The 3D Dog

When do fish talk about dogs? When it's today's blog and it's guest-scribed by Andy "Fish" McElfresh. Take it away, Poisson.

Something's fishy

There was a time there when I took a lot of 3D pictures. You could say I was some kind of prescient forerunner to Avatar, but really, I was nerdy, it was super nerdy, and I loved it.

Fish pix

I got into a phase where I took tons of photos of dogs. They are just the right size to show off the hyper-real characteristic of the 3D: not so big, and not so small that they get into the parallax crossover zone.

Nerdy, see?

Future fish wife

So one day, I'm walking the streets of the Upper West Side with my then-girlfriend, and future wife, Johanna. We come across a beautiful Irish Setter, who trots right up to us, nuzzling and kowtowing for a petting, pulling his walker along by the lead. The man was a very pleasant young Asian man, and I asked him if I could take a picture of his dog.

He started laughing. "The dog?"

So I launched into a complicated explanation of how it¹s 3D, I'm into dogs, the parallax crossover zone, etc. etc. until he finally interrupts and says, "sure."

I took out the light meter, dialed the settings, and pointed the camera.

"You don¹t want me in it?" the man asked.

"Nope, just the dog." I said.

I took the picture, had it developed, carefully mounted it -- and it was awesome. It went into the coffee table box, the one with which I would bore guests on the rare occasion that someone would come over and didn't pretend to be blind in one eye.

Sorry. Had to.

A couple of months later, I went to my first Williams sing-along at the Horner¹s apartment. As soon as we came into the kitchen ("come see Mrs. Horner's purple Chicken!"), I saw the dog.

Eph foul

"I know that dog!" I said. "I have an awesome 3D picture of that dog!"

Jack Horner looked at me, and the penny dropped.

"You're the guy..." he said. And laughed.

For a moment, I was hoping that being "the guy" meant that somehow I had gained notoriety among the Manhattan intelligentsia as an avid 3D dog photographer. A paralyzing moment later, that didn't strike me as all that likely. Plus the laugh was hard to explain.

"My son-in-law told me somebody took a picture of the dog!" Now his voice had the tone that asked, "how clueless are you?"

And then I saw the refrigerator. And the nice young Asian man. And the articles proclaiming another triumphant performance. And that the nice young Asian man was none other than Yoyo Ma.

Jack's son-in-law

Now, I have an unusually large capacity for embarrassment. Whereas an Olympic speed skater, for example, has large, tree-trunk-sized thighs, I have a similar muscle, somewhere in my cerebellum, that spasms into action like it was jettisoned from the dying planet Krypton as the last hope of a race of people who are prone to extreme embarrassment. And that brain muscle came to life like Frankenstein's monster on the slab.

In other words, I was stunned.

And Jack, God bless him, just nodded and said, "you'll have to show me that picture sometime."

Thank you, Fish. Your story left me not only wanting to see the picture, but hungering for purple chicken and yearning for some Jack vocals. Here's the man himself, Yoyo's father-in-law, with Malcolm, Bill and the boys doing "I Love the Ladies." ("When I'm in London, Paris, or old Vienna....")