This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ariana Grande, Hi, I'm Cynthia Erivo, and you're listening to the Broadway Podcast Network. Visit vpm.fm to discover more.

[0:31] Mike Abrams: the wrong cat died. The podcast break down the catastrophe. I'm Rose Mike Abrams, and today we have another great fan guest. Her Anna McNeely Gumby, cat jumpsuit is currently on display at the new Broadway Museum in New York City, and she has over 2400 unique items from the show, which could possibly be one of the largest cats memorabilia collections in the world. She has a cat's costume rental business and is a massive cats fan. So welcome. Christine Bogle, thank you for joining

[0:58] Speaker 2: me. Hello. It's nice to be here. Thanks, Mike. I'm

[1:01] Mike Abrams: excited to hear from you. I think you, I don't know. I've never heard anybody that has a larger memorabilia collection. So we'll get to that. But we gotta start at the beginning. When did you become a cats fan? How did it start like, what was your first interaction with the show?

[1:17] Speaker 2: My first interaction with the show was when I was 12 years old, and I came from a privileged background, but it was a background that was sort of where we were provided for but we had sort of a sort of dysfunctional household, and we had Everything we could want, but it was so incredibly dysfunctional, and literally, I was having a serious hard time. And I remember in the summer of 1982 I was 12 years old, my parents had divorced, and I was kind of floundering. I was doing very badly in school, and this was before they had found out that kids were starting to develop something called autism and Asperger's, and I was particularly very lonely child. I really didn't have a lot of friends or anything like that. And as it all came to a head in the summer of 1982 and my family had left to go somewhere, and I was alone in the house, and I was just laying on my bed, and the window was open, and it was summer, and it was kind of late summer, and the breeze is blowing in. And this I had my radio tune to a soft rock station, and I hear this song Come on the radio. I'm laying down, and instantly, like a magnet just pulled me upwards, and I go the side of my bed. I'm looking out the window, and I'm hearing the strains of this song sung by this woman, and it was Barbra Streisand singing memory. And I was like, All I knew was that this song that I was listening to, I had chills going up and down my body, and I didn't know what it was, but I knew that it was important, important, very important. And I didn't know at the time how important it would be, but it was important. And I remember hearing the song, and I can see myself still in the room, and the dust and the lights coming off, the sunlight and the sound of the lawn mowers, and she's just singing the song on memory. And it just really spoke to me at 12 years old, you know, because I was, I felt like I was so different, you know, growing up, and I frantically wrote down the name of the song, and the singer, Barbara Streisand. I knew that my mom liked Barbara Streisand. I heard this song. I wanted to hear it again, like instantly, but I ran downstairs and I grabbed all my mom's records, and she had, like, you know, all the great crooners, you know, and Barry Manilow to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Barbra Streisand. So I'm, I look, I find a Barbra Streisand Album that she has, and it's one of the old ones. And I'm like, oh my god, yeah. So I definitely I wanted to hear the song again so badly, but it was 1982 and literally, children, there's no internet, there's no instant gratification right now, okay, if you wanted to hear something again. You had to listen to it, wait for it on the radio and get lucky. And I waited the whole week to try and hear the song again. Desperately. My mom were in the car. The mom turned into that station, turned to soft rock, you know, station, and I was unlucky. I didn't get it. So that weekend, and the next weekend, my dad, you know, took us out, and he would, you know, he had visitation rights. So we were going out shopping at the shopping mall, and to get your music, you had to go the record store. So I'm going in there, and I'm like, Barbara sterson, Barbara sterson, I gotta find that song. I go to the single. It's not there. I go to her section, the Barbara section, it's not there, and I'm like, everything could have stopped right there completely. I would have never gone into anything with cats if I had not walked down the aisle when my dad called me to the cashier, I'm at the very edge of the rack, and I look to my right, something maybe, look to the right, and I look down, and I see this black LP, record album, and there's just two yellow splotches on it. And, you know, I look at it, and instantly I could see that there were the splotches. Weren't splotches. They were dancers. And a lot of people have told me they've looked at the eyes and they've never seen, you know, the dancing characters. I saw it instantly. It was a it was a male dancer, and it was a female dancer. And I saw it instantly. I just had that ability to see it. And I pulled it up, and, you know, I'm like, cats, and then I put it down, and then I like, look to the right, and there's a sticker on it, and it says featuring the, featuring the hit song, memory. And I'm like, Oh my God. This song says memory on it. Oh, my God. Barbara Streisand's. Barbara Streisand's in this weird album. I gotta find out what it is. I turn it around, and I see it's just nothing, no pictures. And I'm like, oh god. I look at it and there's nothing but just white text, like a Star Wars white text scroll going down the back of it, and I turn over and the record albums, Henry, it's a, it's a two album set. I look at the price, $22 my dad's never gonna let me get this. This is way too expensive. So I pick it up and I grab it. I'm 12 years old. Okay? I would go to my dad. I go, dad, dad. This is the song I really want is on this album. It's Barbra Streisand. Please, please. Can I? Can I buy this working album? I know it's so expensive. And then he goes, Oh, I've seen that. It's in Broadway musical about people dressed up as cats. And I said, Barbara Streisand's in it dad. And he's like, Hmm, okay, my dad was an arts guy. Okay, even though he worked in the military, he's in the arts forum in the Air Force. He's an arts guy. You know, he liked symphonies, he liked operas. He loved the Broadway shows. He saw a lot of the greats. He saw, I believe that he saw Rex Harrison, and I think he saw Yul Brynner and the King and I and then I know for sure he saw Joel gray front row, like, two days after the opening of Cabaret. So my dad was a big arts guy, and I said, I want, I want this song. And he thought, Well, okay, I'll get it for you. But why don't you get the cassette tape, you know, then you can listen to it on my Sony Walkman. And I was like, oh, okay, okay, okay, but I didn't realize, you know, Sony rockman's at the time were really like a phenomenal invention. You could carry your music around with you, so you could put your headphones on and go jogging or Jazzercise or whatever, and it was like the first time you could actually have portable music. So my dad convinced me to buy the cassette because it was cheaper and I could carry it around. And my dad had a Walkman, and he promised to get us one for Christmas. And he also said on the way out, he goes that Broadway musical, I want to, want to see it. And you said you wanted to go see Annie. Maybe this Christmas will take you up to New York to see the show. You can see Annie or cats, you know, whichever one. And I was like. I was like, okay, but I wasn't excited, because I was I didn't know anything about cats, and I thought, okay, you'll see Barbara Streisand. Literally, I thought this. I when I before I listened to the music or read about it or the lyrics or anything, I thought it was a show about Barbara Streisand, and she was singing memories of her life. And I thought she's must be this old senior citizen lady singing about her old cats. I mean, like the old cats used to own, you know, through her life or something. That's what I thought the show was about. Because there's no pictures, nothing. It was completely blind. I didn't know anything. And I, you know, we had seen movie musicals, Annie and grease, and we danced to them, you know, downstairs in the basement, things like that. And I was like, I get this music. And my at my dad's apartment, and we were only allowed to listen to his Walkman for half an hour. We had to share it. It was my older brother. It was me and my sister. So we had to share it. So I put on cats, but I only could listen to the first side of the act one cassette, and I have no idea what I'm listening to. I'm completely like, baffled. I'm like, Jellicle, cats. Jellicle. I just wanted to listen to memory. I didn't understand what was going on, and so I only listened to all the way up to Buster for Jones. And then when I got it back very we were gonna leave, and I thought, I gotta listen to memory before I leave. So I listened to it. And it's not Barbra Streisand, so it's a different woman's voice, and there's this little girl child singing at the beginning of it. And I thought, what it's like, oh my god, it's so cute. She's singing a little girl's. And, you know? And I was like, what? So I was very confused, because when I opened up the cassette, all I had was lyrics, you know, no pictures, nothing, no pictures at all, yeah, and I kind of put it away, but then I kept going back to it when I got my Walkman. And then I remember seeing somewhere in the spring, we never went up to New York. Of course, things were getting crazy, and my mom wanted to move to the west coast, where my grandparents were. We were getting ready for a move, and it was late at night, and we would stayed up a little bit later. My brother and sister and I, and we were watching the TV, and at that time they were starting to do New York was started. New York Board of tourism was starting to do this. I love New York campaign. Do you remember that? Okay,

