Dale posting here:

Recipe for a delightful evening. I will do this a la Joy of Cooking, with the basic necessary steps first (i.e, "Making Custard") and then suggest a variation which I have found successful (i.e "Caramelized, alcohol-soaked, flaming Disney character-shapd custard")

So here are the basics for "Enjoyable evening", to be followed to the letter.

1) Acquire one (1) cute dog (Recipe may be doubled, but beginners should probably stick with one).
2) Confirm that dog likes children. (For instructions on how to check the child-tolerance-quality of your dog, see heading "Annoying nieces and nephews")
3) With dog acquired in Step 1, proceed to a space frequented by children (several).
4) Let sit.

Let me emphasize how important step 1 is in this process. Should you forget to follow step one, you will not only not produce an "enjoyable evening" but you will seem like a scary old lady/pedophile and people will snatch their children away from you. Should you forget step #2, you will not only not produce an "enjoyable evening," but you may produce "long and expensive legal battle." Should you forget step 3, you may still have an enjoyable evening, but your friends will be less interested in hearing about it the next day.

Now a variation I have been experimenting with recently.

"Enjoyable evening at Local Ballfield"

1. Take cute dog to local ballfield while game is in progress. An adult game with a few alarmingly unsupervised children wandering around is preferable to a youth game, which can have an overwhelming number of children and also some of their poisonous cousins: teenagers.

2. With dog, attract two 8-year old friends, one of Dominican and one of Puerto Rican heritage.

3. Discuss dog and baseball. Discover (per child #2) that the Mets were established in 1780 and that they have always been much better than the Yankees. Admit child #1 response that the Mets and Yankees do not play each other much because they are friends.

4. Attract 9-year old Haitian-American child who is mildly afraid of dogs. Begin to assure friendliness of current dog, only to have the children introduced in step 2 do this for you, claiming intimate knowledge of dog's preferences and habits and giving lessons in the proper handling of dog.

5. Watch dog almost die of happiness as three children concentrate full attention on giving him/her full body massage.

6. Listen as Haitian-American child explain to Dominican-American child the political history of Hispaniola ("they are really close, like you could even walk there") and the reason his family came to America and the modern immigrant story in a nutshell ("I was three, and my whole family lived there, but then there was riots and it wasn't safe, so my mother brought us here but first my uncle already came here so we lived with my uncle in the Bronx and now we live here") and relative housing prices ("but in Haiti you know everything is cheaper there so we got a big old house and my whole family lived there and we had a dog but here the apartments is too small so you can't have a dog") and then have all three boys break down the entire major league baseball roster into the best players, the main criteria for which seems to be: 1) are they on the Mets? 2) are they Dominican or Puerto Rican?

7. Discuss relative merits of kids' scooters, as compared to the scooters their uncle who has a store could get them.

8. Conclude that a dog probably cannot ride a scooter.

9. Enjoy.