Secret Identity

It's harder keeping a secret identity these days.

If there aren't video cameras following your moves or the paparazzi on your tail, you can be outed on the Intenet.

Gone are the days when you can Clark Kent it by putting on a pair of glasses. (By the way, have you even considered the irony of glasses making people see less clearly? You haven't? Well, neither had I until I started typing this....)

Which bring us to the subject of dogs in hotels.

Never let them near the honor bar.

If you think that's an odd change of subject, bear with me (or don't if you're really bored). This will make sense momentarily.

My favorite lawsuit of the past week was the one filed on behalf of California K-9 Academy against Hollywood producer Jon Peters.

It seems his dogs ran up a $21,000-plus hotel bill and he hasn't paid it. Actually, the bill was more than that but Peters paid part of it.

How does a pair of dogs run up that kind of bill?

It's not entirely clear, but my guess is that the charges for those little bags of peanuts really mount up after a while.

By the way, if you don't think the beasts were being treated like people, you should know that the dogs are referred to as having "Peters" as their last names - Bear Peters, Beau Peters and Tomas Peters.

And, sadly, they're the product of a broken home. First they were left with the human Peters' ex-wife and then she - probably because she wasn't the birth mother - turned them over to the Academy. Tomas, apparently the favorite son, got taken back quickly while the other two ran up the bill.

Beau, a Doberman, ended up staying at the Academy for 385 days "because defendant Peters and his agents consistently expressed interest in retrieving and/or visiting the dog."

It would have been easier if the dog lived somewhere closer.

Finally, according to the lawsuit, "defendant Peters, through his counsel, provided written authorization to The Academy's attorney of record allowing for the sale of Beau Peters."

Let me emphasize the interesting phrase in that sentence: through his counsel!

Yes, the man went to his lawyer for help in dealing with his Doberman.

Imagine yourself as a big-time attorney with famous Hollywood types as your clients and one of those clients comes to you for advice on what to do with a dog.

Has law school prepared you for this moment?

How exactly do you keep a straight face?

You have to admire whomever this lawyer was. Sell the damn dog was probably the right answer.

You may have read or heard some of the above elsewhere, but I'm betting no one else has reported the thing that most caught my eye about this lawsuit: the lawyers who filed it.

I'm not going to tell you who they are because I don't want to ruin their secret identities. This should, however, be a lesson for them and those of you out there who also have secret identities.

You need to be a little more careful.

The pair of women lawyers representing the Academy put their email addresses on the lawsuit. The domain name was littlemissesquire.com. Check out the site. Someone's having a good time doing a sort of If-Perez-Hilton-Was-a-Woman-Lawyer thing and there are no author names on it.

So, clearly, Little Miss Esquire is a secret identity.

Unless, of course, you go to littlemissesquirelaw.com where you'll find their names and phone numbers.

They may have outed themselves.

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