[10:51] Speaker 2: Okay. This is what happened. And I had seen it before in passing, like they had Chorus Line members and some of the other people. And it's, I'm sitting on the couch and my brother and sister in front of the TV. And then all of a sudden I see him on screen, Terry Mann as Tucker and Donna king as bomb ballerina. And Terry's crouched over there with a fog and, you know, the fake city side behind him, city set behind him. And he goes, we cats love New York. And I vaulted off the couch, and I fell over the coffee table, and I'm like, in between my brother and sister don't turn off the TV. And I hear my mom's all, like, coming you kids go to bed. And so I saw them, I love New York commercial, and it was the first time I'd ever seen the characters. And because I've been listening to them for months, I first time I'd ever seen him, and I remember thinking, that's what my stuff police looks like. I was like, Oh, wow. I was like, Oh, my God, I've got to see more of this. And they didn't have the tire commercial out yet, or I didn't get to see the cats that leap commercials. So only thing I had with these characters in my head, or what they look like, and how they sounded and moved and, you know, in space was the I Love New York commercial, and as I never saw it again, it took me years, years. It took me at least 15 years to find that commercial with traders, with people trading Broadway stuff. It took that long. It's so it's crazy. It's

[12:18] Mike Abrams: so interesting to hear say this, because it's like, it is like, compared to the time we're living in now, where there's Tiktok influencers and people going and sharing everything that you can get a pretty good taste of everything you want to hear, and that commercial you can find on YouTube, exactly. So it's like, you can just go back and even in the music, you know, there's a you don't even have to think. You can just, you can go to Google and hum the lyrics and they'll tell you what, Song wise,

[12:42] Speaker 2: yeah, and at the time I was, I was a brand new fan, and it was part of my teenage life. And the way they had started the show was like, Is the curiosity killing you yet? And with the commercial, and they had nothing that people had to go in there blind. And as luck would have it, we moved in 83 and then about four months later, the first national tour, I came to Washington, DC, so I missed it by four months, and my dad went to go see it, and then he came back and he gave me more info, and he gave me pictures and programs and things like that, because he knew how much I loved it. So this is the first time you saw going into the first time. So I was, I was 14, and then he said, for your 16th birthday, I'll take you to see cats. And I went. I got my date right here. I went out the day after my birthday, August 15, 1985 and my father took me on a business trip to Chicago. So I saw the sold the show in Chicago at the Shubert Theater. And he got tickets last minute. So he had seen it before, but he kind of knew what was going on, but he wasn't a really good person that would just go on the phone and wait for hours and get the best seats. Okay, so we were up in the back. Very

[13:55] Mike Abrams: different than now go online and get them. You had to like to go get either to

