The Tail of Cat Man Du

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Cats, which many people consider untrainable, jump long distances on command, exhibit amazing balance, and leap through flaming hoops. Pretty much anyone who has visited the continental United States' southernmost point to ogle its spectacular sunset has seen him. This is no small business.

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Between tips and sold merchandise, Lefort makes enough money to live comfortably with his eight-plus cats in a trailer on Stock Island, about five miles north of Mallory Square. Lefort says he has even earned enough to have sent his daughter through college at UCLA. She declined to comment. Lefort, who himself sports an uncanny resemblance to a cat, is cagey about his background.

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Born in Paris, he was once a clown and even had a minor, nonspeaking role in 7 Fois Par Jour Seven Times a Day , a Canadian-Israeli comedy about an architect who suffers from excessive urges to have sex. After living in Montreal for a time, Lefort showed up in Key West just as it was evolving from America's end of the road into a sophisticated tourist town with a carefully tended, laid-back vibe. Indeed, a study of his background is a glance backstage in the Conch Republic — something like a look into Mickey Mouse's dressing room.

Just before sunset on Halloween night in , Michael Patrick wrapped a straitjacket around his chest. The long-haired, well-muscled year-old, nicknamed "Michael the Escape Artist," walked to the edge of the Mallory Square pier and stood with his back to the water. Then he flipped into the foot-deep harbor and disappeared. There was this incredible current ripping through the channel, and I couldn't find Michael anywhere. The Coast Guard, the city's fire and police departments, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spent hours searching.

Around midnight, Soto returned home. A few minutes later, his phone rang.

Patrick explained he had hired a diver to wait for him under the pier and remove the straitjacket. Then they swam a few blocks down. He added that he would reveal the secret of his stunt the following day.

But it didn't work out that way. Patrick was arrested and jailed. That was just one of the strange moments of entertainment at Mallory Square, a waterfront chunk of land that offers arguably the best view of the sunset in the Southeast United States. It's not only home to Lefort's Cat Man, but it's also a literary and entertainment juggernaut that helped transform the Conch Republic. Located less than a mile from the home of author and mariner Ernest Hemingway, Mallory Square was a favorite haunt of playwright Tennessee Williams, who wrote part of A Streetcar Named Desire in the town. Williams visited Mallory Square nightly in the s to watch the sunset on his boat, according to Key West historian Tom Hambright.

It all grew from there. Before Mallory Square gained its reputation as a tourist attraction, it was used as a commercial dock for large ships, according to Hambright. Will Soto arrived as a year-old in the mid-'70s. Born in Chicago in , he served as a radioman in the Navy and visited Key West in while in the service. The next year, he left the Navy and enrolled in Southern Illinois University to pursue art. Later, he returned to Key West as a sculptor. People would come to drink, dance, and skinny-dip.

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We'd even do the limbo naked. I remember when Jimmy Buffett would sit on a bucket and play the guitar. The police didn't really come down until it started to become a noticeable event. It's hard to keep a party that good a secret. For years, the only performers in Mallory Square were a magician, a clown, two drummers, and Soto, who developed his entertainer persona through trial and error. He learned to walk across a razor-thin rope while throwing and catching sharp knives. As the crowds grew, other street performers and merchants followed.

The show was nicknamed "Sunset Celebration. The show was limited to two hours before and after sunset. No one ever asked what your last name was or what you did for a living. It was just sort of about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Today, performers such as Reid Conklin, a slender something with tattoos across his chest, thrills crowds by throwing knives and flaming torches high into the air. Dennis Riley, an older man with thin strands of salt-and-pepper hair, wears a knee-length frilled skirt while he plays a bagpipe. And almost every night, Rev.

Bill Welzein, nicknamed "Bible Bill," stands in white ankle-high socks tucked into worn sneakers and preaches the gospel.

Key West's Cat Man Dominique Lefort | Miami New Times

At least three times a week, Soto, a year-old juggler who has performed for more than 40 years, does his show like clockwork. The town has gotten a lot more conservative, which squeezed a lot of funk and characters out.

The cost of living has gone up a lot too. A lot of colorful people who created this place Lefort, dressed in washed-out blue jeans, open-toed shoes, and a blue T-shirt one size too large, strolls into Blue Heaven, a funky Key West restaurant two miles from Mallory Square, on a recent Wednesday afternoon.

Inside, he removes a pair of large black women's sunglasses. As he roams the restaurant, customers smile at him. A slender man wearing a Key West T-shirt and a baseball cap, seconds away from biting into a fish sandwich, stops and whispers, "Look, it's that crazy cat man. Lefort sits down at a table and begins speaking, mostly in that deep and intense French accent, about his childhood in Brittany, a region in northwest France. It wasn't easy to be there in the years after World War II, he says. As a boy, he says, he dreamed of becoming a clown.

The grim years of war, which decimated his homeland, inspired him to dedicate his life to making people laugh. But he soon learned that to be a clown, one needed wisdom that only came with age. In school, he studied drama, opera, modern dance, and pantomime. As a teenager, he followed strangers on the street to try to mimic their gaits and gestures. When I would follow people, I tried to get an idea of how they feel, and to feel that myself.

