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July, 1989. I was acting in A Midsummer Night's Dream with Christopher Sanderson's RAKKA-THAMM!!! company in Washington Square Park, a couple of years before Chris left this company that he had founded and continued his work as Gorilla Rep (also continuing the yearly production of Dream for quite some time after). Nowadays, there are plenty of free outdoor Shakespeare (and other theatre) productions going on in public spaces all over NYC in the Summer. That first year, we were the pioneers, no one else was doing this, and we were forced from the park by cops on several occasions during our rehearsals. Chris was of the opinion that our rehearsals/performances constituted "public assembly" as it is legally defined and protected, but the cops weren't interested, and neither were the city and borough authorities, who didn't seem to understand exactly what we wanted a permit for, and didn't care (small fry that we were), and blew us off.
So, we had the cop cars drive up to us a few times, turn on the lights and siren, and order us over the bullhorn to get lost. I don't remember how it was all resolved legally, but I remember that by the time performances started we didn't seem to have to worry about that anymore -- though we had arranged a procedure to follow if things got out of hand when Chris would debate the cops about why we were being kicked out and he wound up being arrested. That never happened that year, though I was present as an audience member in the Park a few years later when a crazy guy wandered into the audience and started punching people -- Chris tackled the guy and held him down until the police got there, but also wound up being taken away in handcuffs himself (since there were about a hundred witnesses willing to make statements in Chris's favor, he was released only a few hours later).
I had some rather thankless roles -- Egeus, Snug/Lion, and Mustardseed -- but gave it all I could (got my first-ever print review, calling my Egeus "lucid"), and had a great time with a lot of my fellow actors and friends. I think almost all of us were between our Junior and Senior years at NYU/Tisch, me at Undergrad Film, the rest Undergrad Drama (mostly the Experimental Theatre Workshop, with a smattering of Playwrights Horizons people). A good age to be loud, and crazy, and devoted to it all.
My best friend, and frequent collaborator, David LM Mcintyre was playing Bottom. He had just moved in with Therese (stage manager of the show), John Miller (also a mechanical and fairy), and John's girlfriend Kizzy (auditioned, not cast, and bitter), into a giant loft space down on Eldridge Street, which was not yet in any way "hip," or even "cutting edge" or even "reasonably safe." Soon after moving in, Kizzy brought two cats into the loft -- a sleek and beautiful but ill-tempered duo of pure black shorthairs they named Sir and Madam -- strays she had found behind a dumpster near where she worked. David, not a cat person, had reluctantly agreed to "a" cat in the house, and was a little pissed to suddenly find two in the loft, neither friendly, neither accustomed to litter boxes, and one of whom turned out to be quite pregnant.
Partially to help out David by removing an extra cat from the increasingly tense home, and mostly because I am a cat person, had just moved out of an NYU dorm into my first apartment (3rd Street between MacDougal and 6th) and wanted a feline companion, I asked for one of the litter. I came over to see the kittens a few days after they were born in mid-June; their eyes were still closed and they couldn't quite walk yet, but crawled. Most of the litter were grey/black tabbies (putting the lie to the romantic notion around the loft of Sir and Madam's monogomous "coupledom"), but there was one black kitten with two small white spots. As the rest of the kittens mewed and crawled over Madam to suckle, the little sightless black one was trying to escape the kitty maternity-box in the closet and explore the world.
Four weeks later, David had had enough of the overload of cats (and their waste products, which he wound up having to clean up), and called me up to tell me he was bringing a kitten over for me right now (and that he thought he'd chosen the best one for me). He showed up a while later with a box containing the tiny black one -- a bit bigger, yes, and walking and seeing, but still able to curl up inside one of my size 12 shoes to go to sleep, with some room left over. David dropped off the kitten and left. I hadn't prepared anything, so I left the little thing to explore while I ran around the corner to Bleecker to get food, litter, etc. from a pet store. While running the errand, I also realized I had no name for the cat. Nothing came to mind. A blank.
