Monday, December 21, 2015

Gato / Gateau

Many people incorrectly presume that a cruelly insensitive Marie Antoinette once uttered the phrase, "Let them eat cake," shortly after learning that the peasantry of France had no bread to eat.

The truth is far more complicated.

In reality, Antoinette’s off-hand remark can be traced to her absolute hatred of cats, the Spanish, and her assertion that they (the Spanish) should “Eat Cats.” Infuriated Spanish émigrés, being a cat-loving, cake-hating people, began to gather at Le Café des Chats, already a fire-bed of revolutionary thought frequented by such luminaries as Pindar, Selena Kyle, and Erwin Schodinger who, secretly, despised the hell out of cats, and managed to mask his cat-hatred bias via a philosophical dilemma, as accurately depicted in the modern documentary, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties.

Shortly, after a hard won bout of tennis (final score: Victoria Azarenka defeated by Ana Ivanovic 6-4, 6-7, 6-0), the assembled Pro-Cat mob began to chant the words oft repeated- but not fully understood- around the world: “I Can Haz National Assembly?” Within a year, Antoinette was beheaded, a fate shared by such contemporaries as Henry VIII, the Princess Langwidere of Ev, and Sean Bean.

Tragic though they might be, this rash of be-headings went on to inspire the controversial Welsh poet T.S. Elliot to compose his best-known work: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a series of light verse that famed composer Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted into the infamous Broadway Musical, Starlight Express.

Starlight Express closed after only two performances, narrowly beating out The Fantasticks as one of the shortest-lived musicals of all time.