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Date: Mon, 1 Sep 86 05:28:20 EDT
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: She's a witch! She's a witch!
Kate has a cat named "Pyewackett". Now a while ago, Bill Rosenblatt posted some info on a British folk-rock group with the same name. I asked him if he had any idea where the name came from, and he has done some research on the matter. It turns out that "Pyewackett" means "a witch's familiar".
-Doug
"Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!"
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 86 09:50 MST
From: "James J. Lippard" <Lippard@HIS-PHOENIX-MULTICS.ARPA>
Subject: Re: cat named Pyewackett
She might have got the idea from the movie BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE (1958), in which Kim Novak plays a witch in New York City who has a cat named Pyewackett. (Not a bad movie, stars Novak, James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, and Ernie Kovacs.)
Jim
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 86 13:05 PDT
From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: Pyewacket
Concerning Pyewacket (one of several spellings --even the KBC has spelled it more than one way):
Kate has two cats, as everyone knows, but because of the history behind Pye's name, he (?) gets all the attention. (Kate herself always gives them equal time in her comic strip.)
The name may indeed mean "witch's familiar" in some early form of English. IED believes that Kate probably heard the name in the movie "Bell, Book and Candle", which starred James Stewart and Kim Novak (as the witch). In that movie, Novak had a Siamese cat named Pyewacket who acted as her familiar, and around whom much of the plot revolved. Pye's role is probably the largest ever given to a cat in a play; IED has read newspaper reports describing auditions for the role of Pye in at least two different regional productions. So KT's Kit-T has notorious namesakes working on the boards.
Now, if someone could just track down the origins of the name "ZOODLE"....
Incidentally, according to one of Kate's earliest NME (or MM) "interviews", the Bush family used to have a dog named Piggy, as well. Perhaps this is the name of the hound who appears in the famous backyard family portrait that appears in Vermorel's or Kerton's book. Anyone know?
written by Love-Hounds
compiled and edited
by
Wieland Willker
Sept 1995 June 1996