While climbing the four flights back up to the apartment, I suddenly flashed on a series of sketches from Michael Nesmith's hysterical and short-lived TV show Television Parts entitled "Life With Rogar" -- a kind of parody of sitcom conventions involving a man who lives with his "pet," a Godzilla-like creature visible only as a giant clawed lizard toe in the middle of a suburban home's foyer (and an occasional shot of lizard legs vanishing up into the clouds). The man (Bill Martin) would return home from a hard day at work ("Rogar, I'm home!") to discover that Rogar had eaten the neighbor's dog (and then the neighbor, and then the cops that had been called), or had brought home a blue whale for dinner, trying to be helpful. The man would scold the beast, and wander off muttering angrily as the sad, deep, desperate voice of Rogar would boom down from above, "PLEASE . . . DO NOT PUNISH."
So as I opened the door to my apartment, I called out, "Rogar, I'm home!" And a tiny black face in the middle of the studio looked up at me and said, "mew."
So I had . . .Rogar The Evil Behemoth:
We bonded. This was the first time I'd had a pet solo - no family or anyone else in the household - and I'd never known how attached a domestic animal could really become to you. He was a special feline, affectionate, smart for a cat, vocal without being annoying or whiny. He was much loved by friends, including non-cat-people.
A year later, I graduated and moved to a much larger apartment on 12th Street between 5th and University (god I miss that place - huge, and with a working goddamn fireplace!). I worked in a video store. One of the customers found out I was a cat fanatic, and told me that she was moving and couldn't keep her two cats, was I interested in taking them in?
Well, I was a soft touch for cats in need. So I went to her place, met them, played with them, found them to be good, and brought them home -- they were the same age as Rogar.
They were Tigger:
and Hazel:
And Rogar, naturally friendly, got on just fine with the new additions.
Well . . . he tried to, with mixed results. Hazel wasn't interested in a new male friend, as she barely tolerated Tigger to begin with. So Rogar stayed out of her way, and she stuck to her favorite activities of eating, sleeping on the windowsill in the sun, eating some more, sleeping on another windowsill that now was in the sun, eating, getting a brief belly rub, sleeping on another windowsill as the sun . . . you get the picture. She became an adorable fat lump that loved to lie around and get occasional attention and lots of sleep.
Rogar was more of a cuddly, purry lap cat. Tigger was all hopped up on goofballs. He bounced from wall to wall, room to room, without any apparent signs of the normal natural cat sense of grace. He was lovable, but as a clumsy, dumb, lug of a cat -- in retrospect, I realize he was probably of above-average intelligence for a cat, as he tended to figure out complex things unusual for felines to do (how to use the speakerphone button on my answering machine as a manual alarm clock to wake me up in the morning to feed him, for example), but his sheer clumsy, ungraceful nature tended to mask this. When he would calm down, he would sit on the couch next to me and watch TV, sitting up, his back on the back of the couch, his hind legs straight out, gut hanging down, looking for all the world like he should have a tallboy next to him and a trucker hat on.
At least his penchant for play-fighting kept Rogar from getting too pudgy, though he did get large, and a bit heavy in the gut, and, for some reason after three years of relatively short hair, he suddenly became a longhair that needed constant brushing to avoid huge matted patches.
The four of us lived happily through another three apartments in NYC -- 10th Street between 1st and A (1992-1994), 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd (1994-1995), and out in Astoria, a couple blocks from the Bohemian Beer Garden (95-96). Then, I had money trouble and couldn't afford anything in NYC - I had been doing fairly well in a few freelance craft jobs, film sound recording, camera assistant, and especially theatrical projections, first working for Wendall Harrington, then on my own, got to tour the USA twice, Spain once, spent a weekend in the DR, and then discovered cruelly to my surprise the downside of freelancing as all work in every field vanished for six months, wiping me out. So the whole kit (or three kitties) and kaboodle (me, I guess) moved up to Maine to be with some of my family.
