My friend, Stefan announced he was collecting pictures of sleeping felines for his brother Eric’s new blog, Justcatsleeping and of course I though of my cat, Kee-hap. With orange tiger stripes, meowmix disposition and (usually) amber eyes, she’s just meant for this kinda thing.
Problem was, Kee-hap loves to be photographed. Way too much. So much so, that sound of the case of a newly recharged digital camera battery snapping out of its case will rouse her from the deepest slumber. So, by the time I’m through adjusting the focus, her whiskers are twitching and she’s sniffing the lens
That night, I was watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on DVD. And I don’t care that it got booed at Cannes and panned by the critics, it told history in a way that’s never been done before and brought an often inaccessible era right into the here and the now in this extraordinary way and Kirstin Durst characterized Antoinette in a complicated and compelling way. The highly criticized soundtrack made it all the more sublime. But back to Kee-hap, okay.
So I’d finished the movie, and Kee-hap, sensing the shift of attention, was now positing herself on the sofa’s edge, like an absolute Monarch. I threw a neon orange ball across the room and as Kee-hap was chasing after it I sent Stefan an email to assure him and his bro that there was, indeed, interest in the project, “but right now (she’s) in the key of C and mad clean thru, as Henry Miller would say, she “has magenta eyes, like old- fashioned vest buttons.”
Now, as you read this, Kee-hap is sleeping in pixelated perpetuity on Eric’s justcatsleeping blog. And this is because, the very next afternoon, I managed to successfully snap Kee-hap in various stages of pre and post meditative slumber. It helped that I loaded the recharged batteries beforehand.
