Here is something you will find interesting:
The Catman
According to the Catman, the smarter the cat, the quicker its tail will twitch. “Any kind of excitement they have, it’s in the tail,” Dominique says, with Moon—a persistent tail-twitcher. PHOTOGRAPH BY Anne Drabicky
After nearly 25 years as a Mallory Square entertainer, legendary Catman Dominique Lefort is perfectly in harmony with himself “Cat show for cat people,” Dominique announces to passersby. “Don’t be late, we are never on time,” he adds humorously seconds later.
When asked why he does what he does, Dominique simply says, “I am an entertainer.”
Oscar, Mandarin and George leap through hoops and onto stools as Dominique encourages and bribes with morsels of chicken gizzards. After the show, spectators herd around the cat cages while Dominique, the celebrity, autographs postcards.
“She’ll drool on you,” Dominique says of his most affectionate cat, Cosette, during a tender moment in the show. “Cats need to feel like they’re in love, otherwise they won’t do anything,” Dominique later explains.
Dominique and Chopin, his smartest cat, rest up before the show.
After a long nap with the cats and before heading out to the show, Dominique shaves at his kitchen sink, with no mirror. “I’m very fast and very good,” he says.
Dominique carries Cosette and Moon in a basket from his Southard Street apartment. Every evening, he transports the basket and two other cat-filled cages to the show on his scooter.
“They need to feel like I’m one of them,” Dominique says of how he bonds with his cats so that he can better train them. Before and after the show, Dominique typically rolls around his living room floor, purring, sniffing and playing—mimicking his cats.
At 6 p.m., Dominique starts his workday, carefully shuttling all seven of his cats via scooter to the show. Once at the Westin pier, it takes him a total of seven trips (roughly an hour) to haul all his props, cages and felines out to his “stage.”
Dominique crafted all the metal crates and contraptions used in the show himself. “Everything can be carried by a guy like me,” he says of the elaborate setup. “I’m not strong, strong, you know.”
Every night at the Westin pier—an extension of Mallory Square—Dominique and his Flying Housecats perform two 30- minute shows. At the end of each, Dominique asks for donations, like other Mallory Square performers, from the 150-200 people watching the spectacle.
By Emmy Nicklin
Photography by Rob Strong
EVERY EVENING for the few hours before and after sunset, Key West’s Mallory Square is the place to be. Always chaotic and vibrant, the square and surrounding piers are brimming with giddy green-flash seekers, mojito-happy tourists and resident street performers—the fellow who swallows knives, the guy who dresses his golden retriever in ladies’ underwear, the bagpiper soulfully playing “Amazing Grace” to another pink sky. It is here amid the pushy jewelry vendors, tightrope walkers and setting sun where a certain Catman does a certain cat show.
You can hear his high-pitched laugh from afar, before you see the hoops of fire or the cats, before you actually try to decipher the thick French accent. His signature cackle rises up from a swarm of spectators, and there in the center of the circle, with a cat comfortably perched on his shoulder and a grin spread across his face, is Dominique Lefort, the Catman—shaggy-haired, whiskered and wiry, almost cat-like himself.
It’s just after 8:15 on a Wednesday night and Dominique is already on his second show. Though the sun has set and the crowd is not as large as the normal 150-person audience, it’s showtime, and Dominique is on. He screams and cackles and mimes and dances with his seven cats for 30 minutes straight. Oscar leaps from one red cloth-covered platform to another. Cosette, exactly on cue, unlocks her cage and struts out to the elaborate setup of platforms, metal wires and stools that Dominique designed and built himself. Once there, she flies through a tiny metal ring from platform to stool to platform again. For the grand finale, George, Mandarin and Chopin walk the tightrope, gracefully hurling their little bodies through a flaming hoop and landing, perfectly balanced, on the other end of the rope. The cats perform flawlessly guided by only a gesture or shriek from Dominique and coaxed along with generous bribes of chicken gizzards.
