ALLAN MAYER
As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a little dustup with Cathy’s favorite newspaper this week. Over the course of the last few days, I’ve gotten a gratifying amount of encouragement and support, which I’ve certainly appreciated. But I must say, the only really difficult moments I had were when I contemplated the fact that Cathy wasn’t around to enjoy the festivities.
(Photo by Emmanuelle Richard)
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And believe me, she would have enjoyed them.
I first met Cathy in the fall of 1990 over lunch at a new restaurant on Third Street called Orso. She was interviewing me for an article she was writing for a now-defunct women’s magazine about a now-defunct city magazine.
Sort of the story of her life.
Of course, the magazine she was writing about was Buzz, which my partners and I were in the process of launching at the time, and which Cathy later helped put on the map.
There are some who will tell you that Cathy was an acquired taste. But I took to her right away. She was smart and funny, with a finely developed sense of the absurd. Her big eyes would sparkle or darken, depending on which direction she sensed your politics were heading. Mine were always going the wrong way as far as she was concerned. But she tolerated me as one would tolerate a well-meaning but slightly demented elderly uncle.
What she wouldn’t tolerate were cant, sanctimony and bullies. Political correctness enraged her. She was, of course, a conservative, which is to say she believed in the virtue of personal responsibility. I sometimes thought her lacking in sympathy for the less fortunate, but the fact is she spent far more time than me — far more time than most of us — looking out for and taking care of strays, both the two-legged and the four-legged kind.
As a writer, she was a dream to work with. Her copy was clean, her arguments clear, her technique impeccable. She was a master of the running gag, the throwaway and the dying fall.
Above all, she had a voice — a slightly querulous, sometimes severe, but always amused and knowing, tone that was absolutely distinctive. She made me laugh and told me things I didn’t know. You can’t ask more of a writer than that.
And now she is gone. Or at least as gone as one can be who has touched as many lives and brought together as many people as she obviously has.
As you get older, you learn to focus less on what’s gone out of your life and more on what you’ve been lucky enough to have had in it.
Cathy sometimes drove me crazy, and on more than one occasion I would come home from lunch with her and tell Renee, “I don’t know why I’m still friends with her.” But a few days later, I’d read something she’d written, and I’d laugh and send her an e-mail. And we’d go out for lunch again.
