Toward the end of the year Perry received a call from a woman with a foreign accent. "You got my cat Pierre," she announced.

The caller, Mme. Sulinaberg of Paris, had traveled from France to visit her daughter in December 1969. Someone had left a screen door unlocked during her visit, and Pierre had gone walkabout. Mme Sulinaberg asked Perry to let her have a look at the cat he had found.

"When I took him over there," said Perry, "she said I could keep him as long as I signed an agreement saying I wouldn't show him as a pedigree because she did not like the pedigree judges. I said, 'Well, it don't matter. I done registered him as a household pet with T.I.C.A. association , and his name is Granpa Rexs Allen, and that's the way it'll be.' Then she gave me the pedigree papers."

Said papers declared that Granpa/Pierre had been born "in Paris, France, February 1, 1964, early morning," said Perry. "His father, Pierre II, was a Devon rex; and his mother, Queen of France, was a sphynx."

Broccoli and Mayonnaise

Although Perry often shows the cats he has adopted as part of their rehabilitation training, he didn't begin showing Granpa, who had already been neutered when Perry adopted him, "until way late because, you know, of his age. He wasn't [shown] for over four, five years," by which time Granpa was working on his second decade.

"I was thinking maybe that because of his age he probably wouldn't win those high awards," said Perry, but his fears were misplaced. Granpa tap danced through the household pet ranks at shows sponsored by The International Cat Association until he had earned the rank of supreme grand master, the highest award offered to cats that compete in the household pet division. He charmed the judges the way a boulevardier charms wealthy tourists.