The first day of Pugfest is something that I will remember for the rest of my life.
A few hilarious things happened, but I’m going to start with my favorite first. The first afternoon, which was on a Saturday, a group of pre-teen girls came to the booth that I was volunteering in.
I went to Pugfest as a volunteer for Wichita Pug Rescue, an organization that I’ve been involved with for about 10 years and have adopted two Pugs from. My job at Pugfest was to run our kissing booth. I’ve never run the kissing booth at Pugfest, so I got a little training from more senior Kansas Pug officials before the event actually started.
I was to tell people that these Pugs are our world famous kissing Pugs. The Pugs will sell you a kiss for 50 cents, or you can pet them and cuddle them all you want for free. All the money raised goes to help rescue Pugs.
There were four dogs in the kissing booth, including my two Pugs, Chief, who is 2 and who I just adopted in March, and Pickles, who is 9 and has the most adorable gray face and longest tongue you’ve ever seen. (I’ll talk about Pickles in a future blog post.)
There were three pre-teen girls in this group on Saturday afternoon and their Mom was with them as well. The girls liked Chief immediately. To be honest, every girl likes Chief and Chief likes every girl he meets.
My boy Pug is a total womanizer and he can pretty much get any girl’s attention without much effort. Chief is show stoppingly beautiful.
He knows it.
He even flaunts it.
So the girls turn their attention to Chief. One of the girls, who is dressed super cute with her hair and makeup done perfectly with gorgeous manicured nails, says to my dog: “Hi Chief. I like your eyeshadow. Nice wing.”
I didn’t miss a beat and I immediately asked the girls if they were Taylor Swift fans. The middle kid said yes, and her and her Mom immediately started grinning because they both knew what I was about to say.
My response: “His cat eye is sharp enough to kill a man.”
And then I laughed so hard I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in my life. All four of us were rolling with laughter and for about 30 seconds or so, none of us could speak a coherent word. It was just a bunch of girls giggling about my boy Pug’s perfect eyeliner.
When people at Pugfest asked me how and why I named him Chief, I asked if they were fans of country music, and when they said yes, I got to explain that I actually named my dog after my favorite country guy, Eric Church.
In one weekend in Kentucky, I managed to combine all of the things that I’m addicted to in life: Pugs, Taylor Swift and Eric Church.
This will be one of many blog posts I write about Pugfest. I’m actually shocked that I didn’t lose any Facebook friends over the weekend from my incessant posting about everything Pug related.
Future blog posts might involve the story about how Pickles stole a sandwich, the list of crimes that Chief has committed in his four months with me, the story of Chief winning second place in his race when he was snoring in my lap literally two minutes before the race started, about how cool it is to volunteer for the actual Pugfest event itself, and a list of all the cool Pug names that I heard.
And then I’ll probably write about the dog bar we went to on Saturday night, where Pickles hit on every single man that she saw and where Chief earned a reputation for being the only Pug brave enough to run with the big dogs. That dog bar was probably the happiest three hours of my whole entire life.
One more thing about my Chiefy: I only met three Pugs at Pugfest bigger than him. Chief is a beefy boy.
It turns out it’s actually socially acceptable to walk around Pugfest and ask total strangers from all over the country how much their boy Pugs weigh. A group of us were all doing the same thing, and every one of us basically had the same response.
Our response?
I like big Pugs and I cannot lie. You other brothers can’t deny…Red beans and rice didn’t miss ya.
