SUSAN KAMEN MARSICANO, APU BASENJIS
Liner, Gilda, and Fiddle, all many multiple titled doggies—DC Apu i Liner SC RN BID CAA TKP FCh SGRC3 SORC JOR VBE, FC Apu Painter Song RI BID CAA TKP GRC ORC VBS2 & CH Apu Sweet Baby James RN CA AX AXJ TKP RS-N JS-N GS-N MXF ORC FCh GRC MVB.
Almost two years later, I bred Blush to Kathy Helping’s love- ly Ch. Trotwood’s Headliner, and chose to name my Basenjis after Apu. At that moment Apu’s Basenjis was born, too. Apu was named after the first truly great art films I ever saw. It was the first film of the great Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu, directed by Satyajit Ray, the Bengali master. Apu was the young boy in Pather Panchali and the main character in the trilogy. There is a dog drawn on the wall in Apu’s village and later the dog is there, too. Merchant Ivory has restored the trilogy of films. I recommend them as amongst the best films of all time. My first dog show was a match in Providence, Rhode Island, around 1963. My brilliant sibling, Robert Kamen, had a great Dalmatian puppy bitch, Pill Peddler’s Pandora, that later went on to win a National Specialty. He took me along, in a bliz- zard, to a freezing armory in Providence. He said we wouldn’t be long. Of course, Pandy won Best in Match, so we were there a very long time, and it was very cold. I saw some of my first Basenjis there. Who were your mentors in the sport? Please elaborate on their influence. Bobby Abelson, Ruth and David Hill, Sunny Shay, and Veronica Tudor Williams. I got my first Basenji from Bobby Abelson (Bomabwa Basenjis). I was very lucky to have found her. She spent hours that first afternoon alerting me to the health problems in the breed, and telling me where they were. She had the great Am./ Can. Ch. and Am./Can. CD Rose-Bay’s Gay Blade. “Rip” was winning the breed at shows and getting legs on his CD the same day. Bobby cared greatly about biddable Basenjis. I have carried that forward. Ruth Hill and her son, David, were Rose-Bay Basenjis. I remember Ruth, well past the age you’d think she’d want to climb four flights of stairs, coming up to see my first litter in 1975. David was a wonderful mentor.
The day after I left home, I walked to the 92nd St. ASPCA in a bliz- zard (the subways weren’t running). That day I got my first dog that I could keep. She was a wee, prick-eared, cinnamon-colored, short-coated mix, with one ear a little floppy, about three to four months old, that developed distemper shortly thereafter. I named her Apu. She got better. She went with me all over the world. We had little money, no car, but nice stuff, like Brie and caviar; some luxuries and none of the necessities. I won a Fulbright fellowship to paint in Firenze (Florence) for two years. Before Italy, Apu went to Cooper Union and the San Francisco Art Institute. She posed with all my nude models, striking the same poses. Apu was one-quarter Basenji. I found this out in 1961, when Bob Mankey (Cambria Basenjis) chased me up Nob Hill in San Francisco, asking if she was a Basenji. He gave me his pamphlet on “The Basenji, the dog who didn’t bark and cried real tears.” Later, back in New York, I lived on Pearl Street, in the financial dis- trict, and passers-by kept calling Apu, “Orange.” I finally ran into Els- worth Kelly (a famous New York sculptor/painter) walking his “Orange.” He told me that Orange was one-half Basenji, born of a Basenji bitch in Paris (belonging to Delphine Seyrig, who starred in Last Year in Marien- bad ), and he told me that Orange was, indeed, Apu’s dam. Apu and I had more than 13 years together. I buried Apu in the myrtle-covered garden at Gansevoort Market and Little West 12th Street. A young girl, named Kyrie, poured a bottle of wine on her grave. Apu had liked to have a drink. The time was 1972 and the times, “They Were a Changing.” Four months later, I went up to Harrison, New York, on Conrail, car- rying a portfolio of drawings of Apu to show off. That day I got my first Basenji, Bomabwa Blushing Bride. Her breeder, Bobby Abelson, sent “Blush” home with me on the train in a Girl Scout Cookie Box, after giving me a short, concise briefing on the breed’s health and tempera- ment issues. She told me to test Blush for HA [pyruvate kinase deficient hemolytic anemia, a fatal genetic disease that was plaguing Basenjis at the time—AR] when she was six months old. I remember that she typed out a five-generation pedigree for me, without notes.
94 | SHOWSIGHT MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2020
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