ShaynaGrissomAuthor

When people try and impress me with their varying tastes, I try to not mock them. Oh, you like Gangster Rap and Death Metal? Who doesn't?

What makes music and film so special is that it can serve as your link to a certain point in time. It also can bond totally different people together. So when you say you like a variety of music and film, I assume it's because you've had life experiences and you're not dead...or my father (who falls asleep as soon as someone puts on anything that isn't mob movies or Foxy Brown).

Now, I've been cohabitating with my husband for the last 16 years. When you've spent as much time together as we, it's pretty safe to assume we share many of the same experiences and nostalgia. Right? It makes sense.

While we have shared many moments together, we do have different tastes in many things. I have a penchant for the obnoxious and campy and he does not.

Somewhere in our 20's, we were rattling down I-5 in a Pontiac Grand Am, bl…

So, before we get into this. I love the Broadway version of Cats.

I had the 1997 London VHS, and apart from a few songs, I was enthralled with the singing, dancing Jellicle cats, and the written gospel about the Heavyside Layer.

It is an Andrew Lloyd Webber production, (Oklahoma! South Pacific, The King & I, basically, every filmed musical ever created.) which I had nearly his entire collection.

That being said: I find nothing strange about people dressed as cats singing and frolicking around.

If that's not your jam, I get it, but my review is based on the 1997 classic London recording of one of the most popular productions ever.

The Good:

There were a few good things about the reboot. Things I did like.

1. I loved the introduction of Victoria.

She is a cat abandoned by a shithead owner and the neighborhood cats introduce themselves and their world. It makes her interest in Grizzabella, the shunned cat, much more understandable than the original where everyone just decides Gri…

I did everything I could, but malaise played peek-a-boo with my consciousness. It wasn’t the thought of being a bad daughter, I was well beyond such notions. It wasn’t the thoughts of what could have been done—I’m old enough to know better. They say that all women become their mothers in the end. That was what kept me up at night.
Her response to life was a handful of chalky white pills and a vodka I wouldn’t serve to my worst enemy. She died in a smoke-stained trailer in the heat of the summer. My therapist says there are seven stages of grief. I skipped shock and guilt and went straight to redlining blood pressure. She wouldn’t even try to get better, not even for me. She was always so fucking selfish.
Police and paramedics all stood around with averted gazes. I wanted to scream that I did not grow up among her trash mounds and cat feces and that it happened after I left.
“What are those little red marks all over?”
“They look like rat bites,” the paramedic says. “She had been in th…