[14:00] Speaker 2: get us a box office and point I want to sit there third row on the aisle. Yeah, you had to be physically in person, or you had to call on Ticketmaster tele charge or whatever it was, and hang on the phone for at least an hour. Or you get busy signals to buy anything. You know, Phantom of the Opera tickets with Michael Crawford. We were on the phone for two hours. We were on the phone for hours and hours, and we could bump off and have to call different, different world. It was crazy. It was totally different. Yeah, and the way they were, you know, I was going back to the way they were advertising. The show was busy. What was basically, you go in blind, you see a couple grainy pictures in the newspaper, and you may see a commercial, and it was word of mouth. It was all word of mouth. You've got to see this crazy, spectacular, you know, show that's in town right now, and that's how the show got its popularity, and it's allure, because it was literally, it was, it was a show that you really didn't know much about, but up until the internet time. That's how shows were, were produced and marketed. Yeah. I mean literally, if you were gonna go see the king and I unless you were, like, working on the show, or you had friends in the show, you didn't know anything about it, you'd see a poster and you say, Hmm, okay, my friends, my friends said that show is pretty cool. Let's go see it. And then you walk in, and I think that's audiences were way more amazed. I think they were more

[15:27] Mike Abrams: captive audience, captive. Your phone in your lap, exactly. There's a lot less distraction. There's not the video, yeah, it's just a different, totally different time. I mean, honestly, there's some benefit to it compared to it really was to now, yeah,

[15:40] Speaker 2: it was literally people went in completely blind, and that's how I went in to see cats. I had seen one commercial on TV, and I just been listening. Now, you have to listen, realize, I shall. I found out about the show at 82 and I didn't see it for three or four years later. And I listened to that the cassette album, and eventually I got the LP in the book of the musical. But the pictures are so grainy and so dark and so small that I literally obsessed over these pictures. I was like, wow. Like, that's misto police and and the book of the musical is, is, I don't know the Broadway version they there's so many better pictures. When I found the New York Public Library Online of the pictures they took Martha swope's pictures, I thought they could have used so much better pictures. It's just the worst pictures in that book. Just awful. The only picture I loved was Cynthia as Victoria, because you can see her face and you could see the design of her wig. And I love that. It was beautiful. So I'm up to here? Yeah, I'm this is great. I'm in the theater in the very back row of the balcony, and I can't see a thing I have, like, literally on the very top of the theater. And it was me, I walk in, and I see the set for the first time, and I'm blown away. And I rush all the way down to the railing, and I'm literally perched over the railing. I'm looking down at this amazing set. And back then, it took about 18 semi trailers to bring the show across the country. I mean, the set, if people have not seen it, now, it's really rinky dink now, just like, it looks like a high school production, it's inflatable. Yeah, it's inflatable. Not anymore, no. It looks like a high school production. Now it's, it's bare

[17:22] Mike Abrams: bones. The tour one right now is inflatable.

[17:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's bare bones. I mean, literally bare bones. But back then they were, they built it all the way out so the walls were covered. The walls had lighting built into it. There's junkyard going all the way down into the aisles and and it was, it was crazy. When I saw it, I was like, whoa. I mean, it is insane. So we go and see the show. The show starts. I'm in the center, my dad's in between me and my dad's friend, and I see the green eyed cats running up and down the aisles. I didn't know that was gonna happen, so I was like, oh my god, oh my god. They're running through the house. And then this, all of a sudden, I'm looking over, and this cat comes and sits down on my dad's friend's lap, and all I see is a silver, black and white back. And I'm like, I didn't know it was Bucha strap at the time. And I'm like, Oh my God, they're sitting on what's going on? Loving. And it was loving, it I was so happy. And I love there's, there was so many different choreography bits that I saw on the first part of the show that had just been completely gone, now completely been obliterated. I liked it on tour because they had balconies. They had platforms above, yeah, on the sides. And when Grizabella gets chased away by tumble. She ran up the platform, and then she watched the rest of the Jellicle Ball from the top of the right platform, looking down at them. She wasn't on the on the boot or anything. She was over them. And I love that, because I was up in the balcony, and she was right there, and there was a blue light on her and all shimmery. And she's looking down and she's she's like, she's pretending to do the movements up on the balcony, not on the back of the car or on the boot. So I thought that was beautiful. And I saw the Flying Trapeze, and oh my god, it was really, really great. Yeah. And intermission comes, and I go down to the front of the railing and look over and I see a line of people being let up onto the stage, and they were going up there to get autographs and signed by Old Deuteronomy. And my mouth dropped open because my dad in and told me that, and he kept that from me. And I was like, oh my god, I'm going down. So I go out to the lobby and my dad's getting a drink. And I said, Dad, I'm going downstairs. I'm going downstairs. I'll be back, and I have my program and everything in a pan. And I'd gone and shuffled around and knew I didn't have a lot of time. This was my first Broadway show I'd ever seen. I rushed to the staircase, and there's a red velvet rope attached to the staircase while it. And an usher in front of it. I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, nobody can go down from the balconies and mezzanine to the lower lobby floor. And I was okay, this was unacceptable, so I went to the other side and the same thing. And I like, we were trapped up in the balcony in the mezz. We couldn't go down because they needed to clear the stage. And they had so many people up on the stage from the orchestra level. And oh, I was, oh my god. I thought this was, oh I was, I was so crushed. I was so crushed. So the show, you know, I watched the whole thing, and then my dad says, Oh man, my dad went to try and try and talk to the ushers, both ushers. She went to both. My daughter's a really big fan of the show, you know, she wants to go down and see the characters. Can she go up on stage? Blah, blah, blah, it's your first time seeing it, first Broadway show. He did everything to try and get me down there, but they wouldn't let us down. So the curtain call comes, and my dad says, Come on. I'll take you down there. We'll put we'll let you go and kind of sit stand in the back of the orchestra so you can see him up close. So we did. We went down there, and the curtain calls going on. They're all making their bows, and one of the side of the front center doors is open, and there's an usher there. And my dad's all like, Hey, can my daughter go in now? Now I'm like, just, she wants to go in around the door and stand in the back. No, no. So the ushers in front of me, and I'm seeing the actors on stage giving their bows. And that was the end of the show. And the second time I saw it was with a drama club in high school, and I was on the balcony in the Los Angeles production, and I got to see a little bit closer, but again, at the time, if you were in the balconies, you were not allowed to go back on downstage. Okay, you had to be on the orchestra. So it took me to the fourth time I saw cats, where I got to be down in the front row, and I got to go up on stage. And I met Calvin Rensburg as dude, and I said, Sometimes he's asleep and sometimes he's talking to people, and then Calvin goes, Oh, it's just how you want to play him, because Calvin liked to talk to people. So I thought that was amazing. And the first time I walked on the set, I was like, I saw him. And I was like, I was completely hooked, completely. Have you seen it live? I'd say around 115 times. I really have no way of knowing at this point. I know it's over 100 I'd have to go back through all my stuff and count each program, each ticket. And I saved each ticket, I saved each program, but I never was obsessed enough that I was gonna keep the number to number it and to like, store every single ticket in binders. You know, I was more interested in articles and things like that.

