GC, NW Larpa Curses of Marcus, a blue female, was CFA's Best Exotic and 17th Best Cat for the 1997-98 show season. Curses was bred by Larry & Pat Helmick in southern California and is co-owned by Pat with Mark Hannon and David Raynor in suburban Washington, DC.
Pat has bred Persians for a number of years, but is just getting started with Exotics. She took one of her Persians (Larpa's Indecent Proposal, a tortoiseshell) to GC Del Adene J'Bustopher Brown, a brown tabby Exotic that at the time was living with Becky Orlando.
While with Becky this incredible male sired some impressive kittens, including CFA's Best Kitten a year ago. (He also sired two national winners this show season and Best Kitten in CFA's International Division.) Pat was pleased with the litter and decided to repeat the breeding and it was in that repeat breeding that Curses was born. Pat thought Curses (named due to her solid blue color) was the best kitten she's bred, but she wasn't interested in keeping this kitten.
Mutual friend Wain Harding knew that David and I were looking for a nice Exotic and he suggested that Pat offer the cat to us. Pat flew out to a small show in Virginia in May, 1997, so that we could see the kitten. She didn't want to simply ship us the kitten; she wanted to be present when we saw her for the first time to insure that we really liked her. Well, we did, and Pat returned home with an empty carrier.
What was there not to like? She had a fabulous, short, boxy body; wonderful, thick, luscious coat; an extreme head topped with tiny, forward pitched ears, and a darling personality. Timing was bad for us to show a kitten. She was almost six months old and the kitten classes are small at that time of the year. We hoped for a regional kitten win with her and showed her as much as we could without spending lots of money to fly off to distant shows.
When she turned eight months old in late July, she was about 100 points shy of what 20th Best Kitten in our region had the previous season, so we (erroneously) assumed that the points would be higher this year and that we had missed out on a regional kitten win. We decided to continue showing her as an adult, in hopes of achieving a regional win in championship.
Her wins to-date had indicated that was a realistic goal. She granded in one show the first weekend of August at a Florida show run by Sheila Dye. It wa a long drive from Virginia to Florida, but the judging slate looked good for Curses and even included Becky Orlando. The drive back just whizzed on by thanks to the one show grand. Curses was shown in the mid-Atlantic area for the next few months and made a respectable showing. However, in November she went through some pretty dramatic changes for the better.
Her body filled out and she no longer looked like a kitten. She was finally a magnificent, mature adult. Judges noticed the big improvement and her placement in the finals reflected it. At the CFA International Show, for example, Kitty Angell made her Best Cat after failing to use her at a show earlier in the Fall. Curses wound up 3rd highest scoring lonhair in championship at that prestigious show and we were delighted. We were also encouraged to readjust our goal from a regional win to a national win.
In late December, I drove 13 hours to the large Nashville show with many of the other national contenders present. She wound up highest scoring cat in show. We invested in some air fares to both the large Houston and San Diego shows in January and Curses did extremely well. The highlight of the season, however, had to be the San Francisco Revelers show in March. This is always a well-run show with lots of competition and has consistently been one of our two favorite shows year after year. This year, however, the show was being taped for a cable network (Animal Planet) to be televised in June. They opted for a different format than those earlier shows on the USA Network. They picked a half dozen cats to follow for the entire weekend and Curses was one of them.
They met us at the airport when we arrived and stuck with us until we left the showhall on Sunday evening. I suspect they were as happy as Pat, David and I were when one of the cats they followed, Curses, wound up the weekend as highest scoring cat in show!
I had a plane ticket to return to California the following weekend for another large show, but we were so excited about Curses great success at Revelers that we decided it was the perfect time to retire her. She had sufficient points for a national Top 25 win and had the breed win as well, so why not stop the campaign on this "up" note?
After the show aired, "It's Reigning Cats in San Francisco," I was amazed at the response. People that I hadn't heard from in years contacted me to say that they'd seen the show and to congratulate us (Martie Fellman was one!). Complete strangers stopped me in stores, in the cafeteria at work, etc. to say they we'd never met, but they saw us on the show. It was most gratifying and a wonderful, exciting ending to our show season with Curses.
Curses was a delight to show. She is a quiet, reserved cat at home; however, she thrived on all the attention she received at the shows and she was "on" throughout the show weekends. She was really wound up on the judging table and proved to be quite a character that delighted both the judges and the gate. She thoroughly enjoyed the experience, which made it much more fun for us, too. She was, however, a picky eater.
Pat had raised her on fresh meat. We don't normally feed meat but that and baby food was all she'd eat for us. She wouldn't touch dry food or canned food, which we feed to our other cats. We humored her while we showed her, but upon her retirement there was no more fresh meat. Naturally, she quickly adjusted to canned food just to prove to us that she knew the special treatment was at an end.
