The Angry Poodle’s Birth Story

The Angry Poodle’s Birth Story

How Our Column Emerged from a Merger
and Nails the Plot Every Wednesday Morning

By Nick Welsh | August 27, 2026

To the best of my recollection, I was never bitten by a radioactive poodle. So, sadly, I don’t know my own origin story. Since I get asked about it a fair amount, this can be kind of awkward. Not as awkward, however, as having to explain to your children that their father is actually a female dog. But still, awkward enough.

Here’s what I do remember. One day about 40 years ago, the Santa Barbara Independent’s editor-in-chief and co-owner, Marianne Partridge, called me into her office and suggested I might want to sit down. After I sat down, she then suggested I might want to stand up and shut the doors, of which I remember there being six or eight. It was a weird room.

We were working together at that time for a paper called the News & Review. What she wanted to tell me was that we were about to merge with our bitter arch-rivals, a paper called The Santa Barbara Weekly.

I was not a fan of the Weekly. Even less was I a fan of what I thought was its unduly self-satisfied column of alleged media criticism called “Trixie, the Angry Poodle Barbecue.” To be honest, I never could even get the name straight. It took me many years for me to realize it was not all about cooking dogs.

The merger was traumatic but necessary. It gave rise to the Independent. But in the moment of that announcement, I was decidedly not happy. My very first words in response to this revelation were: “Fine then, but kill the damn dog.” I was referring to the Angry Poodle column. I despised pretty much everything about it.

The people behind it were nice people, but they used the word “irreverent” to describe the column. Anyone who uses that word to describe themselves lacks the necessary capacity for shame and embarrassment that sentient beings require to stay alive.

In spite of my emphatically articulated feelings, the column survived. It was deemed a necessary diplomatic concession to help the otherwise feuding factions come together in the formation of a more perfect union.

I didn’t like it. But I got it.

Initially, I had as little do with the column as humanly possible. The writer was a genuine original who showed up at press conferences under the courthouse archway armed with a boombox, which he’d hoist up on his shoulder and point at whichever candidate happened to be running for whichever office.

Unbeknownst to us, he was also pioneering a brand-new journalistic style that can only be described as magical surrealism. He wrote vividly about events that hadn’t actually happened but which he thought would have been really cool and funny if only they had. He never got around to letting readers in on the joke. Somehow, he never let his editors in on it either.

The last I heard, he had moved to Japan and was making good money teaching English. How the column came to fall into my lap remains lost to the miasma of memory.

I had done a column before. Catholic school teachers beat writing into me. A high school English teacher accused me of “verbal vainglory.” I couldn’t tell if it was an insult or compliment. So, clearly, I had qualifications.

Initially, it was more or less a collective effort. A typical column would consist of four or five quasi-opinionated news chunks — mostly about local politics — that were colorful or fun or incriminating or illuminating or embarrassing for which no excuse could be conjured to squeeze them into an actual news story. In a word, they were outtakes.

These early columns were not signed. There was no byline. This reflected the editorial reality that the items of any given column had been suggested by any one of many writers and reporters. It was my job to gather these nuggets and then figure out some illusion of flow.

For many moons, this lack of a byline became something of a thing. “Who is Trixie?” people would ask. As pseudo-mysteries went, it was a fun ruse.

While some prominent news editors in town were genuinely in the dark as to who wrote it, the real media cognoscenti in Santa Barbara always knew. When I’d go down to the Moreton Bay fig tree by the freeway where homeless people famously used to hang out, they’d all start barking at me in unison: “Hey, it’s Nixie!” It was a gas. The most astute readers of Santa Barbara’s many newspapers over the years have always been people on the streets.

Along the way, I got impressed by the literary pretensions of certain sports columnists; I was amazed how they could spin angel hair out of next-to-nothing. Their columns had a beginning and an end. In between, they had to weave a rug. Hey, maybe I can do that, I thought. So, it began.

Also, along the way, I started signing my name. It was about a year after the Painted Cave Fire of 1990. The demand for building permits from people whose homes burned overwhelmed the processing capacity of the county’s Planning & Development Department. Some owners wanted to rebuild bigger and better. It was a lose-lose-lose situation. Push came to shove and things got nasty.

Some unnamed group started taking out full-page ads that looked and read like investigative newspaper articles that exposed county planners as perfidious mountebanks. The only problem was that these exposés had no byline.

How could I write a column slamming them for not signing their name if I didn’t? That was the first signed column.

Welsh poet, drunk, and womanizer Dylan Thomas said, “Love is the last light spoken.” At the Independent, the Poodle tends to be the last word written.

I’m at the keyboard by 6 a.m. every Wednesday. It’s usually written by 8 a.m. or a little later. If I’m lucky, lightning strikes in between. Ideas will present themselves that I could never consciously conjure. Your hidden brain wakes up. I have no idea how it works. I just marvel when it does. Every Wednesday, I feel like I won the lottery.

Do you know how lucky I am?

As Blanche DuBois is escorted to the funny farm in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, she confides to her attendant, “I have always relied upon the kindness of strangers.” Anyone lucky enough to write a column has to feel exactly the same.

But more than that, I have always relied upon the kindness of editors. They’re the ones who save me from myself, whether I think I need saving or not. On occasion, they’re actually right. Over the years there have been many.

But for the last umpteen-plus years, it’s been Marianne Partridge. That’s the same Marianne Partridge who 40 years ago suggested I might want to sit down.

You know how lucky we are?