Tigger and Hazel didn't last long with us up there, sadly. They didn't adjust well to house/indoor/outdoor life. Rogar did, and became a happy outdoor cat and Mighty Hunter of birds, rodents, and snakes - brought inside and shared with us as gifts, of course. When I moved back to NYC, he stayed behind; as much as I loved him, he couldn't be an apartment cat ever again.
Years passed, a lot happened to me here in NYC, I saw Rogar when I visited my mother in Maine. He always seemed to remember me. Eventually, Berit and I got this apartment in Gravesend, and our first cat, Hooker. Soon after, I got the email from mom that Rogar had sickened suddenly and died.
Berit and I have two wonderful, far-above-average cats now (both of whom have been fighting for my attention as I've been writing this - Hooker is now frantically "marking" the edges of the laptop screen with his mouth, occasionally gnawing on the corners, angry I'm paying attention to this thing instead of him). But Rogar was my first real pet, the one that was all mine, and I miss him. The last time I saw him, on a Maine trip, I became incredibly ill with the flu the day I was supposed to go, and wound up in bed, feverish and sweating, for several days. When I took to bed, Rogar got on next to me, curled up against my side, purring, and didn't leave me or the bed until I was well. That was a hell of a cat.
I seem to have almost no photos of Rogar, and Tigger, and Hazel apart from the ones above (the last two of which were taken before I even knew them, by their first owner). I'm going to keep looking for more for future Fridays - maybe there's more around (I do have a photo of older, fat Hazel, but pictured with an ex-girlfriend of mine who might not appreciate my sharing the image). Next couple of weeks, the stories of Hooker and Simone, our current cats.
A few years after that first, cop-threatened run of Midsummer in Washington Square Park, Chris Sanderson talked me into being in it again, this time just as Egeus, so that I could help him shoot the whole thing as a 16mm feature film (which we completed the shooting on, but was never finished otherwise for some reason, probably loss of money and/or interest). One of the things we shot was a prologue in the office of the Manhattan Borough President, Ruth Messinger, as she read her proclamation to the camera noting the opening night of that year's run as "Gorilla Rep Night" in the Borough of Manhattan, celebrating the important cultural contributions of the company to the Borough. Things had changed around here.
So, we had the cop cars drive up to us a few times, turn on the lights and siren, and order us over the bullhorn to get lost. I don't remember how it was all resolved legally, but I remember that by the time performances started we didn't seem to have to worry about that anymore -- though we had arranged a procedure to follow if things got out of hand when Chris would debate the cops about why we were being kicked out and he wound up being arrested. That never happened that year, though I was present as an audience member in the Park a few years later when a crazy guy wandered into the audience and started punching people -- Chris tackled the guy and held him down until the police got there, but also wound up being taken away in handcuffs himself (since there were about a hundred witnesses willing to make statements in Chris's favor, he was released only a few hours later).
I had some rather thankless roles -- Egeus, Snug/Lion, and Mustardseed -- but gave it all I could (got my first-ever print review, calling my Egeus "lucid"), and had a great time with a lot of my fellow actors and friends. I think almost all of us were between our Junior and Senior years at NYU/Tisch, me at Undergrad Film, the rest Undergrad Drama (mostly the Experimental Theatre Workshop, with a smattering of Playwrights Horizons people). A good age to be loud, and crazy, and devoted to it all.
My best friend, and frequent collaborator, David LM Mcintyre was playing Bottom. He had just moved in with Therese (stage manager of the show), John Miller (also a mechanical and fairy), and John's girlfriend Kizzy (auditioned, not cast, and bitter), into a giant loft space down on Eldridge Street, which was not yet in any way "hip," or even "cutting edge" or even "reasonably safe." Soon after moving in, Kizzy brought two cats into the loft -- a sleek and beautiful but ill-tempered duo of pure black shorthairs they named Sir and Madam -- strays she had found behind a dumpster near where she worked. David, not a cat person, had reluctantly agreed to "a" cat in the house, and was a little pissed to suddenly find two in the loft, neither friendly, neither accustomed to litter boxes, and one of whom turned out to be quite pregnant.
