I was noticing when I went into the boutique pet store in my neighborhood that, in spite of the recession, people were spending a lot of money on expensive items for their cats in my neck of the woods. I proposed to the owner that she host a workshop on reading cats’ paws the day after my reading for Opening Palms at the bookstore up the block.
Good thing she said no. When I got home, I practiced. Even though my cats have been with me for eleven and twelve years respectively, neither one would sit still long enough. Now dogs — that is another story.
At the next festival I worked at over the summer, I happened to have a customer who brought her dog into my booth. I knew that bringing a pet to the festival was controversial because my friend, another traveling vendor, had wheedled hers in, bending the rules of a strict organization. You know the type. She argued that she had been on the road so long that she simply did not have the correct papers to get her little sweetie into a kennel. So he stuck with her in her pull-along camper.