Remembering A Great Los Angeles Character, Leo the Psychic Cat Master, At the County's Mass Burial Ceremony

Gentle reader...

Yesterday, we attended the annual laying to rest the ashes of the unclaimed at the County Crematory and Cemetery in Boyle Heights. Since 1896, Los Angeles County has sponsored this sacred ritual, ensuring that no soul shall pass in our corner of the world without a respectful farewell.

This year, the mass grave contained the remains of 1495 people who died in 2014. These are the ones who were so isolated that after three years of looking the social workers couldn't find their kin, the ones who died without a name, the ones whose families couldn't afford the cost of a service. Many of them were homeless and alone.

The interfaith ceremony is deeply moving. Mingled together in the soil are the vast varieties of Angeleno, while up above in the sun and the air, a large and varied crowd comes together to honor people who most never knew.

The tender service offers something for all laid to rest and all who mourn them: a Catholic Deacon swings a smoking bowl of fragrant incense, a female Rabbi sings the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer is intoned in Spanish, English, Korean and Fiji, a Native American shares a song from the Tule Reservation, then come verses from the Koran, Buddhist and Hindu scripture, and Maya Angelou's defiant poem "Still I Rise." (The poet, too, died in 2014.)

We were there to pay our respects to the nameless and the strangers, but also to mourn a lost friend found.

Leo Vaisman was a Westside street performer with a delightful act: he trained cats to stand up on their haunches and take paper money, and exchange it for rolled fortune-telling scrolls, as all the while Leo rattled off a litany of mystical feline accomplishments in a musical, Russian accented voice.

The Psychic Cats wore elaborate velvet robes and had names like Cassandra, Nostradamus and Sister Clara Clairvoyant. On each scroll you'd find a color photo of your elegant seer on one side, their generous, if slightly incoherent, predictions on the other.

Kim was captivated by Leo and the Psychic Cats, and booked them to appear at Scramarama, a music festival held at the old Palace Theater in 2001. A few years later, when we were married, Leo's cats told fortunes for our guests.

Booking this act wasn't as simple as calling a phone number or sending an email. Leo could usually be found working on the Third Street Promenade—unless he or one of his cats wasn't feeling well, business was slow, the weather was bad, or cops were hassling performers. A website was printed on the fortune scrolls (psychicamulet.com), but there wasn't anything at that URL. So in each case, booking Leo involved several trips to Santa Monica, walking up and down the Promenade asking other performers, "Is the Psychic Cat guy around? Can you ask him to call us if you see him?"

Also, Leo didn't drive, so he needed a taxi or a ride to the venue and back again after. And his cats had fleas, which is how we learned yes, you can safely flea bomb your Maid of Honor's car. (Sorry, Cathy.)

And he was worth all the trouble. There was something about Leo's act that seemed a thousand years old. You could imagine gentle guys with trained pussycats rattling off a similar patter in old Constantinople, Revolutionary Paris, in the shadow of Wren's churches, on the Ganges or the Yangtze. Suspending disbelief and thanking the cats for their prognostications was a little bit of everyday magic.

After our wedding, we were rarely on the Westside. There weren't any occasions for booking Psychic Cats. Years went by. And then one day, a friend asked how Leo was doing, so we put his name into the internet. And there he was, on the list of the unclaimed who had died without kin in 2010, and been cremated and buried by the County in 2013.

We wish we had been there to pay our respects to this lovely character on that December day. But he was in our thoughts yesterday, as 1495 other Angelenos were ushered out of our world and into the next. Any one of them could have been as colorful as Leo. May he, and they, rest peacefully and in good company.

For those of you who remember Leo, please spread the word. We did, by telling his story to the reporter from the Times who covered the ceremony. But it didn't seem enough somehow; we hope this is.

The latest You Can't Eat the Sunshine podcast episode went live today, and it's all about mid-century L.A. civic artist Joseph Young (The Triforium) and how city and county preserve his work.

New tours have been posted into spring, including a sequel to the all-day Desert Visionaries cultural history tour (this one featuring a stroll with baby and mama goats!). The full tour schedule is below or on our website.

We're back on the bus on Saturday with our last tour of the year, Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice. Climb aboard the crime bus and discover the beauty and mystery of old Downtown as we go in search of the weird time capsules where strange troubles unfolded. Join us, do!

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RECENTLY TOURED

Young Adult Librarian Vi Ha and Teen'Scape patrons created this magnificent Christmas tree beneath the dome at Central Library.

LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 3/4

Four times a year, we gather in the teaching crime labs of Cal State L.A. to explore the history and future of American forensic science. On March 4, 2018, join us for Wrongful Convictions: Investigatory Case Studies from the California Innocence Project. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research.

