Actually it is the Cat IN the Hat, but you get the point.  Today is the birthday of Theodore Seuss Geisel [AKA Dr. Seuss]: March 2, 1904 - September 24, 1991.

It may surprise you to learn that I clearly recall insisting on almost all the details of this composition -- the location (top of the slide), the wardrobe (a golfer-style corduroy hat with earflaps and a simple shirt and slacks ensemble set off by a cardigan sweater with faux pony fur panels in front).  I don't recall putting in any request for a cat prop, so that must have been my sister's idea; she could be extremely willful at times.  And so could I, of course, although I have no idea now why these creative decisions were so important to me then, beyond the not unreasonable explanation that the hat and sweater, though hand-me-downs, were new to me and therefore novel and worthy of careful recording for posterity.   

I can hear my grandmother asking why I have a hat on and will someone at least make me put the earflaps up, it'll read all wrong in the shot, or something to that effect.  She was not wrong, as you can see.  I did not always know what was good for me.  One could argue this is a trait carried over into the present.  Plus this was before I started flunking flashcards in school and we were taken to the optometrist, so my sister isn't squinting because of the sun but because she can't see and neither can I, which I realize does not, however, excuse having my eyes closed. 

"Mommy, look," my sister said with a tone of childlike wonder -- admittedly not hard to pull off considering she was four years old -- when she stepped outdoors wearing her first pair of tiny cat-eye shaped glasses.  "The trees have leaves."

"I felt like such a bad mother," my mother used to say when remembering the moment.  "I had deprived my child of leaves."

And I feel bad about yesterday's post, the one about the young porn star and the gay porn producer's murder in Pennsylvania.  I think it reads a little disparaging and  may delete it.  So for now, Gentle Reader, let me leave you with an image of a kinder, gentler Pennsylvania.  Taken in a time long ago, but proof if any were needed that even then a young boy had very particular ideas about what it meant to be in front of a camera, and how it should look, and the camera angle, and what you should be wearing.

Or not, as the case might be.