Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

But these thoroughly modern misses have no idea how cumbersome big hair is, and I am counting on this as my advantage, since I have watched the Divine Ashleigh sisters try to sashay their Persian fluff through various apertures. They cannot pay too much attention to the surroundings.

I must wait a long time before the door opens again, during which time I hear the distant strains of "Suspicious Minds" being hummed by an awful lot of guys with no ear for music. At last I hear something from within the mysterious room. It is little Miss Quincey intoning, "Bye-bye, baby. Be good now.”

And then she is backing out of the doorway, bent over with the weight of her vertical coiffure.

I slither inside on my belly like a snake, or like Little Egypt shedding her veils when performing, wondering if I have solved all the mysteries rolled into one: Elvis is alive and well in a storage room in the Kingdome.

The door snaps shut behind me, and my strategy to use my dark coloration as camouflage has never been so successful. I am in the utter dark, invisible to all, including myself. I cannot so much as see my tail in front of my face, not that I should ever want to do any such thing.

Tails belong in the rear, where one cannot trip over them.

Now who can Miss Quincey have left in the utter dark, locked up, and still call "baby"? A ghost comes to mind. I do not believe that normal physical deprivations, such as light and companionship, would harm a ghost. Still, even a ghost is no one unless he or she is seen in the right places, and it would seem cruel to condemn a spirit, no matter how restless and in need of containment, in dark isolation.

On the other hand, Elvis had Dracula tendencies: staying up all night and going to bed at dawn; tinfoiled bedroom windows, whether at home or on the roam, to keep the light out; luring young, beautiful girls to his bedroom, where he engaged in much of what humans call "neck- ing," no doubt resulting in what humans call "hickeys" and what vampires call faucets.

This would certainly explain the "Elvis is not dead" notion. If he really were a vampire, all he would need is some native earth—in his case, Mississippi mud—and a nice hidden, dark location in which to stash a coffin. His documented midnight visits to Memphis mortuaries certainly lend credence to the vampire theory. If only I could go on talk shows without a mouthpiece! But since I do not deign to speak to humans, my media career will have to be confined to cat food commercials.

So I crouch just inside the door, envisioning rooting out a six-foot vampire with a depilatory problem.

Faint heart never won a fair fight. I guess I can go fang to fang with anything living or undead. I silently pad deeper into the dark. The floor is concrete, as it is in all backstage dressing room areas. It is also cold on the tootsies. In fact, it is cold and it is damp, which lends weight to my theory that Elvis is a vamp.

I hear a sudden machine-gun burst and flatten to the floor. Elvis kept those on hand, too.

Odd, though, no fire flashes have lit the dark.

My heart is pounding against the cold concrete to which it is pressed. In the restored silence, I can hear every beat, but little else. Another raucous outburst shatters the silence. I had hoped a vampire would stick to the gentlemanly and Old World weapons of fang and nail.

In an odd way, the sound effects resemble the chattering of an extremely noisy and noisome bird. Of course, this bird would have to be the size of a private jet to make such a racket. . . .

This is when I first seriously begin to get nervous about my situation. We all know that it is eat or be eaten in this predatory world. And there is nothing that so upsets an ace predator than the notion that there is a variety of one's usual prey that is big enough and hungry enough to turn the tables on the natural order.

Let us just say that I would not like to meet up with thelikes of a bald eagle without the intervention of an avarian enclosure at the zoo.

Scrabbling sounds echo off the empty walls. Now, scrabbling sounds are an interesting phenomenon. It implies something animal (or at least avarian) rather than vegetable or mineral. It implies some rudimentary intelligence, but nothing human. The scrabble could be as small as a mouse, or as big as a housecat, or an elephant, I suppose.

So what scrabbles in the dark and also carries a machine gun? Although smell is not one of my primo senses, I put my nose into action. I sniff things that I do not consider eating material but humans do: fruits. Large birds will snack on certain fruits, I believe.