Celebrity encounter in the city

SYDNEY, March 18, 2023 — I met a star today.

My daily commute to the office takes me through Wynyard Station, a very clean, modern marvel of mass transit where trains and buses and light rail meet. It’s as if they were thinking about me when they built it; it refutes all of my suburban American arguments against mass transit. I can get off a bus in pouring rain and walk nearly a quarter-mile to the office with a roof of some sort over my head all the way. This is a great thing, a testament to considerate architecture.

In the Wynyard Station tunnel leading to Barangaroo, where my office is located, there are screens that show ads. The ads are for Westpac Bank, one of the big banks in Australia.

One ad in particular always gets my attention: A big, slobbery bulldog running in big, slobbery slo-mo toward a rugby ball.

I am normally not a dog person. However, I have a very, very soft spot for big slobbery bulldogs.

“Rocky loves NRL,” the text over the ad reads. “So do we.” Then, the slogan, “Westpac-backed.”

On this Saturday evening, I was walking back from dinner to my hotel, and the walk took me through Wynyard Station. The station was mostly empty, a stark contrast to the usual weekday chaos. As I walked through the tunnel, I saw the light from the ad screens. I noticed two women and a dog intently watching the ad.

Then I realized.

“Lookit that,” the woman holding the dog’s leash was saying to the dog, pointing at the screen. “That’s you!”

No way. I stopped walking and did something I rarely do: I engaged a stranger in conversation.

“Is this … THAT dog?” I asked the woman holding the dog’s leash.

Sure enough, it was.

“It’s the first time he’s seen it,” she said. “We had to bring him here so he could see himself.”

So of course, I had to have a picture, and she took a picture of me taking a picture of them. Rocky let me pet him for a bit, and he was just as big and slobbery in real life as he is on the Wynyard Station ad screen.

While I was petting him, he turned his back to me and leaned on my legs, perfectly fitting himself in front of me to fully enjoy the perks of his stardom.

Rocky, as it turns out, is a Very Good Dog. Hopefully he doesn’t let his fame go to his head.