What is our Great Dane’s Purpose?

Well, there’s been a spate of activity going on with The Mutt-Cracker (SWEET!). And little wonder….the show opens in a sickening 10 days with all of the Christmas activity to help eat up some of that short time.

I was reading the Austin Chronicle’s recommendation to the dogs and look, they were all ears!

The Pup-illons were “All Ears” when I read them this quote from the Austin Chronicle.

KUT is going to interview me and my balloon-making Great Dane, our lucky seventh dog, Dane Dawson of balloonsbydane.com, simply the best balloon twister in Austin. I mentioned that we won’t even be using this, his best skill because Moose and Mouse get a bit freaked out by the popping-plus it could eat up a minute of performance and that’d just slow us down.  Moose and Mouse sure had plenty of chances to get acclimated to the popping when I was practicing making balloons myself so they may just never get used to it.

I didn’t care so much about the twisting, but wanted to make something special for one person while showing off Lauren Macaw’s ability to differentiate colors and name them correctly.  The thing was that during shows I preferred when she got the colors wrong and would (and still do) pretend to get upset, throw things on the ground, yell at her for embarrassing me, and generally give her way more energy and attention for saying the wrong color. And I don’t need balloons for that.

Incidentally, since this is supposed to be a training blog, it is exactly the above-described phenomenon that causes people the most trouble with parrots and kids. They get more attention when doing something wrong….and dogs barking and then they get yelled at? Think about if you were an alien from another planet and you see dogs barking and then the owners start yelling at them. What would that look like? Simply a bunch of aliens screaming together. PS-if the dogs stop after you give them a quick “Stop” that’s impressive.

Parrots love yelling at each other in the wild. And they totally do everything they can to provoke humans into yelling back at them and storm around like little ineffective Hitlers. It’s the second most common reason parrots get kicked out of their loving homes. Biting is the number one reason. A good, measured program of Time Out is the only way I know of to humanely address parrot issues.

I digress. This is a piece about Dane and what his role in the show is.

Dane has played in numerous jazz bands and I’d say he might even be as good of a musician as he is a twister, but no, we won’t be using much of that skill of his either as we already have four amazing musicians in the cast. Dane will help me tie everything together. He’ll keep the action moving by doing short clown bits, some with an instrument, other times simply with his wit and charm (whatever-he seems to show up on time) while I prep the next act (catch a dog after I let him out of the crate).

Anyway, it’s shaping up to be an even more jam-packed show than normal, and normally people are stunned at how much I do in just my solo routine.