GO, DOG, GO!(The Talk of the Town)(dog shows)

A couple of years ago, on a snowy December weekend in Chicago, Liz Hansen slipped and broke an ankle while crossing the street. She was on her way to a dog show, where she'd planned to enter her standard schnauzer, Seasar. She told the orthopedist, "This foot has to be functional by the second Monday in February, because I will show my dog at Westminster." It was, she did, and Seasar won the Westminster Kennel Club's best-of-breed distinction.

Last Monday, the second this February, Hansen slipped on her way up the snowy steps to Madison Square Garden and broke a wrist. She pleaded with the emergency staff at St. Vincent's to hurry up: she was due to show Seasar at Westminster, again, in a matter of hours. They gave her a temporary cast and some painkillers, and she hustled back to the Garden in time to make some final trims to Seasar's fur with her good hand before leading him into the ring. Once more, he was judged the top schnauzer.

"The judge did ask me to show the dog's bite, and you need two hands to do that," Hansen conceded afterward. "I said, 'I can't.' So she had to do it herself."

The "Blizzard of 2006," as the latest northeaster had come to be known by the start of the week, may have dumped more snow--twenty-seven inches, or enough to bury Seasar, standing--than any previous storm in these parts, but the coinciding occasion of Westminster's annual exhibition afforded an opportunity to assess the blizzard in a broader historical context, according to the standards of an unusually intrepid lot: dog people. And, by dog-people standards, this last storm was fairly ordinary.

"We're a bunch of crazies," Amanda Quinlan, who is from Georgia, said, standing backstage beside her sleeping wirehaired dachshund, Joey. "It has to be Category 3 or higher for dog shows to stop."

Quinlan flew in on Saturday, just before the storm. The following morning, with the snow falling fast, she made the mistake of ...