Rejected New Yorker Cartoon

How many times do I have to say it, I'm only in town to see CATS!

I enjoy starting the year with Yankee rejection. Shortly after the New Year began or perhaps shortly before it did, and when doesn't matter anyways, I saw two news stories about New York that amused me as a True Westerner. I mean that in the truest Sam Shepard sense. See, I even go to plays and stuff.

I can lay claim to being a True Westerner because I was born in the Rocky Mountains, and my Paternal Grandfather and his Brother were Sheep Ranchers in Colorado and Utah. So there.

Back to the news stories. So the first one is that the cosmopolitan sophisticates of NYC are shuddering to think about the recent Coyote sightings in Central Park. They're Scaredy Cats!!

Most of these members of the Intelligentsia have never even seen a Coyote. Unless it was on some PBS Planet Show, of course. So in their imaginations they visualize the BIG BAD WOLF!

The interviews with these panic stricken wussies were straight out of the Brothers Grimm. I must admit that for a change I enjoyed their hysteria. It was refreshing to see them getting all worked up about something other than the BIG BAD ORANGE NEW YORKER WOLF!

Where I live in the Sonoran Desert, we see Coyotes all of the time. In fact, there is an actual Coyote Den on the hillside across the street from our house. Hanging around on a Sheep Ranch will also teach you just about everything you need to know about Coyotes as complex intelligent predators.

The second news story was about how everyone in New York (critics especially) really, really despise the brand new movie version of CATS! Their disdain has something to do with the hideous special effects that paste the actors and actresses mugshots onto the bodies of cats.

As if the Broadway Musical was Great Art. Face it, grown adult humans dressed up as giant kitties prancing and mewling about on a stage for several hours was always a dreadful proposition.

CATS sucks, and it always did. All apologies to T.S. Eliot who wrote the original poem and The Wasteland too. See, I told you I'm an educated hillbilly that even reads poetry and stuff.

I will even stick my neck out and say that T.S. Eliot hates CATS. I bet that every night he haunts the bedroom of Andrew Lloyd Webber, pacing back and forth on the headboard hissing about royalties.

Besides, why do New Yorker's hate the movie so much, when they stood in line to see the musical on Broadway for 18 years and 7,485 performances? I guess they must have changed their minds.

So I thought that if I combined the two I would have a marvelous cartoon for the New Yorker.

Coyote hysteria meets the suave and jaded disdain for CATS. Boy, was I ever wrong.

You should see the rejection email they sent me, all haughty and condescending. They actually told me that I should read the magazine to familiarize myself with the sort of cartoons they publish. They even provided a link to their website so they could instantly dun me for subscription money.

I'm definitely stupid enough to be a freelance illustrator, but not so stupid as to blindly solicit publications that I know nothing about.

Every Winter, the Snowbirds (mostly from Chicago and New York) show up in the Sonoran Desert.
They tend to think that those of us who live here year round are unwashed cretins. I take umbrage at this because I take a dust bath every single day and my family isn't from that part of Greece.

They don't watch out for their animals that they bring with them, leaving their dogs and cats alone outside. I have tried to tell some of them about the Coyotes and that when they can't catch a Javelina, or a Roadrunner, a Bunny Rabbit, or a Fruit Rat, that their Cat or their Dog will do just fine.

Every year the missing pet flyer's get posted no matter how you try warning them.

I even attempted to convince one of them that their desire for some Free Range Chickens was the proverbial "Fox in charge of the Hen House". They told me that they have a fence, and I shook my head, tsk, tsk, tsk. I tried to tell them about the food chain. But they thought I was talking about a really long line outside some swanky new eatery in Brooklyn. Let's just say that everyone loves Chicken and leave it at that.

Strange thing is that the New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross, who was born in Aspen, Colorado in 1892. He grew up in Red Cliff and Silverton, Colorado, also Salt Lake City, Utah, and Denver, Colorado. All of these places being the stomping grounds of my ranching family after Greece.

Something tells me Harold Ross would have understood my joke.

So I'm adding this cartoon to my ever taller stack of New Yorker rejects.

Someday it is going to be as tall as the Empire State Building.

Hey, that's a good idea for a New Yorker cartoon!