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Missing Pussycats

JINX

I love pussycats and when I was growing up we had a long succession of wonderful ones.   Our house had a lovely garden and those lucky cats had the best of both worlds – indoors and out.

In fact one of my favorite cats was a tom named Jinx,  a dirty stay-out who prowled our Bronx neighborhood late into the night.  When he was ready to come home he’d climb the magnolia tree in front of my parents’ bedroom window,  and scratch on the window pane until my father got out of bed to let him in.

One night,  tired of Jinx’  middle-of-the-night antics,   my father – usually the most mild-mannered of men – lost his temper and scolded the cat.  The next night Jinx went out and never came back,   and for months I blamed my father for that missing pussycat.

         

SMOKEY

After that childhood of indoor-outdoor cats,    I married,   became an apartment dweller and realized that any future cats would have to be indoor-only.    No lovely garden to romp in or neighborhood to roam,  but at least they would never go missing.  Or so I thought.

Our first married apartment was on the top floor of a small four story building in New Rochelle,  NY.   From there Danny took the train to his mid-Manhattan office,  and I drove the short distance to the Bronx high school where I worked.    Sharing that first apartment with us was our first cat,   a beautiful black velvety tom named Smokey.

One afternoon after school  I stopped to do the marketing as was my habit,  and once home I juggled an armload of grocery bags as I fumbled with my keys.   Then I let myself into the apartment and headed straight to the kitchen to unpack the bags and start dinner.   Smokey hadn’t met me at the door,  nor had the clatter of pots and pans brought him running to the kitchen,  and I thought that was strange.

Wondering where he was,   I walked through the apartment calling him.   No Smokey in any of his favorite spots – not under the bed,  not in the closet,  not on the windowsill.   I even checked the terrace though we were always careful to keep the terrace door locked.

Then I noticed an open bathroom window,  the only window in the apartment that didn’t have a screen.   It was so high we never imagined the cat could reach it,   but what if somehow he had!

I ran to the bedroom window and peered down at the courtyard.   Thankfully I saw no splattered Smokey on the ground,  and even if he had fallen,  I reasoned,   four stories was a survivable height for a cat.   So I decided to get the car and cruise around the neighborhood until I found him,  when suddenly I heard a faint meow which seemed to be coming from inside the wall.  Just then Danny called to say he was leaving his office.

”Smokey’s missing,”  I cried,  “at first I thought he fell out the bathroom window,  but now I hear him meowing!”

”Calm down,”  my ever rational husband said,    “he must be locked in a closet.”

”No,  I checked all the closets!  HE’S SEALED UP IN THE WALL.”   I said now in complete panic mode.

”What are you talking about?”   Danny said.

”Remember that Edgar Allen Poe story The Cask of Amontillado when the crazy guy bricks up the other guy in the wine cellar?  That’s what happened to Smokey!  HE’S SEALED UP IN THE WALL!”.  I insisted.   “I’m going down to find the super,  he must have a crowbar or something we can use to get him out!”

I hung up before Danny could try to stop me,   and I rushed to the apartment door.   I flung it open and there,  curled up on the doormat,  was our missing pussycat!   Smokey stood up,  stretched his sleek body,  and pranced back into the apartment.   Obviously when I came home with that armload of grocery bags,  I didn’t see the cat run out.

I really must stop reading Poe!

JACKIE

Since those early Smokey years we’ve relocated to the city and also acquired a weekend house in the Connecticut countryside.   However our cat at the time,  the sweet Lucy Gray,   seldom came with us.   She didn’t travel well,  and a car-sick cat doesn’t bode well for a pleasant journey.

On the other hand our present cat Jackie is perfectly happy to spend two hours in his pet carrier,  with no messy accidents in the back seat.   And he loves his country weekends with such interesting things to see and hear outside the window,  quite different from his 16th floor,  birds-eye view back in the city.

Then one Sunday night a few years ago we were packing for the drive home when I couldn’t find the cat.   Assuming he was asleep somewhere in the house,  we searched room by room,  opening closets and looking under beds.  No Jackie.  We looked again.  No pussycat.

Although we were always careful going in and out the front door,  I now had a growing fear that somehow Jackie had gotten out and was lost in the woods.  So out we went with our flashlights.   I crawled under the deck and Danny got in the car and started driving around.   But no Jackie.

I called our neighbors Carol and Howard who came over with their dogs.   At Carol’s command,  “Find kitty!”. the doggies started sniffing all over the house.  But no kitty.

I opened the front door and banged a can opener against a can of cat food,  usually a surefire way to get Jackie coming on the run.  But still no cat.

By this time I had gone slightly berserk and was convinced that Jackie had been eaten by a bear.   (When Danny reminded me that bears were largely herbivorous,  I changed the murderous offender to a coyote.)

Then remembering that once my son’s cat had gotten out,  and Noah sat on his front steps for several hours until the cat came back,  I vowed to do the same for Jackie even if it took me all night.

“OK,  sit out there if you insist,”   my husband said,  “but I’m checking the house again.”

”It’s no use,”  I wailed,  “by now Jackie’s been eaten by a coyote!” 

