A Real Royal Flush

Once you’re famous you’re bound to turn up in a museum exhibit. My turn came today, when my image went onto the walls of the famed Toilet Seat Art Museum. Featured on the Today Show and listed as one of Texas’s ten best offbeat museums (one has to wonder what the ten worst are), the museum features more than 900 decorated toilet seats. They cover the walls, interior partitions—even the doors--of a corrugated tin two-car garage behind a cottage in Alamo Heights.

The quirky collection is the really out-there vision of Barney Smith, 89. In January the Wednesday Walkie Talkies visited his museum while walking in the neighborhood. They oohed and ahhed over seats adorned with everything from wasp nests to Boy Scout patches to marbles to swizzle sticks.

My mistress got so carried away that she suggested that the prolific Mr. Smith create a seat in the honor of the WWTs. He agreed on the condition that we give him a logo to work from. Lyn Belisle, a member of the group who is an artist, agreed to create a logo with me as its centerpiece, since I'm the group's de facto mascot.

Today, six ladies walked to the museum to sign the newly competed seat with a pen. I can’t write my name, so I proffered my paw, which artist Lyn outlined next to the signatures. Mr. Smith will engrave over the signatures with a dremel tool, add photographs and, if Mary can bear to part with it, glue on one of my collars. So there you have it. My visage is in a museum for all to see.

The portrait as drawn by Mr. Smith is not what I'd call a spitting image. In fact, it looks weirdly wolf-like to me. But that's OK, because there's another dog that occasionally walks with us, named J.D. (short for "just dog.") who might just think that's HIS picture. No hard feelings that way.

I’m not the only one happy to be memorialized. Logo designer Lyn Belisle emailed the group, “I have always wanted to have my art in a museum. It’s a dream come true, a real royal flush.” I couldn’t have said it better.

Now to another subject. I went with my master and mistress to Austin over the weekend and had a fine time checking in with their son Maverick’s dog, Chigurh, and with the chickens. Sadly, there are only two now. Maverick discovered the third one stretched out in the enclosure last week with no sign of sickness or injury. The only thing he could figure was that she died in childbirth as she had a habit of laying extra large double-yoked eggs.

I didn’t get to participate in the high point of the trip, which was riding in a little Smart Car. The city of Austin has a pilot program called Car2go, in which people who sign up can use the cars wherever they find them and drop them wherever they want around town. Cars can be located using an iPhone. Cost of operation is 35 cents a minute, half the cost of a taxi. The cars are tiny but so am I, so I do hope Mary and Maverick will take me with them next time they decide to take a spin. If I'm museum material, surely I'm worthy of a ride in a Smart Car.