[22:56] Mike Abrams: Yeah, so I want to, that's a great pivot. I want to hear about your memorabilia collection and how you started now. Like, what was kind of the first piece you collected? How did you start collecting, and where is it kind of like taking off to today? Like, what's maybe your most favorite piece, or most interesting piece?

[23:13] Speaker 2: Oh, okay, the first piece I ever got was from my one of my best friends, Hector Montalvo, who was sort of the unofficial mascot of the Broadway show. Now, I met him by writing a letter. I saw him interview with him on variety, or is it vanity Variety magazine backstage, and they had done a small piece on him, and I wrote him, and letter actually got delivered to him at winter garden, which it was amazing that that happened. And I started talking with him, and I met him, you know, we saw the Broadway show together, blah, blah, blah. Well, one Christmas, he the cats cast were making ornaments, and they were taking some of the old, ripped up unitards and tails and and, and, you know, warmers. And they were knitting and making little sewing, little tiny, little tiny ornaments, little RAM balls and little tiny bags. You know, I draw string bags made of the made of the actual fabric. And he knew that I loved Victoria, so he got me a Cynthia on Rubia scrap of unitard. It's a little, little tiny thing about that big. And it had the cats who care, equity fights, AIDS ribbon on it. I still have it. Is the first thing I ever got that was a original. Oh, wow. The first original piece of fabric or anything I got from the show, and it had a little fuzzy. He made sure to get one with a fuzzy on it and some actual painting on it, because some of them were kind of bare, you know, with a couple of maybe, like Plato, with some, you know, scratch some markings at top. But he made sure to get me a Cynthia, and it was signed by Cynthia and Rubio too. So that was, that was pretty cool. So let me. First piece. And yeah, my first piece.

[25:01] Mike Abrams: And then, yeah, and then what, like, how did you get to the point where today, where you said you have over 2400 pieces of is it stuff that you're finding online and buying? It's the stuff that you're getting from cast members. Like, what is the most of it? Where does it mostly come from?

[25:16] Speaker 2: Um, most of it came from online. Yeah, when eBay started, I mean, that's pretty much how everybody got stuff, is on eBay. And I didn't really start collecting until eBay really and that just opened up the floodgates. I mean, that enabled me to get every single UK bro brochure ever published, and, you know, things like that. I started collecting program programs because I was so obsessed with the show. And around the time I met Hector and was starting to see Broadway, I started to become interested in the other international versions, the French version, the Hungarian version, the Japanese version. So I was literally going to the libraries and finding the addresses of these theaters, and I would, I would put $60 cash, and I shove it into a plain, nondescript envelope, and I'd say, you know, cats program brochure, and I would, you know, track down the name so they cut a gist of what they wanted, and it was, hopefully enough to pay for shipping. And nine times out of 10, these theaters would send me their brochures. So I was starting to collect brochures, and sometimes I even get them signed. I mean, I got the China, I got the Swiss, Swedish China theater, and it was completely signed. I was like, oh my god, wow. So it's like, with a letter I wrote in English, and I put about 60 bucks in the thing, and they sent it back because I just they literally translated my letter, because they hadn't seen anything like this before. American fan is so crazy about cats. And

[26:53] Mike Abrams: again, this is all pretty email to them, Yep, yeah, that's that's such a cool piece, because it is a like, there are still some productions. I've interviewed, I think, over 20 different productions, people from 20 different productions. And I didn't know most of these productions existed. Oh, yeah. And it is kind of fascinating to see of like, wow, there's this, like, nuanced piece, and it is some difference and some unique parts. And then there's things that go for 15 years but are on the same tour. So to hear that it was something you were tracking down. I was free Wikipedia page to tell me that is crazy. It's really cool. It's

[27:29] Speaker 2: crazy. I was so obsessed around the early 90s I had I had gone back to Washington, DC to live with my dad. I went to a very prestigious art school called the Corcoran school of art as blocks away from the White House, and I was also a couple Metro rides away from the Library of Congress. So I would go into the Library of Congress, and I would track down the Vogue magazine article. I tracked down the Time magazine article. They saved everything. So I would go and I would, I would spend three or four hours looking at microfiche. I would go, okay, Des Moines, Iowa, cats was there on this date. And I would go and micro fish, everything. And I would copy, and, you know, back then, the copies, the color copies, were terrible. The dollar 50 each, and regular black and white was like 1015, cents. So I'd carry all this change to the Library of Congress. I mean I was literally, I was crazy. I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna track down all this stuff. So when I found out the foreign language, I got the German Hamburg CD first, and then I was just like, Oh, I gotta find out more about these productions. And then I found out about Japan, and just started collecting from there. And then when eBay came out, I started going more after I wanted costumes. I wanted actual pieces. I had a lot of pictures, a lot of photos, lot of news articles. I had bootlegs, I had cassettes, I had LPs, tons of stuff already. And a lot of the stuff was rare. I mean, stuff you would never be able to find. To find, like the Hungarian, you know, souvenir brochure. You never able to find the Mexican brochure. My dad went down to Mexico to visit our relatives, and he got, like, every single news article from Mexico and the brochure when he saw the show there.

