Please meet Dottie, Steiff's Dally Dalmatian!

Please meet Dottie, Steiff's Dally Dalmatian!!   She was produced in West Germany between 1953 and 1969, so she considers herself a vintage puppy.   She does have her Steiff button in her ear, but no other identification.  She's made out of white mohair that has airbrushed spots.   She is stuffed with straw and only her head is jointed.   She is about 6 inches tall.   There is one loose stitch on her nose, but she is otherwise in excellent condition.   

Dottie always was one of those creative types.   You know, the kind whose imagination runs in overdrive.    From the time she was a young pup, Dottie was obsessed with color.   Yes, your typical dog can only distinguish different shades of blue and yellow, but Dottie was different.    She dreamed in rainbow hues.   When she was dashing through the garden, the red, pink and purple flowers would blur together until her head started to spin.   The colors made her so happy that she would burst out with a loud yelp and roll on the ground twisting and tossing and turning.

Her littermates didn't quite understand what Dottie was talking about when she described a ball she was searching for on the edge of the property one day after a game of fetch as a bright purply red color.   When she finally located it and proudly brought it home, her brothers and sisters thought it was rather gray.  

At the age of eight weeks, Dottie was adopted by an older couple on Long Island, New York.   Bart and Margarite Thompson owned a Labrador Retriever named Dutch, and Dottie was to be his companion.  Shortly after she settled into her new home, she was sent to puppy camp for behavioral training.   At the end of the first week of instruction, when she told Dutch about her day with the orange cones she had to run through, and how she sped up and down the yellow ramp on the obstacle course and the green frisbee she tried catch but missed,  Dutch just stared at her in disbelief.   Though Dutch loved her enthusiasm, he just rolled his eyes when she related her experiences in Technicolor.

To celebrate her first birthday, the Thompsons shepherded Dottie and Dutch into the car and headed toward New York City for the weekend.    They stayed at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in dog-friendly accommodations.  She couldn't believe the sounds as she lead the way down Fifth Avenue.   The restaurant they ate at on Madison Avenue made her drool for more, and when she saw those tulips down the middle of Park Avenue, it made her bark with delight.  But the best part of the weekend was when they visited Central Park.    She threw herself down in exhaustion after exercising on the great lawn.   She never saw so many different breeds of dogs in a city:   Big ones, little ones, mutts, show dogs.   There was no end to the variety.   She even had the chance to sniff at Jeff Koons' puppy sculpture outside the Guggenheim.

Today, now that she's a little older, she lives a quieter life, but she still enjoys vibrant colors.   Much to Bart's amusement and Margarite's distress, Dottie took up painting of sorts.   When the opportunity arises, she sneaks into his workshop, puts a paint brush in her mouth, tips over a can of paint, dips the brush in, and starts dripping paint on the floor.   Dottie has become quite the artist.  Dutch is of the opinion her splattered paint is beginning to look a lot like a Jackson Pollack masterpiece.