This is a blog about playwriting. But you know what? I have a really cute dog. So I've decided to introduce Laya to the world.
Brief background: Laya is a failed foster, so to speak. We fostered her in summer 2022 while she was undergoing tests for Cushing's Disease, a canine malady the symptoms of which include massive weight gain. And Laya was a fat, fat dog. Avocado-shaped. Turned out she didn't have Cushing's, though - I guess her previous owner just overfed her and didn't get her any exercise.
Anyway, she was adopted away from us by a family with two cats. A week later they let us know they planned to return Laya to the pound because she and the cats didn't get along - Laya was endlessly fascinated by the cats and hounded them to abandon, which wasn't good for anybody. Through a series of events not really worth describing, we ended up outright adopting Laya from the family. We thought it might be temporary, but she squirmed her way into our hearts pretty quickly, so now she's ours.
She's generally a great dog, and just a few months of a normal diet and moderate exercise got her weight down from an unfathomable 80 pounds to a svelte 50. She has tons more energy and is lots of fun to have around, the only drawback being she has some major separation anxiety that results in some low-level destructive tendencies when we leave her home alone. Mostly not a big deal.
What does this have to do with playwriting? Very little! Though I'm sure I have some good ten-minutes about dogs in me (in fact I just wrote one) so maybe I should be looking closer to home for inspiration.