Sunday, April 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Celebrating Birthday

Las Vegas couple's calico cat 'tells' her life story in colorful photo-filled book

Don and Noriko Carroll did a photo book on their cat Birthday. Photo by Jeff Scheid. On the book's cover, Birthday appears to peer out from inside a rose. Don and Noriko Carroll added drama when Birthday trapped a mouse. Topi, a cockatiel, rides herd on Birthday as a kitten. Birthday peers out of a window while visiting Vermont. A young friend plays with Birthday at a New York park.

One calico cat, named Birthday, has had a meteoric rise.

From a lowly stray kitten in New York City's Little Italy, she has become a nearly famous feline living on half an acre in the Sunrise Mountain area of Las Vegas.

A new book, "Happy Birthday, the Cat" is not only about Birthday, it is purported to be by Birthday, too.

Birthday's owners -- referred to in the book as Mama and Papa -- are Noriko and Don Carroll, photographers and graphic artists who took the photos used in the book while living in a New York loft studio. They moved to Las Vegas a year ago.

The book documents the life of Birthday, who got her name because she was an impromptu birthday present for Noriko in 1996.

In many of the pictures, Birthday appears au naturel, playing with computers, staring out of windows, being bathed, napping, sniffing.

Other images appear to be staged, but most were not, Don explains.

"She was amazing as a kitten," he recalls. "She would always do something to get our attention."

Often, Birthday would play in the studio with whatever props the Carrolls were working with, just as the studio lights were being readied.

That explains photos in the book that show the cat playing with a suitcase of money or jousting with a duck. (The suitcase was used originally for a picture to accompany a magazine article on the illegal drug trade; the duck was to be photographically manipulated to create a "quack" doctor for an article about Internet medical sites.)

Some of the photos were contrived with computer assistance. Hence the shot of Birthday in firefighter garb, using her mouth to rescue a mouse. Noriko laughingly explains its genesis: Friends were grossed out at an image of Birthday carrying a mouse she had trapped in the Carrolls' New York loft. But after using software to add a firefighter uniform to the image, Birthday "looks like a hero instead of a villain," Noriko says.

Yet "Happy Birthday, the Cat" is far more than a collection of photos. It has no captions. Instead, the text tells a whimsical story about each sequence of shots. Some of the episodes are partially true, others are transparent fiction.

"You think that your cat is thinking something," Don explains. "We used to look at that cat, and almost always a story would develop," of thoughts that the couple ascribed to the cat in reaction to actual events.

The suitcase-of-money photos, for example, are accompanied by Birthday's alleged musings of how to spend the money in a chapter titled, "I'm Rich?!"

"What could I buy beside(s) cat food? How about a big field full of mint! ... Twitching my nose, I (next) thought about traveling around the world to taste gourmet cat food."

The couple admits they could have written a pseudo-biography about Birthday, but chose the first-person -- or more precisely, first-animal -- approach of an autobiography because it fit better with Noriko's English, which, although fluent, is imperfect.

Noriko, born in Narita, Japan, did not move to the United States until about 1990. Her English still indicates she is foreign-born.

"When I write, it sounds that way," she jokes. In other words, her written English comes off childlike, which suits the book's persona of Birthday as the cat "child" of the Carrolls.

The couple did not photograph their pet with putting a book together in mind. But after shooting thousands of images of Birthday, they realized they had created a body of work, whose collective impact was stronger than the sum of viewing each picture alone.

"Happy Birthday, the Cat" is the only joint book they have done -- Don wrote a pre-computer-age photography book, "Focus on Special Effects," which came out in 1982. But they have worked together in art and graphics since Noriko moved to the United States.

The couple had met by chance in 1988, at an airport in Bangkok as both were traveling to Katmandu -- she to do trekking in Nepal, he en route to Tibet to photograph the Dalai Lama, for a shot that eventually ran on the cover of Paris Vogue. Eventually, she moved to New York to study English and allow the relationship to grow.

Their main line of work is Concept Images, a business of stock digital images they sell via the Internet for limited use to advertisers, magazine publishers and others. Naturally, their Web site (www.conceptimages.com) has a section of cat images, but also features categories such as desert, fetus, islands, kickboxing, plants, skulls, sharks and volcanoes.

While living in Little Italy, the couple's building was about two miles from the World Trade Center. Noriko watched the second airplane hit on Sept. 11, 2001, while Don walked toward the towers, camera in hand, to document the disaster. He returned to the site for several days afterward, with a shovel and other tools to help clear debris on the perimeter of the wreckage.

To explain the effect of a major landmark being abruptly erased from a skyline, Don points to the hills, including Frenchman Mountain, behind their back yard in the eastern Las Vegas Valley. "It's like getting up one morning, and this mountain is gone."

When the terrorists hit, the couple was already arranging to move from New York, driven away by ever-increasing rent. They had decided on Las Vegas for its reasonable real-estate prices, easy air connections and proximity to friends in California.

They found their present address after visiting new housing tracts, getting depressed at the similarity of mass-produced houses and then, on a lark, driving their rental car up Sahara Avenue, heading east.

The goal was to "drive until there's no more houses," Don recalls. The older neighborhood where they ended up is now where they live.

Asked if they have any more books on the horizon, the Carrolls have a flippant answer and a real answer.

The flippant answer is that Cookie, a second stray cat they took in after moving to Las Vegas, is now writing an exposé, "The Truth about Birthday." And that truth, Don reveals after some prodding, is, "Birthday isn't as nice to other cats as she is to people."

The real answer is, they just may put together a book about the hummingbirds in their expansive yard. They've been shooting for a while, and have captured such unusual moments as a hummingbird urinating and a baby hummingbird emerging from the nest.