15 Minutes
Into the room women come and go, talking of Leo DiCaprio.
I have no idea what TS Eliot would have made of Page Six and People magazine, but I suspect that Old Possum might have written a ‘Book of Bold Faced Nabobs’ which Andrew Lloyd Weber would have converted into a 9 year wonder on Broadway.
Yoda is our entrée into the world of celebrities, who would not deign to give us the time of day under any other circumstances. He compels their attention, and draws them in, like an angler who confidently casts his lure knowing that the fish will bite.
Friday morning, just before Fashion Week in Milan. The Air France lounge in New York is infested with denizens of the design world. In one corner, Calvin Klein holds center stage and the room looks like the casting call for The Devil wore Prada. Just outside the golden ring, is the Anne Hathaway type, piteously bleating ‘Where’s Anna?’ She rushes off to check if the take off can be delayed till Anna arrives, and comes back crestfallen. ‘Where’s Anna’, the Greek chorus rises as the minutes tick by.
Anna glides in, impervious and with about twelve minutes to spare. Yoda trots up to meet her, inspects her well turned out heel, and a hush falls over the crowd. Will she be pleased? Or will she fire someone for not setting up the cordon sanitaire? She reaches down, the air gets sucked out of the room, she pats Yoda, and all is well with the universe again. Yoda trots right back to us, blissfully unaware that he has gone where mere mortals fear to tread.
Fast forward to a few months later. Jennifer Lopez ( before the J.Lo days) and Sean Coombs (before the P.Diddy phase) are in the row in front of us. Yoda sticks his furry face in the space between their seats, and wins new friends. He is played with, cooed over, and a few weeks later we hear that she has two new dogs. Did Yoda do it? Or is it a Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc logical fallacy, which I was warned about in college? It doesn’t matter.
Better Midler, Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon…. I am a shameless name dropper, but don’t blame me, blame the pooch. They have all come under his spell for about 30 seconds.
We wanted to get Yoda his own 15 minutes, and when you want something badly enough, someone finds a way to sell it to you. We saw an ad in Dog Fancy. If we sent in his picture, they would publish it in a doggy calendar, on the page for November 22 - Mina’s birthday. The only brief - the picture would have to capture the essence of the dog’s personality.
So, how do you style a doggy shoot? Yoda would obviously be groomed to within an inch of his life. But, what about the backdrop? What props could we add that would guarantee Yoda’s picture being ‘selected’? We draped him over his LV bag, which nestled against an LV steamer trunk. His brown and white coloring went very well with the luggage.
Then, we added the crowning touch. A Concorde label. The Air France label was not particularly attractive, but BA had a nice bright white tag with red lettering. Yes, that would be it. Even though Yoda had never flown on BA- they don’t allow dogs in the cabin- we decided that we would sneak this past the fact checkers at the calendar printing house.
Mina shot the picture, we sent it in with an order for 50 calendars. It worked. Yoda was immortalized. It was not quite the swimsuit issue, he was not featured along Gisele Bundchen, but we knew we had done our bit. The only challenge now was – how to find 49 other people to whom we could give the calendar?
Andy Warhol would have been proud
Feb 20, 2009 | | Book