Partially to help out David by removing an extra cat from the increasingly tense home, and mostly because I am a cat person, had just moved out of an NYU dorm into my first apartment (3rd Street between MacDougal and 6th) and wanted a feline companion, I asked for one of the litter. I came over to see the kittens a few days after they were born in mid-June; their eyes were still closed and they couldn't quite walk yet, but crawled. Most of the litter were grey/black tabbies (putting the lie to the romantic notion around the loft of Sir and Madam's monogomous "coupledom"), but there was one black kitten with two small white spots. As the rest of the kittens mewed and crawled over Madam to suckle, the little sightless black one was trying to escape the kitty maternity-box in the closet and explore the world.
Four weeks later, David had had enough of the overload of cats (and their waste products, which he wound up having to clean up), and called me up to tell me he was bringing a kitten over for me right now (and that he thought he'd chosen the best one for me). He showed up a while later with a box containing the tiny black one -- a bit bigger, yes, and walking and seeing, but still able to curl up inside one of my size 12 shoes to go to sleep, with some room left over. David dropped off the kitten and left. I hadn't prepared anything, so I left the little thing to explore while I ran around the corner to Bleecker to get food, litter, etc. from a pet store. While running the errand, I also realized I had no name for the cat. Nothing came to mind. A blank.
While climbing the four flights back up to the apartment, I suddenly flashed on a series of sketches from Michael Nesmith's hysterical and short-lived TV show Television Parts entitled "Life With Rogar" -- a kind of parody of sitcom conventions involving a man who lives with his "pet," a Godzilla-like creature visible only as a giant clawed lizard toe in the middle of a suburban home's foyer (and an occasional shot of lizard legs vanishing up into the clouds). The man (Bill Martin) would return home from a hard day at work ("Rogar, I'm home!") to discover that Rogar had eaten the neighbor's dog (and then the neighbor, and then the cops that had been called), or had brought home a blue whale for dinner, trying to be helpful. The man would scold the beast, and wander off muttering angrily as the sad, deep, desperate voice of Rogar would boom down from above, "PLEASE . . . DO NOT PUNISH."
So as I opened the door to my apartment, I called out, "Rogar, I'm home!" And a tiny black face in the middle of the studio looked up at me and said, "mew."
So I had . . .Rogar The Evil Behemoth:
We bonded. This was the first time I'd had a pet solo - no family or anyone else in the household - and I'd never known how attached a domestic animal could really become to you. He was a special feline, affectionate, smart for a cat, vocal without being annoying or whiny. He was much loved by friends, including non-cat-people.
A year later, I graduated and moved to a much larger apartment on 12th Street between 5th and University (god I miss that place - huge, and with a working goddamn fireplace!). I worked in a video store. One of the customers found out I was a cat fanatic, and told me that she was moving and couldn't keep her two cats, was I interested in taking them in?
Well, I was a soft touch for cats in need. So I went to her place, met them, played with them, found them to be good, and brought them home -- they were the same age as Rogar.
They were Tigger:
and Hazel:
And Rogar, naturally friendly, got on just fine with the new additions.
Well . . . he tried to, with mixed results. Hazel wasn't interested in a new male friend, as she barely tolerated Tigger to begin with. So Rogar stayed out of her way, and she stuck to her favorite activities of eating, sleeping on the windowsill in the sun, eating some more, sleeping on another windowsill that now was in the sun, eating, getting a brief belly rub, sleeping on another windowsill as the sun . . . you get the picture. She became an adorable fat lump that loved to lie around and get occasional attention and lots of sleep.
