The Pink Feather Hat, the Three Legged Cat, and a Dress Made of Starlight

I was talking to a veterinarian mom last night at a 7th grade birthday party, and we were talking about the kitten debacle of 2018. (In a nutshell, our six-month-old kitten got pregnant on spring break while staying with a catsitter, and gave birth to several kittens, one on my head while I was sleeping thank you very much, and long story short, things didn’t go well and one of the kittens ended up with three legs. I had to take care of Mom kitten, so I asked my super animal-lover friend Mary Ellen to foster them. Her specialty is nursing baby animals to health. All the vets shook their heads and shrugged when I asked them the chances of survival for the 3-legged kitten. He only weighed 3 ounces, and with a mother too sick to feed him… things weren’t looking good. When I took Mary Ellen the basket of kittens, she took one look at the group crawling over each other and immediately scooped up the sick 3-legged one and said, “I’m going to hold you right next to my heart.”

Anyway, I was telling the vet mom that the 3-legged kitty is now huge and healthy and happy, adopted by a vet tech and very loved. She laughed and said, “Animals are so amazing! It doesn’t matter what happens to them, they just keep going. They’re not like us humans, feeling sorry for ourselves. They’re awesome!”
I’m trying to be like the three-legged cat!

(But is it too much to ask that first someone scoops me up and say, “I’m going to hold you right next to my heart!”?)

I don’t know, but what I do know, is that I’m quite stunned by the turn of events the past two years, and I can’t quite take in the fact that Kim is no longer here. People want to help, saying, “She’s here, just in different form. She lives in your heart, your memories.”

Words don’t help. I can’t hold her hand, or wrap my arms around her, or balance her on my feet. The one thing I can do is write about her, and that brings her to life for a few minutes, as I relive our miraculous magical moments together, the way she smelled like a field of corn after a spring rain, the way we laughed so hard we would fall to the ground and roll around, trying to catch our breath, pounding the floor with our hands, just gleeful to be in each other’s company. And one of the places we laughed the hardest was when we were choreographing or rehearsing our dance shows together.

When Kim and I created Honey and Vermilion, we found a headpiece, a barrette with a tuft of pink and ostrich feathers, and we incorporated the movement of our feathers into our head movements of our dances. My tuft was in a hat box for years. I just came across it again and placed it on my fireplace, and the other day, I took it on a beach walk with me. Oh if those feathers could talk. They can’t, but I can.

One afternoon Lady Jane, a New Orleans burlesque dancer called “The Oyster Girl”, called me to see if I’d be interested in performing the next night in her burlesque show, Top Shelf Shimmy, at The Viper Room. Lady Jane’s dance number involved a massive oyster shell, the size of a car, onstage and as the music played, the lid would open and two beautiful arms would appear with big rings, then a feathered slipper foot, and slowly, Lady Jane would emerge in a long feathered robe. She would climb out and strut and swish around the stage, then pull a giant pearl beach ball out of the shell, which she would throw in the air. She was slinky and in true burlesque style, hilarious. (The word burlesque, comes form the Italian word “burla” meaning “to laugh”. My favorite kind of burlesque is cheeky and hilarious and glamorous all rolled into one.) Occasionally, Lady Jane would bring her dog Doodle and come out earlier in the show wearing a tutu and carrying an accordion. She would play her instrument and Doodle would howl along with her like he was singing opera. It was fantastic.

That evening, Kim and I came across some huge broken mirrors that someone was throwing out. We found a truck and dragged them to our living room, leaning them against the wall so we could create our dances at home. We created our two most popular choreographies, Little Egypt and Big Spender in about 45 minutes,in front of the giant broken mirrors, by playing the music and experimenting with different moves and tricks, and laughing so hard as we collapsed on each other over and over.

To announce our act, we tossed around a lot of descriptions for ourselves, inspired by old fashioned circus barkers. We tried to think of what we would find enticing if we were going to see performers, and decided to go with: “And now the darling duo of delight performing daring tricks of strength and skill… HONEY AND VERMILION!”

On Opening Night, we wore matching silk kimonos over our costumes, and bustled around backstage wearing our fishnets with the toes and heels cut out so we wouldn’t slip doing our tricks onstage. We stretched each other, and then put our heads together, literally touching our foreheads together and holding hands for our “showgirl prayer”: “We ask the spirits of Josephine Baker, Mata Hari and Gypsy Rose Lee to be with us during this performance. May we inspire our audience, igniting their creative sparks with joy, love, beauty and truth.” We performed, we brought the house down, running off stage to massive applause and cheering, our ostrich feather headpieces bouncing.

Backstage in the VIP room, we wrapped our arms around each other, sweating and thrilled that the audience had responded so enthusiastically to our dances. After our show, we put our kimonos back on and emerged from backstage arm-in-arm to greet our admirers. The room was filled with the bubbles that came with Catherine Delish’s champagne glass finale, where she climbed into an enormous champagne glass and took a bath while a bubble machine blew bubbles across the club.

We performed Honey and Vermilion in Lady Jane’s show at the Viper every Thursday for the next two years, and went on to perform it all over the world. We wore the pink feathers on our head, and years later, Kim put them on her head, flapped her arms and bocked like a chicken, evoking my baby daughter’s very first belly laugh. (There was a reason her email address was kimmythewit! She was hilarious!)

Kim and I planned on doing Honey and Vermilion forever, even when we were little old cat ladies together, we would do the senior citizen version together, but it turns out, I’ll be doing the senior citizen show solo.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I’ll be holding her right next to my heart, like that 3-legged cat, and even though I can’t see her, I’ll feel her right next to me, wrapped around me. One can dream, and one can also take the feathers to the beach and dance and pretend Kim is next to me in the glittering stars on my dress, in the sunlight playing on the water, in the foamy ocean waves.