I KISS A DOG

Have you ever seen a kissing booth?

Me neither, except in mythology. You know, cartoons, drawings, photos and the like. At charity carnivals, people would line up to pay a dollar and get a kiss from a real live girl. Maybe these booths really existed at one time. It seems so unsanitary now.

But at Woodland Hills Mall the other day I saw a real live kissing booth.

It was for charity, one of the events at the mall for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

For only a dollar, people lined up to kiss… a dog.

Sparkle is a professional kissing dog. She belongs to Tulsa Boxer Rescue and travels for charity events with her own handler – Laura Morris – and her own Smooch-A-Pooch kissing booth.

Sparkle is well suited for the job. She’ll lick the face of anyone within reach, ready or not. Sparkle has taken her act to Petsmart, the zoo and the bowling alley. And business is good. Sparkle makes about $200 per event, $1000 a year. But she files no tax return because it’s all for charity.

Sparkle is a survivor. She was rescued from the Tulsa animal shelter, emaciated and infected with a tick borne disease. And she’s a breast cancer survivor; Sparkle has had a mastectomy.

What’s it like to kiss Sparkle? Shana Lamons was a customer. She’s also a breast cancer survivor. Sparkle kissed her from chin to eyeballs. She described the kiss as joyful and fabulous. Lamons says, “Dog kisses are good for the soul. Truly they are.”

There was nothing left but for me to experience it myself. So I put a dollar in the jar and puckered up. Sparkle attacked my face. Right on the lips. Lots of tongue. Very wet. It lasted a long time. One of us finally broke it off. I was completely satisfied.

Sparkle's take today went to a charity called Breast Impressions. They provide breast casting kits to women diagnosed with breast cancer. This allows the ladies to make plaster casts of their breasts as a memory of what they looked like pre-surgery.

This may sound bizarre. But the casts are variously decorated with sequins and fabric, paint and fake fur, and become a work of art suitable for hanging. In fact, Breast Impressions sells off some of the busts for pretty good prices and donates the money to local breast health programs.

And I’ve learned something about cancer. That is, how many cancer survivors there are. And I include myself. A cancer diagnosis was at one time a death sentence, but not any more. I think you’d be surprised to learn how many of us former cancer patients there are among you, leading normal healthy lives. Or as I sometimes tell people, “I’m fine now, but that was the worst case of cancer I ever had.”