GIVE THE GIFT OF... US!

The holidays are upon us, and with them the obligation to come up with something agreeable for all kinds of people. We'd like to make gift shopping easy on you, with the gentle suggestion that an Esotouric gift certificate is always the right size and color. The recipient can chose from something naughty or nice from our wide range of bus adventures, and you'll save on our regular ticket prices when you buy three or more before 12/24. For more info or to reserve, click here.

COMING SOON

HOTEL HORRORS & MAIN STREET VICE - SAT. 12/9... Through the 1940s, downtown was the true city center, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their human context has been lost. This downtown double feature tour is meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core, and is especially recommended for downtown residents curious about their neighborhood's neglected history. (Buy tickets here.)

THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA - SAT. 1/6... Our traditional first tour of the year, which falls on or near the anniversary of Beth Short's kidnapping. Join us on this iconic, unsolved Los Angeles murder mystery tour, from the throbbing boulevards of a postwar Downtown to the quiet suburban avenue where horror came calling. After multiple revisions, this is less a true crime tour than a social history of 1940s Hollywood female culture, mass media and madness, and we welcome you to join us for the ride. This tour usually sells out, so don't wait to reserve. (Buy tickets here.)

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 1/13... Follow in the young writer's footsteps near his downtown oil company offices to sites from The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister, meet several real inspirations for the Philip Marlowe character and get the skinny on Chandler's secret comic operetta that we discovered in the Library of Congress nearly a century after it was written. Plus a stop at Scoops for noirish gelato creations and a visit to Larry Edmunds Bookshop. (Buy tickets here.)

THE BIRTH OF NOIR: JAMES M. CAIN'S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE - SAT. 1/20... This tour digs deep into the literature, film and real life vices that inform that most murderous genre, film noir, rolling through Hollywood, Glendale and old Skid Row, lost lion farms, murderous sopranos, fascist film censors, offbeat cemeteries -- all in a quest to reveal the delicious, and deeply influential, nightmares that are author Cain's gift to the world. (Buy tickets here.)

Additional upcoming tours: The Lowdown on Downtown (1/27), Special Event: Two Days in South LA: The 1974 SLA Shootout (2/10), Weird West Adams (2/17), Boyle Heights & Monterey Park (2/24), Echo Park Book of the Dead (3/3), Eastside Babylon (3/10), Special Event: Desert Visionaries 2 - Llano del Rio, St. Andrew's Monastery, Angeles Crest Creamery & Aldous Huxley's Pearblossom Ranch (3/17), Pasadena Confidential (3/24), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (3/31), The Real Black Dahlia (4/7), The Lowdown on Downtown (4/14).

OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST

In Episode #123: The Triforium + Topographic Map: Preserving Joseph Young’s Mid-Century Marvels in the Heart of Downtown Los Angeles, a special episode on an iconic L.A. artist. Plus Vermonica dismantled, Grand Central Market sold, some hope for a Pereira & more. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!

AND FINALLY, LINKS

Weird scenes inside and outside the L.A. Weekly offices.

Jack Stauffacher, master California printer, has died. Kim learned to lay type on the Cowell Press he started at UC Santa Cruz.

City Planning watchdog can’t get a straight answer about a dropped application for live music on a Hollywood hotel roof. Is it shadow city policy to turn the neighborhood into a party zone?

Bittersweet preservation campaign outcome: the landmarked Bob Baker Marionette Theater to be demolished, but Baker’s magical puppet shows will return to a new theater inside the development project slated for the site.

Terrible news for one of the finest streamline modern buildings in Los Angeles County, with a grand Hollywood story-- glamorous vet to the stars' pets!

The new suicide prevention fencing on Pasadena's Colorado Street Bridge is even uglier than we'd heard. A National Register monument deserves better design.

This sounds thrilling, and now we want to go to Iowa. (Actually, we already wanted to.)

A new digital archive that is all too timely: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement.

Turns out that winning Pershing Square redesign can't be built due to parking garage topography, so they'd like to block the view of the Biltmore with an LED light show.

Blues for Angels Flight? Not any more, Angelenos: your sweet 1901 funicular railway is back in service! But the man with the horn reminds us how sad we felt not long ago.

San Marino’s one and only Colonial Kitchen, the cutest and kitschiest diner around, is on the market. Got a few million bucks to save it?

A little bird tells us the interiors of the magnificent moderne Farmers Insurance Building were destroyed during the run of “street artist” David Choe’s “Choe Show” last summer.

LACMA’s new digital archive frees up lost gems from deep storage, like silent film star Gloria Stuart’s 1960s-era study of the Watts Towers with Simon Rodia standing at the gate. But such low resolution!

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric