To get into the Orlando Cat Cafe, we had to enter from the Minch Coffeehouse with baked goods, and panini next door. While most of the Orlando Urban Sketchers were ordering coffee, I was outside sketching the cat Cafe exterior.
Hillary Geiger was kind enough to give me a ticket to get into the Cat Cafe room. I hadn’t read the whole invite to know to order one beforehand.
To get into the cafe Cafe itself you had to use an isolation room. You had to make sure the door was closed behind you before being let into the large Cate Cafe. That would keep any cats from bolting out the door. These cats didn’t seem like escape artists. They seemed perfectly happy allowing people to play with them.
There was a laser pointer which would project a bright red dot on the floor or walls causing a kitten to pounce and never catch the light. A loose shoelace hanging off of a light stick could produce the same effect. One cat climbed up on an artists table and knocked over all the art supplies. They clattered to the floor loudly and people rushed over to help clean up.
Honestly I don’t trust cats. My younger sister had a dark cat named Smokey, and he bit me and scratched me. It was no surprise then that no cat ever made its way up onto my table. To my right was a board covered with photos of the cats in the cafe with names under each photo. There was Magnolia, Swiftie, April, Hazel, and a sinister looking Karolina to name a few. In all there were over 20 cats in the cafe. As I was sketching an employee came up to the board and put a sticker on of of the cats that announced that she had found a new home.
One thing I didn’t realize when doing the sketch is that the reservation was just for an hour. Most of my sketches take 2 hours to complete. so when the Orlando Urban Sketchers started gathering for the throw down and photos. I was far from finished with my sketch. I had to throw down a few more washed back at the studio. So is the sketch finished? Well a sketch by definition is never finished.