(This is a continuation of the story of how my cat Viggo got his name.)
My friend and former housemate Val and I are two very different people, and back then we seldom agreed on anything.
For instance, her taste in men runs toward pretty boys – long wavy hair, clean-shaven, smooth chest, slender, sweet, and so on. I like 'em hairy, burly, and manly – but soulful and funny, with an enigmatic, artistic edge.
Her taste in movies includes big action-adventure blockbusters with lots of car chases, like the Lethal Weapon series and the Terminator movies, for example. She also loves fantasy flicks like “The Lord of the Rings,” the Harry Potter movies, and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” I, on the other hand, love indie and foreign films, thrillers, film noir, psychological dramas, gangster movies, classics - that sort of thing.
We do have some common territory, however. We both like feel-good romantic comedies (OK, some might call them chick flicks) like “Phat Girls” and “Maid in Manhattan.” And we are both highly amused by raucous, over-the-top comedies like Tyler Perry’s Madea movies and the Harold and Kumar flicks.
Well, at the time we got the gray and white kitten, “The Lord of the Rings” was really big. And the Danish-American actor Viggo Mortensen was in it, playing some kind of warrior. I haven’t seen any of the movies in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (not my thang), but I just looked on Wiki and found out that the name of the character played by Viggo Mortensen was Aragorn, also known as Strider. Val of course had seen “The Lord of the Rings” numerous times and had seen the other movies in the trilogy as well, and that’s how she became a fan of Viggo Mortensen. He was pretty enough to suit her taste.
He was also manly and soulful enough to meet my standards. I knew Viggo from several movies, but particularly liked him as Gwyneth Paltrow’s soulful artist lover, David Shaw, in “A Perfect Murder.” The character, a painter and photo collage artist, had a rather gothic, high-ceilinged New York art studio in an old abandoned warehouse, and he and Gwyneth’s character would meet there for their paint-spattered trysts. After a while her wealthy but cold husband, played by Michael Douglas, found out his wife was cheating and decided to have her murdered. The rest of the movie entails the wily rich guy playing cat and mouse with his young wife and her lover.
So, in the end Val and I both agreed that Viggo Mortensen was hot, and that Viggo would be the name of our adorably macho new gray and white kitten.
Viggo the cat has turned out to live up to his name quite well. He’s every bit as enigmatic and soulful as Viggo Mortensen was in “A Perfect Murder,” and also every bit as heroic and manly (catly?) as the actor was in “The Lord of the Rings.”
He even catches rats. Outside, of course.