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T A B L E__T A L K

Is Hillary kicking butt on the defend-your-husband TV circuit, or what? Stand by your first lady in Politics

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R E C E N T L Y

Gossip: Too important to leave to amateurs like Ted Koppel?
By Deborah Mitchell
Has the press bottomed out? Editors, gossips face off in NY
(01/29/98)

Have you Yanks gone crazy?
By Jurek Martin
A British journalist decries the media-whipped frenzy over President Clinton's private life
(01/28/98)

The $17.6 billion touchdown
By Steven Stark
Why we'll be paying for macho TV execs' exorbitant football deal
(01/27/98)

Bring me the head (and more important, the body) of Monica Lewinsky!
By James Poniewozik
Spending 120 hours in blabberspace as the networks roll out the greatest show on earth
(01/26/98)

Mommy Leerest
By Gary Kamiya
Monica Lewinsky's mother's gushy book on the Three Tenors' sex lives
(01/23/98)

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______BY CATHERINE SEIPP | I live in Los Angeles, land of riots, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, carjackings, O.J. and deal memos. A town called "this town," where you'll never eat lunch again. A vast, glittering metropolis of broken dreams, where they'll eat you up and spit you out. But my hometown is more than that. These days it's also a land of endless, heated arguments about whether dogs should be allowed to run off-leash to romp and sniff each other's genitals in fenced-off expanses of municipally sanctioned lawn.

Welcome to Los Angeles, City of Dog Parks, where they'll eat you up and spit you out and eat you up again. (Or, as my favorite line from the Bible, Proverbs 26:11, puts it: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.") Nothing divides neighbor against neighbor, celebrity against celebrity, like the dog park issue.

On the extreme pro side are people who avoid eye contact with humans but greet each dog by chummy nickname: "Here come the Slimers!" one man shouts jovially at my local dog park in Silverlake, whenever he spies a familiar pair of drooling Great Danes.

On the extreme con side are those so offended by this sort of thing that they lose sight of the laws of physics in their predictions of canine-induced catastrophe. Several Silverlake residents insist that dog urine will somehow run uphill for dozens of yards, continue its gravity-defying trickle over a massive berm of earth and contaminate the reservoir.

Celebrity dog trainer Matthew Margolis sides with the cons. Margolis not only trains celebrities' dogs (Madonna's pit bull, Whoopi Goldberg's Rhodesian ridgebacks, Goldie Hawn's Jack Russell terrier, to name just a few) but is something of a celebrity himself, with more than a dozen books and videos about dog training to his name, a regular spot on "Good Morning America" as resident pet expert and an upcoming PBS series in April called "Woof: It's a Dog's Life."

"I don't love 'em," Margolis says of dog parks. "There's a lot of dog fights, a lot of diseases. Even if your dog is vaccinated, how do you know all the other dogs are? It's more for the people than the dogs."

I actually had a few questions about this, since the only reason I take my own dog to the dog park is that it sends her (not me, you can be sure) into paroxysms of joy. However, I've known celebrity dog trainer Matthew Margolis long enough to realize that in the Boolean, yes-or-no logic of dog-training there is no room for discussion. You're allowed on the furniture or you're not; you agree with him or you don't. And any hint that maybe you don't 100 percent at all times just means a big yank on the choke chain until you see things his way.

Margolis is such a trainer-to-the-core (more than a quarter-century in the business), that establishing dominance -- the basis of all dog work -- is second nature to him in any interaction, human or canine. A few years ago, I interviewed him about his new business of importing trained protection dogs from Germany, called schutzhunds, for rich clients fearful of life in Los Angeles and willing to pay up to $10,000 a pop for a canine security guard.

But, I couldn't help wondering, what if a carjacker just comes up to your car and shoots the dog?

"No, no, no, no, no!" Margolis said, in the firm voice used with a puppy about to pee on the rug. "There's not a guy in the world who's going to go up to a car with a dog in it. We're not talking about the Brinks job here; we're talking about slimeballs."

But wouldn't it be boring for the dog to be cooped up in the car all day while its owner goes in errands?

"You're worried about the dog, and I'm worried about your life!"

But --

"Sweetheart, sweetheart! Six of my clients have been raped!"

Anyway, speaking of random urban violence, not even the occasional gang shooting at Silverlake Park gets locals worked up the way the leash-free zone there does. It's like this all over town. My friend Prudence, a director's wife, recently had a run-in at the incipient dog park forming near her home in Beachwood Canyon. A pair of dog owners for some reason denounced her as a "dried-up, frustrated old maid" when she asked if they could please remove their dog from the picnic table -- an odd insult, considering she had her two small children in tow, thus the request to remove the dog from the eating area.

"It's not that I don't like dogs," Prudence explained to me later. "I just don't approve of anything with less than two layers of fabric covering its anus."

N E X T+P A G E+| Dog park to the stars