Over the weekend, I had the unique pleasure of visiting a cat show in Timonium. I’m not going to say it was the highlight of my weekend, but I am going to say I am glad I went there. As you may know, I was just as broke as hell for the last few days, and so it was by the kindness of my not-quite-as-broke friend Letitia that I was able to gain admittance to this circus mundanarum (it cost 7 dollars for… some reason).

What’s a cat show, you might be wondering? Well, it’s like a dog show, but with a couple of differences. You may think the biggest difference is that there are cats instead of dogs, but you would be wrong. The biggest difference between a cat show and a dog show is that in a dog show you are showing off a bunch of animals that actually give a shit. Structuring a cat show like a dog show is, more or less, a hilarious recipe for awkwardness and unmet expectations.

The first thing you notice as you simply enter the building is the overwhelming wall of cat pee smell. Opening a door and seeing a tiny, ancient man sitting there clutching a hand stamp and smiling while being olfactorily abused by the most wretched cat pee smell is certainly enough to make you reach into your pocket for that $7, isn’t it? Not for me. Thank god for friends.

The hall was a mausoleum of middle-class white ladies. The tortured souls of cats stood at attention in soft, scrubs-patterned fabric cages, existing only for our amusement. These cats were dead long before they were born. The cold lack of enthusiasm emanating from the husbands manning the merch booths was enough to drive me to drink. Alas, it was a dry room. (Not entirely- I found a bottle of tequila squirreled away in a cardboard box of personal effects- namely, urine odor furniture spray and a velvet blazer. It was certainly a husband box.)

Letitia was mainly here for what the website described as the “agility course.” This, I imagined, would be the cat equivalent of the dog show floor, where the more willing show animals, dogs, would run through a course displaying obedience and control, gaining points for tightness and quickness and losing points for being sloppy. Yes, it was just as I imagined it would be. A lady holds up a cat, puts him on a pedestal thing, and proceeds to coax the cat around the course with a bell on a string on a stick. The main difference between this and a dog course is that you pretty much automatically win if you can get the cat to fucking do anything. One of the cats did manage to jump through a hoop, but the smarter cats, of course, realized you can go under it.

Seriously, once the timer started, it was put down on a desk and pretty much forgotten about until 15 minutes later when the cat was contemplating whether to come out of the plastic tunnel or just die in there. One hilarious incident had a poor kitten try to run up three steps in pursuit of the bell, but pummel it’s tiny kitten face into the top step instead. That kitten refused to even go near the steps again, and was disqualified. I have never seen such a sheer waste of PVC and Jo-Ann’s fabrics as this obstacle course. I got kind of sick. Sick and laughy. Not a bad combo.

Later, we checked out the judging booths. A row of cages was set up along a shelf, partitions keeping the cats from seeing each other (because, as it turns out, cats want to kill the shit out of each other) and a judge plucking them out one by one to tell the gasping audience which ones are their favorites. Ok. And they aren’t called judges, by the way. These people are known as Cat Fanciers. Yes. Like the magazine. We watched several rounds of dead-ended women (and one man) compare this Siamese to that Maine Coon to this Cornish Rex (that’s a cat, right?) to that Egyptian Mau. This was somehow interesting. I have never heard a cat’s body referred to as “a brick” and have that be considered a good thing. Nor have I ever seen such bizarre cats as the Snake Cat and the Spock Cat and the five-cats-in-one Hair Loaf.

The most fun part of this section was when one Fancier replaced a cat back in the cage and placed a ribbon on the cage, the cat then decided to start eating the ribbon from inside the cage. I started cracking up of course, which prompted the sadly present gentleman in front of me to turn and glare at me as if to say “have some respect, don’t you realize that careers are on the line?” Yes, sir, I do realize that. Hence, the laughing.

We hung around for a while, but when people started shuffling around and getting even sadder than usual, we decided it was time to go. Letitia pointed out one ridiculously gigantic necklace pendant that was only cat related because of a porcelain cat resting atop the fuck-your-neck super amethyst.

We took some photos as the guy behind the counter sat in a chair and thought to himself in a ratio that was 0 percent his wife and 100 percent that bottle of tequila. We left, pushing our way through all the expectations we were required to leave at the front door, drove back to the city, and drank. Oh, we drank. You can’t not. Thank god for booze. The end.

P.S. I felt this particular exhibit seemed straight out of a museum about humans, far after our extinction:

this is how I feel