Look how sad. Look how sad!
There are dog people, and then there are dog people whose dogs are clones. Barbra Streisand falls into the latter category, of course. The legendary diva recently posted an Instagram of her mythical beasts (lab-created Coton de Tulears) posed on the tombstone of that which spawned spawned them. As Streisand explained last year in a brief essay for the New York Times, she was so broken up after the 2017 death of her beloved Samantha (Sammie) that she sent some of her cells to a lab in Texas to make more Sammies. Well, the lab made so many Sammies, you would have sworn it was a Subway. Streisand kept two of the four spawn of Sammie (the runt died) and there they are, Scarlet and Violet, looking melancholy on their mom’s grave.
You may say in response to the headline of this post, “How could they possibly miss a mom they never met?” I choose to believe that clones know. They just know. And they long. Forever.
Interestingly, the one in the middle whose seeming pronounced frown suggests that she is the most broken up about this, is not one of Sammie’s asexual offspring! She is Fanny, whom Streisand took off the hands of her breeder while she awaited her test-tube puppies. But look how sad! Look how sad! I wonder if Fanny’s sad all the time for not being a special one, a clone. Is it the mustache that’s pulling Fanny’s face down, or is it something more existential? That Streisand refers to Fanny as Scarlet and Violet’s “cousin” and not sister may be telling in itself.
It just goes to show that everyone is sad, even pampered, genetically engineered dogs and their “cousins.” And then they die. But the lucky ones come back.