Alice Doesn't Bark Here Anymore
Texas, 7 February 2008
Memo to Grace Saenz-Lopez: YOU ARE STUPID SORBET.
Sometimes, you just need a palate cleanser. Three days of Dane Cook, with Super Tuesday smack in the middle, can leave a heavy, oily taste in your mouth, thick with punditry and a distinct lack of funny. You need something crisp, clean, and utterly ridiculous to cut through that and get you ready to take on the world again.
So, while the former mayor of Alice, Texas may not be dumb in the globally-polluting manner of Dane Cook or John McCain, she is dumb in a special and uniquely self-destructive manner. She was forced out of her office for dog-rustling.
Oh, not Michael Vick style dog-rustling, or even shady-ethnic-cuisine-comedy dog rustling. No, this is the kind of case that, in a simpler time, would have been handled by Judge Wapner. Last year, the Gutierrez family needed a dog-sitter for their Shih Tzu*, Puddles. So they turned to their neighbor, who, in classic small-town fashion, also happened to be Alice Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez.
But when they returned from vacation, they got some horrible news. Puddles had dried up. Their beloved barker had, like all dogs, gone to heaven. The pooch, as they say, was screwed. Dead. Metaphorically. Not screwed until dead. That would be a different part of Texas, I think. So they went away and mourned the loss of poor Puddles.
Until, in a twist we never saw coming because Lifetime and Animal Planet are two entirely different channels, a friend of the family thought they saw Puddles in a local grooming shop. They called M. Night Shyamalan, but the director assured the family he was not fucking with them, and once again put a Post-It note on his fridge to remind him to get an unlisted phone number. Then they checked with the grooming shop, only to learn that the dog was owned by the mayor, and was named... Panchito.
She took care of the dog, decided she liked it, then kept the dog in secret for MONTHS and told them it was dead. In a small town. In Texas. God, it feels so good to say that. There's no crazy like hick crazy. Secret dog. STEALTH SHIH TZU. I can't think of anything that would make it more awesome. Well, maybe if the mayor had, like a twin sister or something. With a similar name. Then there'd be this weird, freaky parallel where one dog was passed off as an identical but different dog by a mayor with a twin.
I think you know what's coming next. Gracie Garcia! The mayor's actual twin sister! She looks just like the mayor, but she's not. And in January, when the mayor reported that the stolen dog had been re-abducted, guess where they found the dog? In the TWIN SISTER'S BACKYARD ten miles out of town. It was, as Clouseau would say, a ruse. A ridiculous, crazy ruse.
Does Lopez have an excuse for all this? She does. She claims she was rescuing the dog, who was abused and near death. So clearly she had to lie and nurse the dog back to health in secret. If only she had some kind of authority or power in the town to deal with a criminally abused Shih Tzu, but she was just a humble mayor. What else could she have done?
That was enough to get her arrested, and last Friday she resigned, but for some reason she gets to keep the dog until the trial in April. Disappointingly, there are no really crazy quotes from her, although she did say in her resignation letter that "It was never my intention to bring any negative exposure to our city.", which is obvious, because it was never her intention to get caught with the stolen dog. That's what all the "telling them it died" and "renaming it Panchito" was about.
Wasn't that refreshing? If it weren't for the four kids who, you know, thought their dog had died, I'd almost be grateful to Saenz-Lopez, for reminding us that in this fast-paced, hectic world, the kind of small-town stupid you can only find in America's heartland is still thriving.
*Watch, as I pointedly avoid making the joke for the entire rest of the column!