august 2025

Live Performances

Every Tuesday in August!! (8/5, 12, 19, 26) 6-9 PM solo at The Taos Inn, Taos NM

Saturday August 16 6-9 PM The Serpent Herders at Chili Line Depot, Tres Piedras NM

Sunday August 17 6-9 PM The Serpent Herders at The Taos Inn, Taos NM

Friday August 22 5-7 PM solo at Embudo Valley Vineyards, Rinconada NM

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Musings – Cats

Apparently, my monthly Taos Inn gig with Serpent Herders (my duo with my friend Chipper Thompson) falls on Black Cat Appreciation Day.

I’ve had two black cats in my life. The first, Bear, was thrown out of a moving car in a box with his siblings. A good samaritan brought the three-week old kittens to the pet store I was working at during my junior year of college. The employees split them up to bottle feed them until they were old enough to come back to the pet store and be sold. If you know me, you can guess how that went. I quickly became attached to my two kittens, a calico I named Jezebel and the runt of the litter, Bear. Bear’s eyes were disproportionately huge compared to the rest of his body. He developed a habit of sucking on my earlobes that persisted until he died from a congenital heart condition at age one. He was a very cool cat.

I decided Bear’s sister was lonely after he died and adopted my second black cat, Zandalee, from the local humane society. She was petite with longish hair, beautiful, aloof, and a little timid. She moved with me from Albuquerque to Portland and then to our current home north of Taos. Zandalee lived to be a ripe old age and was always a good girl.

Our current cat is gray, not black. His name is Bart and he is simultaneously the best cat and the worst cat I’ve ever had. Due to his murderous tendencies he’s also likely the last cat we’ll have here in our mountain home.

Bart was supposed to be a feral barn cat, but he had other ideas. A few weeks after he arrived he started slowly making his way into the house via the cat door in a living room window that we installed for our sweet orange tabby, Rusty. Bart went from perching on the windowsill to lounging on the bench just below the windowsill, and pretty soon he had the run of the whole house. He beat up Rusty, regularly punched all the dogs in the face, and bit my husband and I frequently, not hard enough to break skin but hard enough to let us know he could if he wanted to.

I mentioned Bart’s murderous tendencies – he’s worse in this respect than all the other cats I’ve ever had put together. He’s killed countless rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, packrats, mice, and birds. Sometimes he brings live creatures into the house and lets them go. Once he even brought in a bat. Another time I heard a splashing noise and when I went to investigate, I found Bart staring into the dogs’ water bowl, watching a mouse he had just dropped in there frantically doing laps. We tried making him wear a bell but it didn’t do much good. My husband, ever the innovator, bought the biggest, most colorful hair scrunchie he could find and replaced the elastic with a cat collar, and that seems to help. Bart looks like a clown, but he struts around like he’s wearing a tuxedo.

Bart is also very affectionate when he wants to be, especially toward me. He loves sitting on my lap, the arm of my chair, the footstool where I rest my feet. He helps me with my knitting and likes to get involved in my yoga practice. Sometimes he bites my toes. Of course, one morning when I had the audacity to say I thought Bart was MY cat, he looked at me, jumped off my lap, and straight into my husband’s. Did I mention he can speak English?

Bart is endlessly entertaining, holds his own with three dogs that each weigh over 100 lbs, and is cuddly when it suits him. I mentioned he’s likely our last cat, but he hasn’t aged a bit in the nearly 10 years we’ve had him. I’m pretty sure he’s a supernatural being who is going to live forever.