Total Cat Mojo

¿Que Es Mojo?
 
I am in front of a large and very enthusiastic audience in Buenos Aires, while on a tour of Latin America. Over the course of the year, I ve adjusted to speaking with a translator in places like Malaysia and Indonesia, and I had just been in Bogotá and Mexico City. If you can have simultaneous translation, with the audience wearing headphones, it is a blessing beyond belief, because the audience is with you the laughing, gasping, and applauding happens (one hopes) just a second or three later than with an English-speaking crowd. In the big scheme of things, it s a minor inconvenience.
 
But, when you and your translator switch off (you finish a full thought before he begins), well . . . it s just a massive headache at best, an absolute kamikaze mission at worst. My translator would stand next to me, a ghost dodging my physical outbursts and stream-of-consciousness rants. The more excited I get, however, the less I remember to heed the presence or the needs of my ghost. Some translators, the ones who pride themselves as practitioners of a linguistic art form, allow me to get an entire para­graph out of my mouth before tapping me on the shoulder or giving me that sideways glance, in order to succinctly and with equal fervor catch the audience up.
 
On this night in Buenos Aires, my translator isn t that person. She is actually a newscaster who happens to be bilingual. It is not the most grace­ful dance, that s for sure. There is much in the way of toe stepping on both of our parts.
 
Improvisation aside, I always introduce the concept of Cat Mojo early in the show. It s the linchpin of my entire presentational spiel. That intro­duction, on this night, is firing on all cylinders; I m feeling it for sure, as I attempt to occupy the space between cat guy and Pentecostal revivalist. I m breathlessly demonstrating what a Mojo-fied cat looks like, shame­lessly preening, modeling the tail and ear postures, the

Jackson Galaxy is a cat behaviorist and the host of Animal Planet's hit show My Cat from Hell. He is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Catification: Designing a Happy and Stylish Home for Your Cat (and You!). Jackson is also the author of Cat Daddy: What the World's Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean.

Mikel Maria Delgado is co-owner of Feline Minds, a San Francisco Bay area based cat behavior consulting business. She is currently working on her doctorate in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, studing animal behavior and human-animal relationships.