Makeup, hair, runway — doggy treat

It was the first day of the Westminster Kennel Club 136th Annual Dog Show at Madison Square Garden and Riverdalian Ann Gorman, 58, was right in the thick of it. She was preparing to show her 2-year-old shiba inu Kintaro, also known as Grand Champion Bali Hai’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers.

She arrived at the Garden at 6:30 a.m. for her 9:15 showing.

The large, concrete preparation room was filled with dogs of nearly every shape, size, color and breed. But the sound of barking was conspicuously absent.

Instead, a din of voices and hair driers prevailed. Bits of fur filled the air, creating a fluffy fog and making it difficult to breath. People vigorously ran metal combs through their pooch’s glossy fur and a few (particularly those with poodles) snipped away to complete a final trim.

Ms. Gorman, a recently retired assistant vice president of Apple Bank, She competes about 35 to 40 weeks a year and has won awards too numerous to count. In addition to Kintaro (a grand champion), she owns or co-owns numerous other dogs, including an older shiba inu named Innisfree’s Medoro, or Dory, and a Siberian husky called Innisfree’s Irish Eyes. 

She recognizes that her hobby is one filled with oddities, overindulgence and characters.

The owners of many of the dogs at Westminster, Ms. Gorman said, spend about six figures on their pooches annually. Handlers, or the people who walk the dogs around the ring in front of judges, make $150 or more an hour and get huge bonuses for winning the elusive Best in Show top prize. Prestigious families like the Firestones (as in the tires) may employ handlers year-round. Ms. Gorman said the Firestones once gave their handler a Rolls Royce as a reward for their dog’s success.

“I’m not as crazy as the ones on ‘Best in Show,’” Ms. Gorman said, referring to 2,000 film about the strange world of dog showing. “Then again, I was working so I didn’t really have the opportunity. But now that I have the opportunity, I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”