Brooks: Pink takes a Minnesota foster puppy on tour, searching for a forever home

Pop star Pink picked a little something up before her tour left town. A foster puppy.

“We rescued a puppy from this awesome organization called the Bond Between,” she confided to a sold-out crowd in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul on Thursday night. “His name is Graham Cracker. He’s currently peeing all over my dressing room.”

Sitting at her pink piano, the singer laid out her plan. The star and her family plan to take Graham Cracker — a marvelously floppy golden mutt of some sort — along for a “big carnival adventure” for the rest of the tour, then offer him up for adoption to a forever home at the final stop in South Carolina.

Fans can follow Graham Cracker’s adventures on his new Instagram account, @grahamcrackerscarnival, which was up to 12,000 followers at last count.

“Isn’t that a good idea?” the singer joked. “We’re probably going to keep him. But this is the idea.”

The crowd cheered. No one was cheering louder than the Minnetonka-based rescue that’s been trying to find Graham Cracker a home.

Staff at the Bond Between, formerly known as Secondhand Hounds, thought the call was a prank at first, said the rescue’s founder and executive director, Rachel Mairose. Once they realized a superstar really did want to foster one of their puppies, they scrambled to get this party started. Within a matter of hours, his foster family in Eau Claire delivered him into the arms of Pink and her daughter, Willow.

“She fell in love with Graham Cracker’s face,” Mairose said.

It’s a happy ending for a puppy who got a rough start. Long before the P!nk Summer Carnival Tour came to town, Graham Cracker, his mother and litter mates were abandoned in the Arkansas woods. Until a little girl named Autumn came along and started feeding the hungry mama as she nursed her babies under a rural deer stand. Eventually, Autumn’s mother realized what was happening and they called a local rescue, Jak’s, which called the Bond Between.

That’s the magic of animal rescue, Mairose said. It’s never just one person saving a puppy like Graham Cracker. It takes rescuers, fosters, volunteers and finally, someone to step up and adopt. But this story, she said, “started with Autumn.”

The Bond Between took in mama dog, renamed Autumn in honor of their original rescuer, and all the puppies. Graham Cracker and one brother were the only ones left. So if you missed your chance to road trip with Graham Cracker, there’s always S’More.

S’More appears to have very fuzzy ears and a snoot made for booping. And he’s just one of the pets waiting for a forever home, or a foster family, or a volunteer to swing by your local rescue or shelter or animal control to play with them.

“Volunteers are the lifeblood of this place,” said Mairose, who also needs fosters to take in pets temporarily while their owners deal with their own hard times, including homeless veterans and people escaping abusive relationships.

To quote Pink: “If you guys ever could foster doggies, it’s a really lovely thing to do.”