The Poodle Problem

How did this happen?
When the man sang that some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger across a crowded room, he didn’t mention anything about a couple of yappy lap dogs. But on a July night at Grant Street Dance Hall in Lafayette, Louisiana, I was only in town for two more days and wasn’t exactly thinking about the future consequences of current actions. All I knew was that I was talking to this curly-haired blonde who I’d noticed an hour or so earlier — and I hadn’t lost her attention yet.

I already knew her name was Cara, that we had a couple of mutual acquaintances, that she’d dropped a ton of money to go to the Super Bowl earlier in the year and was also a rabid LSU fan. Those things, along with her — how do the French put this, “smoking hotness” — were more than enough to drown out any alarm bells that might have gone off when she whipped out the iPhone and started showing me photos of her “babies,” a couple of small poodles. Sure they were cute, boy they were fascinating, yeah I love dogs, yadda yadda yadda.

Of course, I paid attention — enough, at least, to notice that there was a black one and a white one and that sometimes they wore clothes. But, like I said, in town for a couple of days. If I was lucky, we’d make out and then we’d never see each other again, so a couple of high-maintenance yipsters were of no great concern.
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