Milkshake the Dog / Milkshake der Hund

Crowd shots of the fourth wedding and reception of the 1994 British romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell feature a number of familiar TASIS faces. It was the year before we arrived at TASIS that filming was being done and a group of TASIS teachers went off to see if they could be extras. It’s the only time I’ve seen those faces in a church until today.

Sitting in a gorgeously old British church that could have been used in the movie, faces from the movie speckling the crowd, listening to songs and reflective words about Mrs. Fleming, and hearing one more eloquent Lyle Rigg speech, I found myself reflecting on how I came to be there. I don’t mean simply arriving on a Ryan Air flight from Salzburg in 2009, but that thing or moment in time where the chain of events that brought me to today was set in motion. I suppose there could be many things…this happened because of that and that happened because of this…but in going backwards through my adult life from Salzburg to Pennington to Venezuela to TASIS and back before that, I like to think that everything is because of one thing: Milkshake the Dog.

It was in 1991, Christmas time I think. My family was providing dog walking services to an around-the-corner neighbor. Milkshake the Dog was a medium-sized white lab. That’s about all I remember about Milkshake. I don’t know if it was a he or a she or if it was feisty or calm or walked fast or slow. All I remember is that we had to walk this dog from time to time. My dad sometimes liked to come along, not because of Milkshake, but because the neighbors had a lot of magazine subscriptions. He particularly like to borrow The New Yorker, read it, and return it before the neighbors returned from their travels.

In the issue that was borrowed that Christmas, somewhere towards the back, was an advertisement for a school in England highlighting its summer school. There was a gorgeous photo which caught my dad’s eye, and he pointed it out to me. Always looking for a summer adventure, I wrote a random letter (this was before the days of email) to the school asking if they needed people to work in the summer. The rest, you can say, is history. The school (which turned out to be TASIS) hired me for the summer; I had a chance meeting with the headmaster at the end of the summer when he had returned from vacation about international schools (a meeting that became very important a number of years later when we were looking for jobs); a chance introduction to the middle school head led to information about the international school in Salzburg; I met Peter when working in Salzburg; and on and on it goes, a chain of events linking one thing to another, all because of Milkshake the Dog.

So thank you, Milkshake, for making such an impact in my life. Where would I be today without you?