Cat-A-Blog #2

My husband thinks I'm self-obsessed; or rather, obsessed with myself.  And I must confess, I do Google myself perhaps a bit more than I really should.  Self-Googling.  Googlebation.  Call it what you will.  I'm simply monitoring my online presence in the hopes for a breakthrough; particularly concerning my novel.  You know, that moment when the publishing world will arrive at my front-door with a battering ram, insisting that the world needs knowledge of my Tome For The Ages.  Or STARZ, anyways.
But, incrementally if not exponentially; since I started this blog...interest into moi's musings has grown.  That's just a fact.  If you type in my name, a bunch of stuff comes up, including a sub-category bar.  One of those sub-categories is CATS.  Apparently, people are interested in my cats, Lara and Marissa.  Also, apparently, more than they are in my book.  So, I will be "creating (cat) content" as they say in The Biz.  Speaking of which, Lara is currently staring me down for her dinner. So...

Here's the story, of a lovely lady, with hair of gold...
So, back in the day, I and some friends founded a little theater group.  We called ourselves "Off-Hollywood."  My friend Joel Craig pretty much bank-rolled the whole thing and we did most of our work under that aegis at The Hudson Avenue Theater in Hollywood.  It's now called "The Hudson Theaters" which arguably sounds a lot more regal.  This was back in the late 90's when theater in Hollywood was almost non-existent.  In fact, it was pretty much openly derided by the Show Biz Establishment (e.g.: Variety, "The Industry" etc.)  People didn't come to Hollywood to do theater.  You went to New York for that. Or maybe Pasadena.  If you were an actor in Hollywood you were there to go to auditions to appear in front of cameras.  Nobody was interested in seeing you trod the boards at some dumpy playhouse, loser.  But of course, Hollywood is flooded with kids coming out of theater schools trying to make it in front of cameras.  So if they don't get those call-backs, what to do?
Well, if you were like me and my friends, you wrote plays for yourself and put them up at dumpy playhouses.  Now though, Los Angeles and "The Industry" have caught on that theater in L.A. is a viable entity, if only for the fact that the town does have all those theater people.  L.A. actually now has a "Theater Row."  My, how times have changed.  Maybe it was because David Geffen had the foresight to put his name on a playhouse and attract movie stars to be in plays.  Monkey see, monkey do, right?  I snark.  It's a great thing.  I just harbor some resentment about all the snob-goblins back in the day.  Does the LA Weekly still exist?  Back in 1999 I made their "worst" theatrical list.  I was awarded the "Most Egregious Abuse of Camp"* honor in their year-end theater overview.  It's a badge I wear with pride.  Hey, at least I got noticed, right?  Back then, I would say that the vast majority of theater in Los Angeles was being written, produced and played by gay men.  A lot of gay women too; but mostly gay guys.
So, one of our troupers was a young woman; a gorgeous blonde from Massachusetts who had just hit town and somehow ended up in a gay theatrical group (not that we thought of ourselves that way; we were open to anyone).  Her name was (is) Nichole Hiltz.  She actually went on to TV series regular on a show called In Plain Sight and various and sundry other projects.  She was a free spirit and a lot of fun!

She was the first and last woman I've ever seen in her birthday suit at close proximity (two feet maybe?).  Like I said, she was fun.  She was in the dressing room and called my name and then threw back a curtain and there she was in all her blonde glory.  I gotta say, even I got a tingling sensation!
But Chris, you ask, what does this have to do with pussy...cats?

Well, you see, it was Ms. Hiltz who arrived at the theater one day with a box full of kittens.  Her cat had just had a litter and she brought them to see if anyone was interested in taking one.  There were about eight of them.  Half were pure black and the other half were tiger-striped tabbies.  Call it an "impulse purchase" (although I was not charged); because I lived an apartment building that didn't allow pets.  More on that later.  I grabbed one of each.

*The show that received the critical raspberries was "Troggie Dearest."  It was a spoof of Joan Crawford movies.  I played Joan:

I very much look exactly like my mother during the 50's in the above photo.  Those shoes had four inch heels.  It was not fun.
So, back to those two kittens...