Rogar was more of a cuddly, purry lap cat. Tigger was all hopped up on goofballs. He bounced from wall to wall, room to room, without any apparent signs of the normal natural cat sense of grace. He was lovable, but as a clumsy, dumb, lug of a cat -- in retrospect, I realize he was probably of above-average intelligence for a cat, as he tended to figure out complex things unusual for felines to do (how to use the speakerphone button on my answering machine as a manual alarm clock to wake me up in the morning to feed him, for example), but his sheer clumsy, ungraceful nature tended to mask this. When he would calm down, he would sit on the couch next to me and watch TV, sitting up, his back on the back of the couch, his hind legs straight out, gut hanging down, looking for all the world like he should have a tallboy next to him and a trucker hat on.
At least his penchant for play-fighting kept Rogar from getting too pudgy, though he did get large, and a bit heavy in the gut, and, for some reason after three years of relatively short hair, he suddenly became a longhair that needed constant brushing to avoid huge matted patches.
The four of us lived happily through another three apartments in NYC -- 10th Street between 1st and A (1992-1994), 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd (1994-1995), and out in Astoria, a couple blocks from the Bohemian Beer Garden (95-96). Then, I had money trouble and couldn't afford anything in NYC - I had been doing fairly well in a few freelance craft jobs, film sound recording, camera assistant, and especially theatrical projections, first working for Wendall Harrington, then on my own, got to tour the USA twice, Spain once, spent a weekend in the DR, and then discovered cruelly to my surprise the downside of freelancing as all work in every field vanished for six months, wiping me out. So the whole kit (or three kitties) and kaboodle (me, I guess) moved up to Maine to be with some of my family.
Tigger and Hazel didn't last long with us up there, sadly. They didn't adjust well to house/indoor/outdoor life. Rogar did, and became a happy outdoor cat and Mighty Hunter of birds, rodents, and snakes - brought inside and shared with us as gifts, of course. When I moved back to NYC, he stayed behind; as much as I loved him, he couldn't be an apartment cat ever again.
Years passed, a lot happened to me here in NYC, I saw Rogar when I visited my mother in Maine. He always seemed to remember me. Eventually, Berit and I got this apartment in Gravesend, and our first cat, Hooker. Soon after, I got the email from mom that Rogar had sickened suddenly and died.
Berit and I have two wonderful, far-above-average cats now (both of whom have been fighting for my attention as I've been writing this - Hooker is now frantically "marking" the edges of the laptop screen with his mouth, occasionally gnawing on the corners, angry I'm paying attention to this thing instead of him). But Rogar was my first real pet, the one that was all mine, and I miss him. The last time I saw him, on a Maine trip, I became incredibly ill with the flu the day I was supposed to go, and wound up in bed, feverish and sweating, for several days. When I took to bed, Rogar got on next to me, curled up against my side, purring, and didn't leave me or the bed until I was well. That was a hell of a cat.
I seem to have almost no photos of Rogar, and Tigger, and Hazel apart from the ones above (the last two of which were taken before I even knew them, by their first owner). I'm going to keep looking for more for future Fridays - maybe there's more around (I do have a photo of older, fat Hazel, but pictured with an ex-girlfriend of mine who might not appreciate my sharing the image). Next couple of weeks, the stories of Hooker and Simone, our current cats.
A few years after that first, cop-threatened run of Midsummer in Washington Square Park, Chris Sanderson talked me into being in it again, this time just as Egeus, so that I could help him shoot the whole thing as a 16mm feature film (which we completed the shooting on, but was never finished otherwise for some reason, probably loss of money and/or interest). One of the things we shot was a prologue in the office of the Manhattan Borough President, Ruth Messinger, as she read her proclamation to the camera noting the opening night of that year's run as "Gorilla Rep Night" in the Borough of Manhattan, celebrating the important cultural contributions of the company to the Borough. Things had changed around here.
