THE CAT CAME BACK

An Op/Ed in the Saturday New York Times by Eleanor Randolph about the Greenwich Village cat who garnered world attention when she got stuck inside a wall of a landmarked apartment building:

Perhaps it was inevitable that any event in New York City involving
both a cat and a landmark building would turn into performance art. By
the end of Friday afternoon, the well-publicized pursuit of a lost cat
named Molly had become a bizarre tableau that got more theatrical by
the moment. Molly, an 11-month-old mouser, was stuck somewhere under or
near a British food shop in Greenwich Village. A group of animal
control experts and a city building inspector were trying to extricate
the cat from the wall. But, like so many things pursued in the big
city, Molly always appeared to be close but somehow out of reach.

One small cat caught in a 157-year-old wall did attract the media, of
course. Among the crowd was a television crew from Japan and a seasoned
reporter who kept asking himself whether this was why he went to
journalism school. Another journalist, or at least someone who said she
was a journalist, arrived on the job in a white mouse suit.

New Yorkers, naturally, provided their own eccentric chorus. Cat owners
came out of the woodwork, as it were, to help. Pauline Zahlout, who
said she had been a resident of the area for 30 years, suggested that
they get a woman —"women are better at mimicking animal sounds" — to
make Molly think a fellow feline was in distress. "Maybe they should
get a foghorn and then get someone to mimic the cat sounds into it,"
she offered.

Josh Schermer, an animal rights activist who had
taken over the search, said he had heard every possible remedy. One
person had insisted that a ferret could get the cat out — one way or
another presumably. Another brought French cat food with the admonition
that American cat food was inferior. And Molly’s owner, Pete Myers, of
the Myers of Keswick shop where the cat is stuck, has had calls from
all over. Susan, a cat lover from Texas, left a message at 2:30 a.m. to
suggest catnip, fresh catnip. "It’s getting old," he grumbled as the
phone kept ringing. "Bloody old."

Outside, however, it seemed to
be just getting started for the weekend. Mary Edwards, a songwriter and
customer of Myers, said she thought the whole panorama was not an
animal story but an elaborate effort by the cat, the media, the shop
and the people "to get into the Whitney Biennial."