[29:16] Mike Abrams: These are things that, like, you had to know somebody, know to know somebody, yeah, because they're not, they're not online. They're not selling. If someone had to go and take it and put it there, or you had to know somebody at the theater, is there a piece you're missing that you like? What's your dream piece of memorabilia from the show that that you don't have, that you wish you owned? I was thinking

[29:37] Speaker 2: about this today, and then I just looked down at my, uh, I looked down on my my book here I can show you. It's a dream piece. It's something that I would absolutely go absolutely crazy for. And I don't know if you know about it or not, but it is. It could be a dream piece for everybody, and it's not a costume piece. I. Um, I gotta find it here. Where is it? Oh, it's summer in here. I'm looking it was like 50 pages in here. It is the Avedon photo shoot. This is for me, would be the absolute holy grail for cats. They took the original cast members and they brought them to Michael Avedon studio for Vogue, and they photographed them in all these different poses. And this photo session, you know, the red poster where they're all on the tower, it's from this session, and they're right now on on Instagram, there is a page called a cat's Winter Garden Theater, and there's a lot of behind the scenes extra photos I've never seen. They must have taken about 100 photos, and every character is photographed, really high res and everything, I mean, beautiful Cynthia and everybody, everybody's photographed. And I think they spent a whole day at Michael Alan doing those photos. And I have several photos that never get negatives, but I don't have the whole set. There must be at least 50 to 100 photos that were taken on in that photo session. And I would do anything again to get those photos, because the original Broadway cast again. Every everybody was photographed in various poses the the, the they did four or five different renditions of the red poster, you know, the famous red poster, you know, and Don is on the other side, you know, it's, it's crazy, that's crazy, but some of the pictures are showing up again. But I would love to have those poster size, yeah, high res, where I could see even the pores, you know, that would be for me, yeah, it's not a costume, which is crazy. It's not a costume at all. It's those photographs. It's those expressions and the body poses that they're in. And you know that for me, would just be like, Wow. I mean, wow. There were so many photos, or so many photos. We're putting this

[32:00] Mike Abrams: out to the world of a lot of cats, fans. So hopefully, if somebody, if someone, someone knows they, can get in touch with you. I

[32:06] Speaker 2: would love that pictures. I would just love them, and especially in high res, because a lot of them, ones I have are kind of dark and grainy, but I would love them in high res, those beautiful I have a two or three. I have a beautiful one of Grizabella against the Red poster background. Because they filmed that. They took the picture in front of a red they had different colored backgrounds, the white background, the red background, the blue one. And, yeah, she's, she's like, this. She's like, oh so beautiful. Really, really beautiful photo of Betty Buckley. Really nice. I want to hear a little bit, a

[32:42] Mike Abrams: little bit about the other parts of your fandom, because I know you again, you've you've been a fan since the pre internet age, and for years, you've collected, you've got your own costume rental business. But I think, like, there's some, there's some parts of like that. You had some websites that you were the musicals that net, you know, almost before in some some stories with that fandom. So tell me a little bit about that part of your cats fandom that like, that section of it, when it was this almost Wild West, before, like modern internet. I would call it, yeah. The biggest is, like internet, the internet,

[33:17] Speaker 2: yeah, I think the day I got the internet and hooked up. I went to musicals.net attempting cats musical Broadway, and immediately I got shunted to musicals.net so I signed in as Victoria, the white cat, Debbie, VT WC, and that was my handle. VT WC is so long ago, but still, people know as me online as Victoria, the right cat, and I just started posting there, and this was when the cats video came out, and a lot of fans were were being exposed to cats first with the video. And I thought the video was okay, but since it was the UK version, I was a little disappointed. Because, you know, I was, if you're raised with a certain look of of the characters, and that's kind of what you were raised with, you're kind of a little adamant that things shouldn't change. And I didn't like the mismatch of the monkey strap is in his full Broadway costume. He's not in the UK. He's in he's in Broadway. He's got the Broadway wig on the Broadway tail, bunker strap, Gruber, and then you have the UK version, you know, and they're wearing the Broadway tails with the yarn. But the wigs are all different. And there was a lot of new fans coming in, and I didn't really know what to make of them, because a lot of them were, they were kind of writing things into the show that I wasn't raised with. And, and I was like, Okay, this we're making things a little too complicated. It's a little too complicated, you know? And I. I just, I don't know, I don't it was a hard time for me at that time. It was really hard. Yeah, it was really

[35:05] Mike Abrams: hard. It Was it, was it a because, I mean, I think that that's always an interesting part for me as someone who's basically made stuff up, on the fly, on the backstory, because I focus on that, versus talking to fans and someone like you and some of the other fans I've talked to where you know, you have your you know more. You know way more than I do about the show. And that's like, you know that is what you're saying, is almost what I've been doing. And it's kind of challenging in the sense of where there's, there's your version, which is, honestly, there's only one correct version, and that's the original people that created the original, exactly the original group, but it's kind of a show built on this kind of bizarre openness of a world. It almost to me, like I've translated a few times to Harry Potter, where it's like, you built this universe that everything can live in. And that's why there was the there's the Tumblr kind of has, like their own kind of role play version of it. But it's interesting to hear you come back from 1998 99 when there isn't all this discourse from it, because it doesn't exist yet, except for in this one little world. And most people who that's the 90 the 98 movies, the only thing

