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Laura E. Hall, Escape Artist
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Move Over, Maru. Make Way, Lil Bub!
It’s Oregon Cats’ Time to Shine at a New Cat Video Festival
The Facebook likes have cooled. The Instagram hearts feel hollow. Face it: Most people just canāt handle how great your cat is. They canāt see what you see when you watch your cat do something awe-inspiring, like shut its eyes slowly or roll over onto its back really fast. They donāt appreciate the voice you made for it inside your head. They donāt know the cute way it sneezesāwell, you missed it that time, you pressed the wrong buttonābut here, look, sheās still doing something really cute!
No longer. With the first annual Oregon Cat Video Festival, you can screen your fur ball in front of a captiveāand no doubt raptāaudience in Salem, Oregon. For a $20 fee (*stage whisper* thereās a Groupon!), you can submit your homemade cat media for competition. (The festival ticket is separateābut 20 percent goes to the Oregon Humane Society.) There will be no Lil Bub to hog the limelight, no Maru to steal your thunder. Really, the only hard rules for submission are that your video has a cat in it, is family-friendly, and has a copyright owned by you, its auteur.
Hereās what the Oregon Cat Video Festival isnāt: the Internet Cat Video Festival, which has screened for the past few years at the Hollywood Theatre. That festival started at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 2012, and drew 10,000 people its first year. In 2016, the art museum discontinued the festival, āto put our resources towards the remodeling of our campus including the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.ā The Twin Citiesā loss is your gain, Oregon.
Nathan Marsh, the festivalās executive director, wants to replicate the success of the Walker. āWe were thinking, 'Hey, we could do that over here; thereās nothing like that over here,āā he says. āMaybe we could change it up and add some different things and make it an actual festival [rather] than just a viewing of one movie.ā
Indeed, Marsh has worked hard to set the stage for what he hopes will be an annual tradition. Thereās a beer and wine garden and cat-related vendors. Thereās a Cat Condo Kid Area and Cat Costume Acrobat Show, and before you ask me if those are actually four separate activities and Iām missing punctuation, no, Iām not. Thereās Moshow the Cat Rapper, who is the most exciting Portland phenomenon to go viral since Birdie Sanders.
āWeāve got this DJ console weāre going to load up with different cat noises for the kids to play DJ Kitty Boom Boom,ā Marsh says, referring another internet cat who is more famous than your cat but who will not be competing against your cat at the Oregon Cat Video Festival. āWe also have some furries coming.ā
So update your phone storage settings, find a piece of bread to stick over your catās face and make it look like they have a bread headāthat is always funnyāand submit today.