Mrs. Levine even had a pack of "Cat in the Hat" playing cards for recess.
The substance is all in the detail: a TV on the floor, a cheap shelving unit bearing a few DVDs and books, a kitchen where a dishcloth, a bottle of Herbal Essences shampoo and the pack of cat food atop the fridge are the only signs of human presence.
This year the appeal is being boosted by a £500,000 injection from Whiskas, raised by the sale of special packs of cat food between now and September.
But more likely they were a jazz-loving pack of cool cats searching out one hot nightclub after another.
If you are picturing a crazy lady living among mountains of newspapers, with a pack of yowling cats stinking up the place, forget it.
"You figure out it's just like when you toss a piece of meat at a pack of hungry cats," she said.
His fine biography of Robert Maxwell, that fat villain whose shilling was taken by so many Labour apparatchiks, emerged surrounded by Captain Bob's slavering libel lawyers like a pack of stray cats around a fish-head.
(Mr. Kieber, 47, a production rigger for events and concerts, recalled that when he moved in, the garbage in his second-floor loft was so thick you couldn't see the floor. There was also a pack of feral cats, which was useful because of the rats, he said, and a refrigerator full of maggots).
Tabby's name stood out, as did the creature's particular daring, and I had the strange sense of already knowing that the poor thing was doomed to a gruesome and shocking end: hunted and murdered by a pack of wild cats, some pages later — by which time I was marvelling both at the various peculiarities of the book and at my unsettling ability to forget them.
Credit to everybody working that night, who – despite being dressed like Cypress Hill on their way to a pool party – dealt very well with a situation that must have felt a bit like trying to herd a pack of feral cats into neat, orderly lines.