[36:17] Speaker 2: they're exposed to, yeah, and then they don't know any the differences. And I came from the world where, again, remember way back when I was talking in the beginning, I had no pictures. I had the music. I had to imagine what these characters were doing and way they looked. I only had grainy, black and white pictures. So when I saw the show at live for the first time, I was blown away. But when, you know the other kids, they just saw the movie, and they were blown away by the movie on a screen. But I had to imagine it all for five years before I saw it, and that, I think, has a sort of special I mean, I was almost like one of the original cast members, because in the UK, they showed up on rehearsal day. What are we doing? We don't know what we're doing. What are we going to look like? How are we going to move? How are we going to act? How are we going to sing? And with the video, it was all laid out. It's flat and it's just there, you know? And you can love the lights and the music and everything, but it's still on the screen, and there's no, I guess you say the imaginatory, imagine imaginativeness of it, because it's there. And then you can take from the movie what you want, and you can build on what the movie is. But I never built on the movie. I just went to the show because I wanted to see the actors. I wanted to see the actors interacting. And I want to see the music and and I was way pro live show than I was the movie, of course, you know, because just the background that I had, yeah,

[37:50] Mike Abrams: it's yeah, it's an interesting way to bring this up that I, like, I'm always would love to kind of go back to talk to some of the fans. Of like, what was the first interaction with the show? Because yours was music first. Mine was the music. It was, it was, it was the music. And then you got to see a production that was really the original kind of geography, and almost the original, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, and then you have this kind of years later, this movie version. And then, I don't

[38:16] Speaker 2: know if you've seen, yeah, the things were cut out, and there was no ground Tiger. And, yeah, and then

[38:22] Mike Abrams: the revival is totally different. There's some, you know, choreography changes, and, yeah, different characters and some stuff change.

[38:28] Speaker 2: I am truly Grizabella. You're talking to Isabella, because she's no change, please. I want things to stay the way they are. Don't

[38:37] Mike Abrams: curious, because exactly I was the I was almost the a middle version of yours, although I saw 2016 revival first, but I saw stage production before hearing I'd heard the music, because at this point in life, most people have at least heard memory, but I'd never heard the whole soundtrack. I've never heard the whole thing. So I saw that version first, then I heard it all, then I watched the 98 movie, because that's what's on YouTube. And now I've now assessed it from every angle, but I've not been able to actually go back to an original production, because it's hard to find there's not like an easy bootleg. No, you have to go to like the library, Lincoln Center Library.

[39:20] Speaker 2: I went to the New York Public Library, and I sat down there, and I cried tears of joy when I saw that. And I was good. I was really good. I did not pick up my phone. I did not record it. I didn't take a single picture of the little, the little grainy screen. I mean, it's literally, it's not a big shot screen TV. It's a tiny little box. And it's like, probably, like a smaller than the box behind you, the flat screen behind me. Okay, cut that in half. Yeah, cut this in half. Okay, a square box. And they shot it like that. And I cry tears. I cried tears when I saw that, when I saw Betty Buckley, because I really, if I could, I'd. Travel back in time and sit with Hector, like the second week the show open. I would do anything to go back and see that many people.

[40:09] Mike Abrams: Yeah, yeah, that version is hard to go because, you know, to go see that. It's not just like on display. You've got to schedule time, and you have to be and you have to exactly ready in their, you know, in their room, you don't get to bring it home. And it's an experience, for sure.

[40:24] Speaker 2: I did that about five I did that about five years ago, before COVID, and these are my original notes. I had to take notes when I was watching it, because there was so much that was different that had been changed. I mean, it's great. I mean, well, I was watching it, and by Act Two, I just stopped. I just stopped taking notes. Act Two and everything like

[40:44] Speaker 3: that. You just want to be in. You want to be in, you know, in it at that point. Yeah,

[40:48] Speaker 2: it's crazy. Yeah, it's insane. The stuff here, the pirates with the masks, you know, the masks, the pirate masks that they wore on growl Tiger. They've never seen this. I've never seen this version. No, the original Broadway production. They wore masks on their head. And I have all four of them. I have all four of those original masks. You own them. Those masks, wow, they're really stink. They're really bad, because a lot of the leather and everything is starting to go but like when you know, you say, when you bring food home to preserve it and you stored in a cool, dark place, okay? Yeah, my costumes are stored in a cool, dark place. Okay? They're in it. They're, they're being, you know, taken care of, you know, preserved preserve, yes, and

[41:32] Mike Abrams: you know, you've got one, that's, it's cool that you also have one on, on display in a museum to share with the world. Yeah, I contacted them

[41:38] Speaker 2: because I did want to share. It. I really start, want to start sharing some of my costumes and sending it to various but this was a theater Museum, so I'm like, Whoa, why don't, do you have anything from cats? And he said, No, we have one of the Siamese. And I said, Oh, Siamese, or a dime a dozen. I can get you Gumby, I can get you mistoolies, and I can get you I can get you unitards, wigs, and, you know, whatever you want. So I started collecting on eBay when it started, and I was amazed when I first went on eBay, and then I was amazed at the prices, so that people were asking. And so eventually, because of all these new fans, I got caught up in a lot of bidding wars. So a lot of my stuff I paid way too much money for. But it was, it was pretty much worth it, because sometimes people don't realize that if I'm bidding on something, I might be bidding on something that matches something I already own, you know. So if it's a UK bomb bay arena wig and her unitard comes up, I want to get the whole set and just, yeah, yeah. I kind of just want the whole thing, you understand? And, yeah. And now I don't really do that much collecting. I don't, not anymore, since COVID, not, not for financial reasons, I'm able to, but um, you know, I'm just, I have a lot. I have a lot now. So it's like, you know, now

