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BuzzyMag.com Interview With Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Part 5:
Host: How many kitties do you both have?
Sharon Lee: Right now we have 3, but that is misleading, because 2 of them
are Maine *** cats and a Main *** cat is two good cats. In
reality we are feeding 5.
Steve Miller: We have had as many as 5.
Host: Do they find you, or did you find them?
Sharon Lee: This batch, Scrabble found Steve. Scrabble was out placed from
the local SPCA to work in a store, a pet store, actually, and
she was running the joint. Steve went in to buy cat food and she
walked up to him, and Steve said what everybody says when they
see Scrabble, 'You are so cute.' She is a little calico cat, a
brown cat, she is now the office manager.
Steve Miller: She has taken over a chair since I began essentially, writing
professionally, I would say back since 1974 or 1975. I have
always had a chair here and a chair here when I am on my
typewriter and computer, or a chair there and a chair here. The
chair here is kept warm for me when I get up by the cat who
takes off from the chair there and sits in mine, because mine is
the most important chair.
Sharon Lee: Therefore, it is the cat's chair.
Steve Miller: There was a co-pilot's chair and there has always been a co-
pilot's chair, and right now Scrabble takes the co-pilot's
chair. Before that, it was Pasha, and before that we had Erwin.
I have Erwin from way back, so we have always had that.
Sharon Lee: We have always had that, and we rescue cats. Mozart is kind of
a rescue, he is a purebred Maine *** Kennebec [inaudible:
01:44] which is in Pittsburgh, not in Maine, even though the
Kennebec River is in Maine. He was adopted by people who took
him away, and 5 years later brought him back to the cattery.
They decided to have a baby and the husband felt that a baby and
a cat was too much, so they got rid of the cat.
Host: Lucky for the baby, and lucky for the cat.
Sharon Lee: I suppose so.
Steve Miller: Probably
Sharon Lee: I had just lost my companion cat of many years, and the owner
of the Kennebec Cattery, Cathy Robinson, basically sent me an
email that said, 'I know you just lost Nikki, and Mozart needs
some special help because he is afraid of men's shoes. Can you
take Mozart?' We can probably do better than that for him.
We took Mozart, and he immediately walked into the place and
went, 'Typewriter or keyboard, that is mine." I said, 'No, it is
not yours.' Having an 11 pound cat lean on your lap trying to
take over the keys, so he fit right in.
Steve Miller: He fit right in. We should probably point out that Cathy
Robinson is [inaudible: 02:52] Universe fan. She is a friend of
Leah, and this is how she had been following us on the internet,
she discovered as many people did. She is also a librarian and
it is one of the interesting things for us is that the community
of science fiction has brought us cats and brought us together.
Cathy found out that we were going to be at the Nebula's, in
Pittsburgh and said, 'There is going to be a big library
meeting. Would you both like to come talk?'
Sharon Lee: We got to talk to a huge room full of librarians, which was
wonderful.
Steve Miller: Not only that, but the next day we got to visit her cattery and
meet about 40 cats.
Host: Was this a step in the direction of your hobby, as in cat whisker
collecting?
Sharon Lee: Whisker collecting, many people do not understand the cat
whiskers fall out, I did not understand that cat whiskers fell
out. I was actually writing a story and was researching a spell,
and the spell included 1 cat whisker freely given. I thought,
'They must fall out. They must fall out.' I went looking around,
at that point, I had Archie, Erwin and Brandy. We had 3 cats, we
were still living in Maryland. I went looking around in all the
places that they laid in, and, by golly, I found one. They did
fall out.
Sharon Lee: Now I had this, and it is a precious thing, obviously. I think
we first used an olive jar.
Steve Miller: I think we used an olive jar.
Sharon Lee: We used an olive jar and put them in there. Then there were
more, sometimes in places that they should not have been in the
first place, 'There should be no cat here.'
Steve Miller: Dining room table.
Host: No big surprise there.
Steve Miller: What was really interesting is that I went into a store and
said, 'That is the perfect thing.' One of her cats had a whisker
that every time it got lost there was a curl at the end almost
like it was doing the 'yna, ha, ha, ha.' I said, 'I got to keep
it away from the other ones so I can find it.' I went in and
there was a cigar tube, so it was a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Sharon Lee: A cigar tube is perfect for cat whiskers.
Steve Miller: We have a bunch in there. We have been doing it. Once we got
onto the . . .
Sharon Lee: Also, the perfume jars, the fancy perfume jars, that they sell
in . . .
Host: That could be beautiful.
Sharon Lee: Yes, and they look like fiber sculptures.
Steve Miller: We started that, and then when we got online, we needed to test
our abilities with HTML and fiddled together, this is how we
work, fiddled together and got the Cat Whisker Digest.
Sharon Lee: What should we do? We will do a at whiskers digest. We will
find all the other people who collect cat whiskers, because
surely, there are more collectors.
Steve Miller: We started that, we put that up in 1995, and it has been online
ever since. People began writing to us about what they did with
their cat whiskers. It is really funny, some people who do
miniatures, have all those little miniature army things, they
make wonderful antennas for their tanks. Additionally, somebody
came to us at a convention and said, 'Do you know that I work in
a lab with electron microscopes and there are official cat
whisker devices to move things on the stage on an electron
microscope?'
Host: That makes sense.
Sharon Lee: It is flexible but it is sturdy, and it is not going to
shatter.
Steve Miller: And it does not leave residue. There are professional uses and
there are . . .
Sharon Lee: Who knew? Nobody knew.
Host: An entire world.
Steve Miller: Yes, we do collect cat whiskers and we are not the only ones.
Sharon Lee: We still do get emails from people who write to us and say, 'I
thought I was the only one. I keep mine in a little dish, and I
have whiskers from all of my cats.' There are people out there
who do this.