PETER SUTHERLAND PRESENTS PETER & ANDREW SUTHERLAND'S MAJESTIC PLAZA

My mom had a cat. Everyone in our family loved this cat. Andrew and I wanted to keep things super casual, so we refused to let anyone name it--we just called it "The Kitty" or "Kitty." My mom had to live with this, even though it was very foreign to her to have an unnamed pet, because animals were usually treated as equal family members in our house. Kitty was black and white, and my mom would drape Kitty over her shoulders and wear it almost as a scarf while she made dinner. The kitty's back legs would lie limp as they straddled my mom's left shoulder, and it would watch her prep food with its head draped over her right (best cat ever?). One day, the kitty didn't come home. It didn't return the next day either. This was a bad sign, because there were coyotes near our house that would sometimes munch on pets.

That afternoon my mom came running down our back hill in tears--I hated to see my mom cry. She almost never cries. She is one of those people who can handle everything--she's worked in juvenile detention facilities, nursing
homes, schools for special needs kids, etc. Andrew and I found the kitty lying dead in the road--it had been hit by a car. My mom came up from behind us and really started to scream. I froze and started to break down and cry, partly because my mom was crying really hard and I was sad for her, but also because we had lost that cat. I also felt guilty about owning a cat and forcing it to live with the risks of a busy street nearby. As my mom and I stood by the fence and cried, my brother calmly walked to the garage and reappeared with a snow shovel and a dirt shovel. He scraped the kitty off the ground with the snow shovel as if the body was a pancake, and gracefully dropped the kitty over the fence into our backyard. Then he grabbed the dirt shovel, stabbed it into the ground, and buried the kitty in a perfect little grave within about one minute. He did all of this without loosing his cool. We both hugged my mom and went back in the house.

I don't consider the cat burial to be a collaboration, because Drew did all of the work, but it is an intense memory for both of us. Several years later Andrew and I collaborated on the videos below:

Survival Stroke

Crunchy Tacos

Fun Spray All Day

PETER SUTHERLAND

http://petersutherland.net