[42:58] Mike Abrams: you're looking for the, the few things that are looking for,

[43:01] Speaker 2: the really super interesting, interesting stuff. Yeah, it's like, if you're a beginning collector and you want to collect for cats, the first thing you're going to collect is a pair of shoes. I mean, literally, shoes are a dime a dozen. You can go to the Broadway flea market, and there's probably, there's still some issues. So yeah, shoes is whatever the holy grail of cats collecting goes from this. It goes shoes, warmers, gloves, collars, unit, hearts, wigs, specialty costume item, full cats character costume item, full specialty character. So yeah, it goes from there all the way down in terms of rarities, to find a complete like character costume, like say you were gonna get Grell Tiger, you know all the way down. You know that that's gonna go for a lot of money. It's gonna go for a lot so, um, yeah, but for collecting the that's pretty much you're gonna wait five or six years before you're gonna get a full specialty. Long, long time.

[44:04] Mike Abrams: Yeah, again, it's, it's like, unless you know the person that has the type of stuff that doesn't pop up for sale very often, and so when it does, there's a group of people bidding on it. But there's, It all exists, you know, it all lives,

[44:20] Speaker 3: probably don't even know they have it. Yeah, a lot of

[44:23] Speaker 2: the actors kept their tails. I thought that was kind of cool, because it's really portable. You can stuff a tail and roll it up and stick it with your, you know, I have a Jean Valjean jacket, and here's my mocha strap tail, you know, just roll it up and shove it in the pocket, because they're, you know, easily portable and stuff. But that's true. Yeah. So

[44:41] Mike Abrams: I want to do a little bit of rapid fire for you about cats. So first would be is, if you were in the play in the show, which cat would you want to play?

[44:54] Speaker 2: Which cat would I want to play? I think I want to play jelly. Jelly, Lorem jelly. She's more kind of my kind of my she doesn't do a lot of dancing, which is great, but she has to sing, and I can't sing and I can't dance, but I think I could embody jelly, and that's one of my favorite numbers. It's funny. You say that because jelly is what is one of my favorite cats. Of course, I love them all, but the Gus, the theater cat number, alongside with memory, that's one of my favorite, favorite numbers. I like it because it's slow and it's and she's being solicit solicitous to him and whatever. And you know, she's making sure he's okay. But, you know, come on, come on. Come on. You know, tell us what. Tell us your tell us what you used to do when you were younger. And I like that. It's quiet and, yeah, it's just kind of, if you get an actor that can play Gus, really, really well. I mean, it's, it's pretty cool, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I like that a lot. I like, I like

[45:54] Mike Abrams: Gus. Who are your favorite and least favorite characters in the show? Um, which cats are your favorite? They change

[46:03] Speaker 2: when I was, when I was in the beginning of the fandom, it was Victoria. I loved Victoria. And then, as you know, I've grown up with the show I was 12, and now I'm of a certain age, I say over 50. So I liked Victoria when I was younger because I wanted, I wanted to be 12 plus I wanted to be a ballerina, you know. I wanted to dance, you know. So, yeah, it was Victoria, and then it gradually morphed into jelly in the 2000s and that's morphed morphed into Grizabella. And then starring role with Grizabella is Monkey shop. I love monkey shop. Okay, I'm kind of leaning towards monk. I love monk. I think he's a great

[46:49] Mike Abrams: female characters that you've just kind of, I love that the female you characters that are through like the ages is you've kind of followed suit exactly with the ages of the cats, yeah. So you've kind of kind of grown with that young and kind

[47:00] Speaker 2: of interesting, at least, favorite cats? Oh no, I love them all. No, I can't.

[47:10] Mike Abrams: I think you've answered favorite song. You said it's Gus and Gus and memory. I'd

[47:13] Speaker 2: say the Jellicle Ball, Gus and memory. I think the three of those, the Jellicle Ball, just for the complete exuberance of, you know, the dancing and the music and Warsaw, and just, you know, British Airways in Warsaw and and then I like Gus because it's nice and quiet. I like it because the cats would come out really early, in the early days, and they would come out, and they would stare at you, if you were down at the front row, and it would come and then I once saw tumble Brutus. There was an orchestra pit tumbled. Brutus stretched out his leg, and he did the splits over the orchestra so he could get to a little kid, literally. And he's like, doing the splits. And then he just kind of just, kind of like stretches. He holds on to the edge of the orchestra pit, and he pulls his leg all the way around. And I was like, wow, you know, on the edge of the orchestra pit, you know, but still, it was really cool. And I was before moments of happiness. I also saw manga Jane rumple teaser come out one time. They were right in front of me, and they saw me staring at them, and rumples like shaking her head, shaking her head, shaking head. And then finally she starts spinning in a circle. She just goes crazy and starts spinning in a circle, and her tail is like spinning around, and manga was like, completely frozen, and she's going in a circle, and the whole audience just starts laughing and stuff. And then she stops. And then she looks at me, and she goes, you know, and just, kind of just, you know, slithered off and stuff. It was so funny. It was hilarious. So they used to do that in the beginning. They used to do the interactions and and I miss all that so badly. I miss it. I miss green eyes. Yeah,

