*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Well, it seems I tried this blog venture 3-4 years ago and never followed up....

And now our country is undergoing self-distancing, lockdowns, toilet paper hoarding, and a lot of uncertainty. Staying at home and wondering what to do to keep our brains active and our souls nourished. So, this seems a good time to revive "With Six you Get Eggroll."

When I dreamed up the concept of "With 6 you get Eggroll" I had  6 cats... in the meantime, several of them have passed on, I've rescued more kitties, and Doris Day passed away too. Today I find myself on a new threshold, managing the 4 kitties at my house and the 3 at my mom's home down the street, so I guess I am back at SIX + eggroll.

Darn, I wish I could order some Chinese food...

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo.

Yes, it seems like the perfect excuse to get your weekday tequila fix and an excuse to party, much like St. Patrick's Day becomes an excuse to drink Guinness or Irish Whiskey for anyone willing to, Irish or not. Cinco de Mayo is not a holiday oft celebrated in Mexico. The day commemorates the victory of the Mexican army fighting against the French in the city of Puebla, Mexico in 1862.

If you’ve ever visited a six flags theme park, that name is derived from the six flags that flew over Texas. At one time, the territory was French! Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, The Confederacy, and the United States. 

When I identify as a Texan at heart (even though I’ve lived in Florida for ages, it seems) it all started with my family that moved there in 1837. From France!

For Texans, Cinco de Mayo it is a way to celebrate and embrace our cultural, historical, and cuisine legacy that’s inherited and derived (without walls!) from Mexico, by commemorating a battle against the French. For a moment, a Texan can ignore that whole messy battle for independence from Mexico in 1836, as well as find a good reason to enjoy a Tecate.

Salud!

What I think about Prince...

I woke up this morning after a full night's sleep! The kitties were again bathing in moonlight with the full moon out on my deck, so no pretzel sleeping and cat juggling during late night TV. I woke up feeling well, and then the chat shows came on with coverage of Prince. And it suddenly mellowed me. Seeing all the tributes piling in, the monuments lit in Purple... it brings home the impact he had on music, and our own lives. So when I hear some say "why is everyone making a big deal that he's dead?" "Shouldn't we have appreciated him while alive?" The answer is, we did. All along in our own daily lives. And yes we do take geniuses like him for granted that they will always be with us...

Yes we appreciated him while he was alive. How do I know? Well, maybe it's because 1999 was one of the first cassettes I ever bought with my allowance money. I always listened to the first three songs and remember when we left it playing at summer camp and some of the "raunchy" tracks started playing how I had to say "uh oh!" as it was a Christian camp. I can now look back on that day and laugh. 

And how many of us danced to Purple Rain at our proms, to 1999 on New Years Eve, or Let's Go Crazy during bad wedding DJ sessions, at retro dance party nights while clubbing? Even my mother saw on TV yesterday his performance of Purple Rain at the Superbowl, and cried.

While listening to Minnesota NPR's live stream for several hours yesterday, I remembered how prolific he was, how many songs of his I knew, how many I did not...how many of his songs I can sing along to and danced to and loved. It's doubtful anyone alive since say 1970 would not include a Prince song on the mixtape of their life. And as I spun my cat Ollie around my office yesterday dancing and singing to Pop Life, I was happy. When the man had just died.

And that's the thing, Prince's music made you happy, nostalgic, pensive. He was a showman entertainer, musical genius, and for all of the puffy ruffle shirts, black bikinis, strange relationships with female proteges, no fan really cared. It's not like he spent too much time with his pet chimp or wore face masks in public or shrouded his children. He didn't die amidst known substance abuse, a bad night of hookers and blow, or setting his plane on fire, all the many ways our musical icons have often passed too young...

Yeah, he was eccentric, but it was normal. When Michael Jackson died, I think we were shocked, but weren't so surprised that something odd happened. And while some speculate that there is more to Prince's death than just "the flu" we know nothing now.

For now, that's why so many of us are collectively mourning and dancing our asses off. You just don't expect the man to drop dead at age 57. 

So, With Six you Get Egg Roll…

It all began with an 8 week old Siamese mix kitten that my mom and I discovered on the golf course behind our house, back in 2002.

Our friend and the original Palm Beach Cat Lady, Catherine Bradley, had been feeding feral cats and running a grassroots TNR program for years… After complaints and controversy, she was arrested for trespass. And told not to feed any feral cats. Certain directors of local landmarks, like a museum that rhymes with Height Small, a local condo that sounds like Alm Breach Hours, and a shopping center like Oil Indiana, had complained to the town about Catherine and the cats, and while no one understood anything about TNR, with little support or backup help, town officials sided with a “kill the cats” position so the museum and condo contracted with a private trapper who trapped and euthanized over 50 cats.

In the meantime, our friend Catherine asked my mom and I, as we live so close to one of those locations where she knew there could be kittens… "could we try to observe and maybe leave a bit of food in case those kittens survived and had not been trapped?"

So for several months, at night, I dressed in black and ventured clandestine around the old Golf House… and would leave a small dish of wet food under a clump of spider lilies near the sidewalk on Cocoanut in case kittens survived. Each night I would collect the empty, dirty dish, and leave some fresh food.

