Monday, February 27, 2006



Many years ago my family doctor was Elliot Mintz. I took my daughter Ale, who had hundreds of warts on her knees, to see him. Ale was 8 years old. Mintz lay her down, and without telling me exactly what he was doing he put her in a trance. Then he told her to rub every wart (three times) with a magic penny (which he gave her) and to go home and bury the penny in a place where nobody would find it. Within the week the warts were gone. A few years later in January 1985 I was assigned by the then editor of Vancouver Magazine, Malcolm Parry to go to the PNE to shoot a dog show. It was there that I spotted Taibo,the blue chow puppy. He was the star of the show and the owner was, yes, Elliot Mintz. Mac decided to put the dog on the cover. If you ever see him and ask him about putting animals on the cover of a city magazine he will frown. Readership and sales always go down with cover pets of the animal kind. The good doctor sold his puppy for lots of money ($10,000 was the sum mentioned in the magazine article). It seems that many people now know what was only suspected then and that is that blue chow puppies lose their colour when they grow. And the art director, Chris Dahl damned me for not having correctly photographed the dog as one of his eyes got no catchlight. Since this was before Photoshop he had a competent retoucher air brush the second eye.