And all the while Dominique is there to carry the show with flailing arms and a ridiculous script, including a barrage of absurd phrases such as “Stay where you ARRRRE!” and “Hurry up, take your time.” His seeming lunacy is a result of “too many sunsets,” he says. There are other Dominique sayings, too, surprisingly poetic: “I am perfectly in harmony with myself,” he says while petting Cosette after a job well done.
IN 1984, Dominique—actor, mime, entertainer and occasional philosopher— came to Mallory Square with cat, Marlene, in tow. What started as a one-man, one-cat clown show gradually turned into a seven-cat act featuring hoops of fire, nonsensical phrases and affectionate nudges. Today, Dominique describes his cat show as a miniplay, containing all the key elements of a drama: “It touches everything. It’s absurd, of course, but not that absurd. There are plenty of meanings. It’s got romanticism, satire, absurdity, craziness, love. All this stuff in a comedy act with the cats.”
Ah, the cats. There is Oscar—part jungle cat—who has a mellow attitude and unusually long legs. Cosette, a tailless Manx cat, is the most affectionate. Sara, the eldest, is apparently a “*****”—she’s the “most jealous kitty,” Dominique says. Moon, the youngest, is a perfectionist. Chopin, George and Mandarin all come from the same litter, which Dominique rescued in 1998 during Hurricane Georges. Chopin is the smartest and Mandarin the shyest. George is a bit feisty like her namesake, writer and feminist George Sand. “I have no favorites because they’ll get jealous,” Dominique says very seriously. Like a good father he “loves them all for different reasons.”
AFTER ANOTHER evening out on Mallory, in the quiet of his Southard Street apartment, an exhausted Dominique explains how he came to be the Catman. He sips his wine and talks, surrounded by antique mirrors, French posters, stacks of Georges Brassens’ CDs and Thomas Paine books on philosophy. Born in Brittany and growing up in the suburbs of Paris, Dominique found inspiration in playwrights Samuel Beckett’s and Luigi Pirandello’s theater of the absurd as well as old Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films and Mack Sennett comedies. As soon as he could, he pursued his love of acting, studying improvisation, modern dance and even mime at the Lecock School in Paris in the mid-1960s. “At first I wanted to be an actor because I didn’t want to live only one life,” he says. “I wanted to live plenty of lives. But the paradox is, I’m not an actor . . . I end up playing myself.”
It was during his phase as “Roudoudou the Clown” when Dominique first introduced Chaton—his daughter Vanessa’s cat—into his act. “When she was five, Vanessa wanted a cat. So I bought her a cat, and she was pulling his tail all the time. So the cat came to me for protection. He was following me everywhere, and I said, ‘Chaton, maybe I should train you and put you in the show?’ I gave him five minutes and no problem. He liked to do it. He was very happy.”
NOW, AFTER nearly 25 years as a Mallory Square entertainer, Dominique and his cats are legendary. He’s done his act in almost every major U.S. city, including Chicago, San Francisco and New York. In fact, the show’s financial success has allowed Dominique’s daughter to get not one, but two master’s degrees—one in nuclear physics from Cornell and one in art history from The Art Institute of Chicago.
Like any good performer, Dominique has devoted fans. Andy and Karen Kinbacher have been coming to Key West every year since 1990 to see Dominique and his Flying Housecats. “At first when you hear him, you think he’s crazy,” Karen says. “But when you get to talking with him, you realize he’s a really downto- earth, lovely person. And he’s just phenomenal with the cats.”
A modest Dominique will tell you otherwise. It’s the cats, he says, that are phenomenal—not just in showmanship, but in who they are. He even compares them to the great thinkers of the world. “Philosophers don’t want to be from the mainstream,” Dominique says over a bottle of Beaujolais one night. “People who make the world think differently. That’s why I like cats. Cats are independent. They don’t belong to anyone.” Dominique continues, “They follow me because they know that I am with them. And they do that because we have a bond together.” The cats are sprawled in every corner of the living room as he says this—across the sofa, curled underneath chairs, in little nooks and crannies throughout the apartment they share together. And Dominique sits contently among them. Tonight, like every night, it’s just him and his pack of philosophers.
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