Friday Random Ten

Got Berit up and off to jury duty, and doing the morning internet checkin before going back to scheduling the rehearsals for Temptation, which, like so many things in this world, is turning out to be a bigger hassle than anticipated (I still don't have all the actors's schedules in, and as of now there are only three days between now and opening when I can get the whole cast together in one place at one time . . . lovely).

So, breaking the show down into french scenes (units based on people entering/exiting) and matching them with the people I'll have available on rehearsal days, making sure I get enough individual rehearsals of each scene. That's today's job. Well, the french scene part -- I still have to wait on a schedule to finish the job.


So, with the morning coffee and blog/site check, the morning Random Ten:


1. "Afterbirth of a Dream" - Met & Zonder - Waterpipes and Dykes
2. "Open Letter to Duke" - various artists - Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus
3. "Todavia" - Esquivel - Caberet Manana
4. "Lift Me Up" - Bruce McCulloch - Shame-Based Man
5. "The Future" - Leonard Cohen - The Future
6. "Night of the Vampire" - The Moontrekkers - It's Hard to Believe It: The Amazing World of Joe Meek
7. "Glendora" - The Downliners Sect - The Definitive Downliners Sect: Singles As and Bs
8. "On the Road Again" - Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home
9. "New Angels of Promise" - David Bowie - 'hours'
10. "We Do (The Stonecutters Song)" - The Simpsons - Songs in the Key of Springfield


Back with Friday Cat Blogging this afternoon after I get some work done, with a profile of Hooker:

Friday Cat Blogging: Hooker

Berit and I moved in together here in Gravesend in April, 2001. We'd pretty much been living together since September the year before. After we were evicted from the NADA space on Ludlow Street (where I'd been living in the basement since '98), we'd bounced from home to home for a few months, then, when I started to work for Cooper Square Realty, through the office there, we found this affordable home.

One of the next steps we planned on, once we settled in, was getting a kitten. Before we got to it on our own, something came our way.

At work one day, I got a call from Michele Schlossberg, the friend who got me the job at Cooper Square, that she was evicting a grocery store at Houston and Eldridge, and that while doing it, she had found they had a 4-week-old kitten in the store. When she asked the store owners what they were going to do with the kitten, they shrugged and just left it there.

So she called me up to see if I wanted to come get it after work, and bring it home. I was a bit worried that Berit would be upset that I had just done this without consulting her, but it was a kitten, it needed a home, and I wasn't going to say no.

So I went to the store after work, met Michele at the store, and looked around for the little guy. When we saw each other, he mewed at me, ran over, ran up my crouched body and perched himself on my shoulder, purring. We put him in a box and I took him home.

When I got there, I came in and called out to Berit, "Hey, hon, I picked something up for you at the deli!" She came out, wondering what the hell I was talking about, and opened the box to meet a beautiful little tuxedo kitten.

I had been thinking of a name on the train home, and as John Lee Hooker had died the week before (Berit's a big JLH fan), I suggested Hooker. And Berit agreed (I had also, frankly, been thinking about Bill Shatner as T.J. Hooker).


So we had Hooker . . .



Unfortunately, we never took any photos of him as a kitten, so I can't share how cute and adorable he was then with you.

Soon after, we were rehearsing the two plays I directed in the Ionesco Festival out here at the apartment, as I couldn't afford rehearsal space, and it was still mostly empty space here. We had to keep Hooker in the bathroom most of the time, as one actor was very allergic to cats, but on breaks we'd let him out to run around and go nuts as a kitten will (he enjoyed playing with Adam Swiderski in particular, as Adam was willing to put up with a lot of biting and scratching, though his hands were quite marked up by the time we opened). Unfortunately, we probably did indulge Hooker a bit too much with the "bitey-scratchy play" at that time, as it caused a few problems when he got bigger.


Especially when he decided Berit's long hair, braided or not, constituted a fun cat toy . . .



And for the first couple of years, he did swing wildly from "napping" to "cuddly" to "crazy-bad" behavior, often very suddenly.


He'd let you know when he suddenly didn't want to be petted anymore. Watch the claws . . .



But he's always been basically good, and he's allowed his fun, and to climb on some things, if not others . . .



(he always gets up there and then is suddenly confused by the concept of "ceiling")


So for the first two years he was a bit nuts, but soon after I quit my day job, and we got our second cat, Simone (aka "Moni"), he calmed down a lot . . .



Though "calm" can be relative. He also turned out to be epileptic, as I've written about before. Not fun, sometimes scary, but in the end, not a huge problem.

Moni completely bonded with Berit, and became "her" cat, so Hooker became "mine," though Berit and I both try not to reinforce this, as we both want both cats to be "ours," but they are kinda insistant on which human belongs to which cat.

So now Hooker spends a lot of his awake time demanding love and affection from me. And when he wants attention and isn't getting it, he misbehaves. He's still adorable, but mischevious.


However, his attachment to me is not always so adorable -- sometimes he demands attention when I'm trying to do something else, and he doesn't understand why I don't always consider paying attention to him more important than, say, reading a book . . .



Especially in recent weeks, his attentions have been constant and demanding. We were gone for almost 6 weeks this Summer, and since we got home, they've been all over us, all the time. If he's not sleeping (as he is right now on the chair next to me), he's following me around, yowling, and wanting to just be picked up and held by me over my shoulder like a baby (oops, he just woke up, yowled, and took up the same position on me as in the picture above, except for shoving his head into my armpit so I can't type).

Still, as Berit says when I complain about Hooker's smothering me with attention, "You love it." And, yeah, I guess I do. He's a sweet big boy, like a heavy strong teddy bear, and we're lucky to have him.


Next Friday, Hooker sleeps in the background, and we look at Moni . . .