imkittymyers at hotmail dot com
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
ZAPPA REMEMBERS DIDI
I e-mailed Zappa to tell him about DiDi, who was originally his cat. Here's his reply:
I just got your email. I'm very sorry to hear about this. I wish I could have seen her one last time. I should have been there.
DeeDee was just over 19 years old...she was born in March of 1987 when I was 17, and I got her when she was about 2 weeks old. [AG] asked me to take her because her mother was going to kill all of the kittens from a litter her cat had had. .... AG got up early and snuck out of the house with the kittens before her mother came home from work that morning. She found homes for all of them except DeeDee, so I took her at the end of that school day because she had nowhere else to go.
Miss W [his art teacher] helped me get her to hand feed from a syringe because she wasn't weaned yet. That's probably why she was always so slender. She mostly lived in my shirt for the first couple of weeks that I had her, except for when I couldn't have her there, and then she would sleep in a big box in Miss W's room next to the kiln where it was warm and where other faculty wouldn't notice her if they stopped in. I had 5 art classes a day that year so it was easy to have her with me most of the time. Still, it was probably the best kept secret in the history of [the high school].
Shortly after that I moved back home and she stayed with you from then on. Before I moved back home, I used to stop in at the Ice Cream Works on Market Street, and they would give her milk every morning up on the counter. She was so playful and bright-eyed, and she had that little corner of a red bandana around her neck...the women there thought she was the cutest thing they had ever seen, and they loved her name. Because she was so pretty and delicate and yet so determined by nature, I named her after Deborah Dutcher...DD*. You guys gave her a good long life...I knew that you would.
Thankyou.
* Zappa went to school with and dated Deborah Dutcher, who went on to become an opera singer, doing Les Miz and Phantom in Europe.
*