But a few minutes later I heard Danny call from upstairs,  “I found him!“

It seems the cat was asleep in a closet all along,  but not on the floor where we had already looked.   Rather he was curled up on a built-in shelf at the back.   A black cat in a dark closet is not hard to miss.

”What a naughty pussycat making us worry so’”    I scolded.

But I couldn’t resist giving him a special treat,  so instead of cat food,  I opened a can of tuna fish.

Jackie came running!

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

It is so true that, as Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” During the summers of my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I indulged my interest in theater by becoming an apprentice at Northland Playhouse in the newly built Northland Mall in a suburb of Detroit. Summer stock was a huge deal back then, and the playhouse needed free labor to cater to the stars who performed there. Many of them were actors I didn’t know who were actually, quite famous in the past. The few I did know left me star struck.

I may not have known who Walter Pidgeon or Arlene Dahl were, but what girl from my era didn’t know Ozzie and Harriet? Not only were their “adventures” on television every week, but they were also responsible for giving me teen idol Ricky Nelson. I would have been more excited to meet him, but I doubt he was into summer stock in 1960.

Similarly, Eve Arden was famous to me because I watched Our Miss Brooks, the television show about a zany teacher that may have inspired me to become an English teacher. And Robert Horton was really cute. He played scout Flint McCullough on Wagon Train from 1957 to 1962. He also had a career in musical theater, so that may explain how he ended up doing summer stock at our local playhouse.

My absolute favorite actor was Tony Randall. He was a genuinely nice guy who took the time to talk with me and the other apprentices. At the time, he had appeared on Broadway and as a supporting actor in many films. He had played a teacher on Mr. Peepers, a television series I watched as a kid. Shortly after appearing in summer stock at Northland Playhouse, he landed the role for which he became famous as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple. Here’s a factoid I never knew. His original name was Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg, clearly Jewish. I followed his long career and always adored him for his kindness and for treating us with respect.

On the other hand, Gypsy Rose Lee was my least favorite actor. Perhaps because my parents told me she was most famous for being a stripper, I was a bit scandalized and fearful of her. Her life was the basis for the musical Gypsy, but I have no idea how she ended up doing summer stock at a small theater in a suburb of Detroit. She was rude, demanding, and condescending. I still clearly remember her asking me, a fourteen-year-old, to iron her cashmere skirt. I was so terrified of ruining it that I never plugged in the iron.

The biggest crush of all the actors I met was James Garner, who was also pretty nice and friendly. I loved him on the TV show Maverick on which he played a wise guy gambler. I couldn’t believe someone that famous (at least to me) was performing at Northland Playhouse. In retrospect, he had just quit the popular series after three years and was not quite the movie and television star he went on to become.

Joan Fontaine, whose playbill is pictured next to his, was a movie star of my parents’ generation, so I was not terribly impressed. Looking back, I wonder why someone who was still making popular films like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Tender is the Night, as well as appearing on television, would want to perform summer stock. Perhaps actors were not that well paid back then. The same applies to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Martha Raye, also performers my parents regarded as famous. Zsa Zsa must have been between marriages (she had nine of them) and television guest appearances. Martha Raye, most famous for the size of her mouth, her USO tours during WWII, and a television variety show in the mid-fifties, was also fond of being married, as she did it seven times.

I regarded Mae West as somewhat famous because I knew the line she said to Cary Grant, “Why don’t you come up some time and see me?”  She was actually quite controversial and interesting, an early feminist and foe of censorship, but by the time she hit the summer stock circuit, her career was in decline. She never bothered to share her stories with any of the apprentices, which is too bad.

Of course, I should have been impressed by Ginger Rogers. She was actually quite famous and I had seen her dancing with Fred Astaire. Her career as his partner was over by the time she showed up at Northland Playhouse. She was also fond of marriage (five times), but I wish I had known the caption attributed to Bob Thaves’ 1982 cartoon (sorry Ann Richards) when I saw her, “Sure he [Astaire] was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did… backwards and in high heels”. Here was a truly famous woman in the decline of her career, which explains her summer stock appearance.

Being an immature girl with little sense of who these stars had been, I was most impressed by people I knew from television. Darren McGavin was ruggedly handsome and had been on Mike Hammer and Riverboat. Apparently, he disliked being in a television series and had left that for movies and guest starring roles. Thus, Northland Playhouse probably caught him in a career transition. At any rate, like James Gardner, he was cute and thus, I had a bit if a crush. Raymond Burr, best known to me as Perry Mason, was actually famous for this role, which he played from 1957-66. Later, he had a popular series, Ironside, from 1967-75. He was also a successful film star. What he was doing at Northland Playhouse that summer is beyond my comprehension.

Perhaps fame for actors in 1960 did not equate with the enormous incomes of today’s stars? Maybe doing the summer stock circuit was something actors, even famous ones, liked to do to hone their craft? As I look back on my experience, the main lesson I can take from it is that fame is fleeting. Many of the stars I met who were doing summer stock at Northland Playhouse had been very famous but were on their way down. Others would go on the achieve some degree of fame in the future. Perhaps Marilyn Monroe said it best from the perspective of a celebrity who was, and still is, a famous person:

“If fame goes by, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.”

I invite you to read my book Terribly Strange and Wonderfully Real and join my Facebook community.