Article Review: Cat Fancy: The Cat That Changed Debbie Gibson’s Life

CAT FANCY: THE CAT THAT CHANGED DEBBIE GIBSON’S LIFE
From CAT FANCY, August 2010. Print Edition found in the waiting room of Angelus Pet Hospital of Glendale, CA., as your correspondent waited to get his male Domestic Medium Hair “Bud” his annual vaccinations.

Summary:

“Deborah” Gibson, which she insists on being called, and is thusly referred to in the actual article even though the cover says “Debbie,”* found a newborn kitten outside of a Miami concert hall. The beast was ill and badly injured. Years later “Gleason” and “Deborah” are inseparable, thanks in part to the mothering done early on by Gibson’s cocker spaniel.

Now Gleason enjoys laying on the piano as Gibson plays whatever musical ideas she is pursuing in a misguided attempt to reattain cultural relevance. Aside from his tendency to lay directly in front of her sheet music, this habit is a pleasure to both Gibson and her furry friend.

Analysis:

The article fails to convince the casual reader that Gleason changed Gibson’s life outside of the normal, minimally life-changing day-to-day aspects of cat ownership. Gleason did erase Gibson’s long-held prejudice against cats however: prior to her finding the kitten, which she vaguely attributes to divine will, Gibson admits that she was “never a cat person.” The change from “not a cat person” to “a cat person,” while trifling to the layman, might seem to the readership of Cat Fancy to be a very significant life change indeed. To said readership it is perhaps a deep shattering and reconstruction of one’s very philosophical bedrock.

*One dreams of being a fly on the wall during the presumably heated exchange between Cat Fancy’s publisher and Gibson’s publicist when the latter received her complimentary issue of Cat Fancy, as Gibson’s insistence at being referred to as “Deborah” at all times, and never, ever “Debbie,” is well known.

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