Those were the years when perhaps the greatest mime of all time, Marcel Marceau, was beginning his career in Paris. At first, Marceau entertained thousands of troops after the liberation of Paris. Later, he founded a world-renowned school of pantomime. At age 16, Lefort began studying Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski's method of acting, in which an actor transforms into a character physically, vocally, and emotionally. It's what helped created the Cat Man personality, Lefort says. I like to be more than just Dominique. After completing his studies in Paris, he signed a contract with an improvisational acting troupe that did puppetry and mime.

That led him to London for a few years and eventually Montreal. When Lefort wasn't acting, he donned a bright-orange curly-haired wig and a round red nose to entertain crowds. His character was named "Rou Dou Dou. Eventually, he quit the acting company and met a woman, whom he declines to name.

Soon they had a daughter, Vanessa. While still tiny, she was given a cat. Lefort formed an immediate bond with the animal. Perrault's Histoires has had considerable impact on world culture. The original Italian title of the first edition was Costantino Fortunato , but was later known as Il gatto con gli stivali lit. Puss in Boots is a popular pantomime in the UK. The tale opens with the third and youngest son of a miller receiving his inheritance —a cat.

At first, the youngest son laments, as the eldest brother gains the mill, and the middle brother gets the mules. The feline is no ordinary cat, however, but one who requests and receives a pair of boots. Determined to make his master's fortune, the cat bags a rabbit in the forest and presents it to the king as a gift from his master, the fictional Marquis of Carabas. The cat continues making gifts of game to the king for several months, for which he is rewarded. One day, the king decides to take a drive with his daughter.

The cat persuades his master to remove his clothes and enter the river which their carriage passes. The cat disposes of his master's clothing beneath a rock. As the royal coach nears, the cat begins calling for help in great distress.

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When the king stops to investigate, the cat tells him that his master the Marquis has been bathing in the river and robbed of his clothing. The king has the young man brought from the river, dressed in a splendid suit of clothes, and seated in the coach with his daughter, who falls in love with him at once. The cat hurries ahead of the coach, ordering the country folk along the road to tell the king that the land belongs to the "Marquis of Carabas", saying that if they do not he will cut them into mincemeat.

The cat then happens upon a castle inhabited by an ogre who is capable of transforming himself into a number of creatures. The ogre displays his ability by changing into a lion , frightening the cat, who then tricks the ogre into changing into a mouse. The cat then pounces upon the mouse and devours it. The king arrives at the castle that formerly belonged to the ogre, and, impressed with the bogus Marquis and his estate, gives the lad the princess in marriage. Thereafter, the cat enjoys life as a great lord who runs after mice only for his own amusement. The tale is followed immediately by two morals: This is the theme in France, but other versions of this theme exist in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Perrault's "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots" is the most renowned tale in all of Western folklore of the animal as helper. In the Panchatantra lit. The Facetious Nights , [10] the first European storybook to include fairy tales.

The poor young man eventually becomes King of Bohemia. In , another tale with a trickster cat as hero was published in Giambattista Basile 's collection Pentamerone although neither the collection nor the tale were published in France during Perrault's lifetime. In Basile, the lad is a beggar boy called Gagliuso sometimes Cagliuso whose fortunes are achieved in a manner similar to Perrault's Puss.

However, the tale ends with Cagliuso, in gratitude to the cat, promising the feline a gold coffin upon his death. Three days later, the cat decides to test Gagliuso by pretending to be dead and is mortified to hear Gagliuso tell his wife to take the dead cat by its paws and throw it out the window. The cat leaps up, demanding to know whether this was his promised reward for helping the beggar boy to a better life. The cat then rushes away, leaving his master to fend for himself.

It is likely that Perrault was aware of the Straparola tale, since 'Facetious Nights' was translated into French in the sixteenth century and subsequently passed into the oral tradition. His original title was Costantino Fortunato lit. However, when Perrault senior died in , the newspaper alluded to his being responsible for "La Belle au bois dormant", which the paper had published in Perrault's tale has been adapted to various media over the centuries.

This new film's story bears no similarities to the book. Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes that the main motif of "Puss in Boots" is the animal as helper and that the tale "carries atavistic memories of the familiar totem animal as the father protector of the tribe found everywhere by missionaries and anthropologists. Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie observe that "the tale is unusual in that the hero little deserves his good fortune, that is if his poverty, his being a third child, and his unquestioning acceptance of the cat's sinful instructions, are not nowadays looked upon as virtues.

While the literary skill employed in the telling of the tales has been recognized universally, it appears the tales were set down in great part as the author heard them told. The evidence for that assessment lies first in the simplicity of the tales, then in the use of words that were, in Perrault's era, considered populaire and du bas peuple , and finally, in the appearance of vestigial passages that now are superfluous to the plot, do not illuminate the narrative, and thus, are passages the Opies believe a literary artist would have rejected in the process of creating a work of art.

One such vestigial passage is Puss's boots; his insistence upon the footwear is explained nowhere in the tale, it is not developed, nor is it referred to after its first mention except in an aside. According to the Opies, Perrault's great achievement was accepting fairy tales at "their own level. Perrault would be revered today as the father of folklore if he had taken the time to record where he obtained his tales, when, and under what circumstances.

Bruno Bettelheim remarks that "the more simple and straightforward a good character in a fairy tale, the easier it is for a child to identify with it and to reject the bad other. If the character is a very good person, then the child is likely to want to be good too.

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