfie, whose human was confusingly dressed like a Dalmatian but was, in fact, an actor named Sandra Bernhard who spoke in a gravely low timbre rather than the squeaky register that humans tend to prefer for dogs and babies, even though they know our hearing is much more sensitive. Sandra Dalmatian had a strong energy, and I thought, Here is a woman who might be hard to muzzle. And also, is she vaccinated?

The gossip backstage—which was the garden area at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo—was that all of the human models were intriguing individuals, but from my vantage point I was mostly seeing Crocs, which looked a lot like my Kong chew toy. The two humans seated on the dais, Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, both with long curly hair that any doodle would die for, were the emcees. I wondered if they would share their groomer s name.