Perry Doodlehead, Healer

In my ongoing quest to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to do during the day on the weekend, I got an email last week saying that this charity organization where dogs go to hospitals and cure people by their mere presence, was having a “casting call” for wannabe therapy dogs. I kind of didn’t want to go to this thing at first because their website said that if you get accepted into the program you have to sign a pledge where you agree to bathe your dog within 24 hours of a facility visit, which appeared to be code for bedbugs. In any event, I decided that we should go because they framed it as a “casting call” and since Perry has already been on Oprah AND in The New York Times AND is literally an Ambassador for his breed the next stage in celebritydom is getting involved with a charity.

In any event, we roll up to this doggy daycare place and apparently every dog owner in downtown NYC thinks their dog has what it takes to be therapeutic. I had to fill out this four page form where they asked leading questions like “Does your dog bark excessively?” and “List some of your dog’s dislikes” which immediately put me in the the awkward position of having to conceal Perry's rabid hatred for dwarves and pug faced dogs.

Finally, the trainer calls Perry and three other dogs into the training room for our “skills” test and right away this bitter old woman with a Papillon makes some underminer comment to the trainer saying like “I don’t think you’ll be out of here by 3 today, there’s a lot of people waiting outside,” and then trainer says that she doesn’t care and that actually this audition is a test for the temperament of both dogs AND owners - ZING. So she had us do all these tests, like give your dog commands and see if he listens and doesn’t bite. The worst test was that the dogs were supposed to walk by a pile of sumptuous treats and somehow IGNORE them, walk away, sit, stay and then go down. So three of the dogs go and more or less ignore the treats and do the commands. On our turn, we walk toward the treats, I tell Perry to “leave it,” and naturally he lunges after them and I have to physically drag him away. Perry then somehow mistakes my “down” command as “give me your paw” and launches into his famous paw- other paw-high five routine which I had specifically instructed him to save for our grand finale.

So after all the testing is done, she gives us the results and there were three possible outcomes: rejected, need basic obedience and then therapy classes, or just proceed straight to therapy class. She tells the bitter woman with the Papillon that her attitude sucks, she tells Bogey who was clearly the Valedictorian that he can proceed straight to therapy and she tells this other puppy that he needs to basic training to get his shit together.

Then she comes up to me and I’m pretty much shitting my pants which is pretty ridiculous considering this entire thing was literally an audition for the “privilege” of PAYING for 5 weeks of therapy classes to then VOLUNTEER my time. But by some miracle, she tells me that Perry can actually proceed DIRECTLY to therapy classes and I was like “um, are you kidding me?” and she told me that she passed him even though he seemed “confused” by the whole testing situation, but once he “understood what was being asked of him” he would get on board.

She also informed me that before therapy classes started in January, Perry would need to practice his shit so he could “graduate on time” with his future classmates. She was basically calling him special needs in front of the other dogs which I found extremely insulting because the same shit happened to me once in elementary school, where they confused my name with this girl Marna and they took me to a reading “annex” despite my protests that there had been a terrible mistake and that Marna was the REAL idiot and I was the one with ADVANCED reading skills. I had to spend an entire day reading aloud humiliating sentences like “The cat is in the box” until I came home and told my mom what happened and pitched my Marna theory, which she agreed with and then called the school to kick some ass.

P.S. No, every post is not about Perry, the last few ones just HAPPEN to be about him so just calm down.