Word: dogs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...TIME Associate Editor J.D. Reed was indifferent to cats. Recalls he: "For a lot of men, cats are an acquired taste, like eating snails. A boy growing up in the Midwest wants a dog. It's a macho thing." Later in life, though, Reed's attitudes softened enough for him to work at writing poetry in a study shared with two Siamese cats-Emily and Hilda, named after Poets Emily Dickinson and Hilda Doolittle. That blend of interest in the literary and the feline eminently qualified Reed to write this issue's cover story on America...
Appropriately enough, given the history of mutual suspicion between human beings and felines, an informal poll of staffers who worked on the story reveals a roughly even split between cat defenders and detractors. "Cats are more photogenic than dogs," says Photographer Neil Leifer, who took the cover photo and five other pictures for the story, "but I'm much more a dog person." Leifer owns two dogs, a Hungarian sheep dog and a golden retriever, and has no plans to inflict a cat on them. Rosemarie Tauris, one of the story's reporter-researchers, has no pets...
...toward cats have been confused, variable, peculiar, consuming, jittery and, ultimately, baffling. Those sinuous forms represented in Egyptian art, valued as rodent-chasers by farmers, or draped luxuriously over an apartment radiator have elicited the best and worst from mankind in the 5,000 years since their domestication. The dog may be man's best friend, but the cat is his most perplexing one, if, indeed...
Some experts find in this obsession with felines a shift in the American psyche. Says Robert Perper, 48, a New York veterinarian: "There's a lot of macho in dog persons. Dogs are bigger, they're a display. People like to give them hearty slaps and decorate them with collars. Three years ago, about 5% of my men patients were cat owners. Now it's 25%. The stigma is gone. They've learned a man can own a cat and still be a man." Peter Borchelt, a behavioralist at Manhattan's Animal Medical Center, wryly...
...theatre beyond the blank, muddy "reality" that the rest of these plays have a foot in. Mark Milliken has staged Fits and Starts with merry rambunctiousness, and the piece is fetchingly danced by Julia Newton, an utterly charming waif. Annette Miller and John Adair, though, as mother and dog respectively, again display little variety or subtlety in their delivery...