[49:00] Mike Abrams: green eyes right now because of COVID. Yeah,

[49:01] Speaker 2: they can't. No, it's because of, it's because of pretty much litigation. I guess you could say they stopped people from going up on stage because a little, a little boy fell into the orchestra, pin, broke his leg, and the parents almost, I think they might have sued, and then they said, Okay, we can't, we can't have people come up on stage anymore, and blah, blah, blah. And plus, people were trying to steal the junk. They were kind of pulling at it and trying to steal the junk off the walls, you know. And it's back in the 90s. So this, they only let people stay on the stage at the Winter Garden because there was no orchestra pit in front. But people still stumbled going up and down those ramps and and then the second reason to was, I believe, is mostly just Tugger, the assaulting. Remember the thing about Tugger and some women tried to bring a lawsuit against them because they said that he manhandled her and pulled her. You know, physically up to dance, because at the time, Tugger would come down the audience, and you find a woman, a lady, let's go dance. I danced with the Tugger four times. It was great. I danced with the Tugger four times. And the last two times, Hector got Frank, Mr. And Cola, bunch of other David Hibbard, you know, to dance with me. And, because I knew that I would go crazy and I loved it, and he would go, Oh, there she is. There she's got a kiss. And I think this woman decided that she just didn't want to be manhandled like that. And I don't think it was manhandling. I think you're just like, Hey, lady, come on. Let's dance. Come on, just shaking myself in front of you. And then she just, you know, decided to, you know, okay, we're not doing this anymore. And also a lot of different times, but really different time exactly. And a lot of the things too, was that, I think there was even one crazy lawsuit right near the end, before they stopped. All the interaction was that one of the cats scared a little old lady, and she left the show and had almost a heart attack. And they wanted to, they wanted to say, because it was in the dark, you know. And the cats would pop up around the lady. And every so often I would laugh, because I down in the front row, in the first couple rows, and I hear a scream behind me, and I Oh, they're coming in, you know. Or, you know, doing green eyes there people would scream, and the tunnel in front and the Cassandra. I was not prepared for it. Yeah, you're not prepared. And a lot of these people, little old ladies, 90 year old ladies, and, you know, and I was like, oh my god, they would be. I would look over, oh my god, yeah, it's like, over here, there we go again. But yeah, I think it was, I always get

[51:41] Mike Abrams: a kick out of Yeah. Tyler Haynes, who was Tugger in 2016 said that he got hit, yeah, he scared somebody, and a little kid hit him, yeah, like, scared him, and they swung back the

[51:55] Mike Abrams: let's ask the most important question I've argued at length that I don't think Isabel is the right choice. So I want to hear, do you want to defend Grizabella? Are you going to have a different Jockle choice? I thought

[52:05] Speaker 2: about this the whole week, and you're probably the answers are going to probably kind of blow your mind. I've categorized it into male and female. Okay for the males, I would say, Okay. For the males, I would say Plato. And for the females, I would say Cassandra. And the reason why I say that is because, yeah, the reason I explained give me the rationale, yeah, I would say that because both of them are slightly older, and they're both mysterious, so they're sort of related to spiritual matters, kind of like, you know, Cassandra is related to royalty, I guess the pharaohs and the Sphinx. And she's very mysterious type of character, and I think that she would kind of relate to, sort of this. Plato was the protege of Aristotle, okay, and Plato wrote Plato's Republic and the Greek philosophers and things like that. And I think that Plato would be kind of like I'm a philosopher, but I want to know what's coming next, and then Cassandra, because Cassandra is related to the Oracle, the Oracle of Delphi in Greece. And the reason I say both of these characters because they're both Grecian character names, the Bucha names. There's a lot of Greek names in the cats cast and TS Eliot, apparently, he was obsessed with the Greek gods and goddesses. And Plato was supposed to be, you know, actually, they thought he was the son of a god. And Cassandra was part of the Oracle of Delphi. And Cassandra is the one that broadcasted, there's going to be a disaster. The city is going to be attacked. There's a disaster. Nobody believes me. Already. Nobody believes me, please. I'm I'm warning you. She's the harbinger of a warning. So, and I just thought that she's kind of associated with those things of the Oracle at Delphi, because people would go to the woman in the cave, and she would give them their arteries, you know, you know stuff. That's where we get the blind justice, because the oracle was always blind, and she was seated over a vat of fire, you know, giving the oracles. So I think that those two characters would be really, I think they'd be like, you know the Egyptian look of the dead and the transformation, you know, into the cost spirit, you know, things like that. So I kind of like, I love

[54:30] Mike Abrams: it, yeah, yeah, that's, that's kind of a unique way to think about it. I think it's definitely different than how I've thought about in the past. But I mean, anytime it's not chrysov, I'm happy you're my second Cassandra vote and the first Plato vote that I have. So it's always cool to get a new explanation too, because it's a, yeah, it's part of the

[54:48] Mike Abrams: has been such a fun episode. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. And I wish the one downside is showing some of these cool pictures and all the. Stuff is that it didn't, you know, it's a podcast, so, so I got to enjoy it, but everyone else, maybe I'll have you, maybe have you send me a picture or two of some of the things you showed, and we'll put it on Instagram when

[55:10] Speaker 2: we post the episode. That's great. Yeah, I had a great time. It's wonderful. I could tell you tons of stories, you know, I've got tons of them. Yeah, all the times I've seen the show, I could talk to cast members and meeting cast members and all that type of stuff. And yeah, it's just a lot of really, it's just awesome.

[55:25] Mike Abrams: Well, thank you, and thanks everyone else for listening to this episode of The Ron cat died podcast. Break down the cast atrophy to follow along. You can subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else listen to podcasts. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and tick tock at the wrong cat died. Or check our website, The Rock had died.com.