On a November evening, My mom wanted to take a walk…so we walked near/on the Breakers golf course at dusk…and saw a kitten. I ran home, hauled out our trusty Have-a Hart Trap, set it up with some food near those spider lilies.. and an hour later, we had trapped Abby. Little did I know how she would transform my life...

September 11, 2001... and cats.

It’s not easy to write about September 11, 2011…

So forgive if this post is a few days late. For every American, every friend of our country, those who lived or live in New York, for those who lost someone that day, or know someone who lost someone…September 11^th will never be easy.  September 11^th will always tug at my heart and have me think of strange coincidences, and the “what ifs.” And yes, I found it hard to find a connection of 9/11 and cats to blog about…until I Googled late Wednesday night. I’ll get to that, but in the meantime I have some reflections on 9/11 to share. Much of my Thursday Facebook feed was possessed by “Never Forget” posts… and a few had some “Let’s Move on, of course we’ll never forget, so stop saying that...” posts.  But it’s never that simple.

Each year I am reminded that for us who lived in Palm Beach County in 2001, we’ll always have a surreal connection to the 9/11 attacks. The men who committed the attacks lodged in our area, used our resources to train, partied in our restaurants and clubs before they left to execute their hideous plan. To this day my mother will insist that she saw Mohammed Atta at a Mexican restaurant we sometimes visited, located near the Lantana, FL Airport. She swears he was seated with a table of other men, and she was surprised that with their tanned complexions, they were speaking a language she realized was not Spanish. What she remembers most was Atta’s dark rimmed eyes.

And a week after 9/11, there was the great Anthrax scare. Presumably a letter containing anthrax was mailed, opened, and contaminated the American Media Inc. building in Boca Raton. One man died as a result. Other “anthrax letters” were sent to various postal facilities, Washington DC political offices, and other New York based media outlets. In total, 22 people contracted anthrax; five died. Years later a U.S. government scientist “gone rogue” was ID’d as the culprit, though never fully proven. Nevertheless, whoever sent those letters, unleashed more terror for our country in those nerve-rattled post 9/11 weeks, and set off numerous copycat pranks. It was a lot for us to handle.

In 1999 S. Florida experienced the Elian Gonzales affair. Palm Beach County had barely recovered from the Bush v. Gore 2000 spectacle. I’d lived here barely two years and was convinced it was a “vortex of the weird.” And since, for many South Floridians, the knowledge that our resources, our freedoms, were exploited to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks, weighed, still weighs, heavily in our hearts. The many 9/11 first responders who retired down here revisit their 9/11 realities again each year.  So it’s not something we’ll ever forget, and I wish those who suggest we “let it go” would think about this… that our post- 9/11 era is not just about “us” going off to war in Iraq or Afghanistan straight after. It will never be that simple.  For our veterans who came home, who are coming home, many to South Florida, it’s not that simple. The point is, from September 11, 2001 on out, life would never be as simple.  People crash airplanes into skyscrapers, build underwear and shoe bombs, mail letters with talcum powder, and behead journalists in the desert. That’s why we can’t forget. And just when we get comfortable with it, something else comes along.

So. About the cats: While Googling I came across a documentary I had read about in the past and completely forgotten about. “The Cats of Mirikitani.”

It’s an award-winning documentary by Linda Hattendorf, who’d known of a street artist, “Jimmy” Mirikitani; he lived in Washington Square Park and SoHo, in the shadow of the World Trade Center. After the 9/11 attacks, Hattendorf took Jimmy in to stay with her and her cat, to escape the chaos and mess of lower Manhattan, only then to find out the story of the amazing and tragic life he’d endured. Hattendorf decided to document the story of finding out his story.

Born in Sacramento, California, raised in Japan, once a cook for Jackson Pollack, and in 2001 living homeless in Manhattan, Mirikitani would draw the scenes from his memory of experiences of WWII Hiroshima, his family’s internment at the same Arkansas internment camp as George Takei, and from the Tule Lake internment center in California, where he would teach art, and draw cats.  It’s a story of getting lost in the world after tragedy, revisiting the past, and getting comfortable with it. And of course, cats.

I ordered the DVD from Amazon, and encourage you to order a copy (It’s @ $16.95) but you can also watch the film online here:

The Cats of Mirkitani

James Garner...

There was some sad news for movie and TV fans this past weekend...veteran actor James Garner passed away. Star of 2004's The Notebook, 1970's TV show The Rockford Files, and 50 major films, Garner co-starred in two films with our blog inspiration, Doris Day. An actor who could play tough, make us laugh, and be a sensitive guy after all. Garner married his wife of 58 years just two weeks after their first meet. And let's just say it, the man melted our popcorn butter. 

Here's a clip from The Thrill of it All:

Ikea: Great Swedish meatballs, even bigger hearts.

Ikea did it with cats, now they've done it with dogs, in Singapore. ;-)



Remember that crazy Ikea You Tube video with all the cats in an Ikea store? (It's much like a day in my house, mind you!)

Ikea Cats UK Advert



Well, via Huffington Post, we at With 6 have learned that Ikea teamed up with two rescue shelters in Singapore, to encourage adoption. The basic message; how better to completely accessorize your home, but with a dog? Click on the video and you'll see how they did it. Just the kind of feel good warm fuzzies we need after a traumatic week for our world :-)


Ikea Stores team up to promote animal adoption


=) With Catnip