Goodbye to Miss Tina 1

On Thursday the 12th, I flew in from Palm Springs to San Francisco in response to a comment from my kitty-sitter. "Michael, there seems to be something wrong with Tina because she's letting me pet her." The twelve-year-old Miss Tina has been a one-person pussy from her kitten days, much to the consternation of my cat-loving friends who wanted to receive something besides a hiss or dismissive shrug from her. She was sprawled on the bedroom floor when I returned home around 7PM, having a terrible time breathing and unable to move. By midnight, after a trip to Pets Unlimited's quite wonderful animal emergency room and a look at the mess inside her chest on an X-ray, Miss Tina was put down.



The next couple of days were shellshocked with sadness and grief, though I knew enough to hang out with lots of different friends and acquaintances, warning them all that I was going to be prone to public sobbing. Thanks to Thad and the Julius Kahn tennis group, h. Brown's Friday political burrito salon (and Joe Lynn especially), and Kimo Crossman in his charming pursuit of culture.



h. Brown, by the way, is currently going the Frank Chiu route, walking around town with homemade signage attached to a cane hawking his three current passions: the freedom of Josh Wolf, the election of Krissy Keefer for Congress against Pelosi, and the re-election of District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly.



On Saturday, my working partner Bill and I went to the "independent chain" replacement for Opera Plaza's A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books.



The place looks almost exactly the same, just a little cleaner.



We were there to see Jamie Lee Curtis who was to appear for a children's book signing, but the publicists had screwed up the listings and she had showed up at noon rather than 2PM as The Chronicle and the Litquake website promised. This meant that Bill and I didn't get to ask the celebrity question we were longing to ask, "Is it true that you were born a hermaphrodite?" It's probably just as well.