This is going to come as a major surprise -- I am not your typical, off-the-rack superhero.
No, your traditional superhero is someone along the lines of Spider-Man or Iron Man, your basic troubled billionaire industrialist with a heart of gold or an angst-filled teenager with rippling abdominal muscles.
I'm more along the lines of the late actor George Reeves, who starred in the black-and-white TV version of Superman when I was a kid. I truly believed George was Superman, despite the fact he clearly spent waaaay too much time at the all-you-can-eat buffet and his supersize stomach left his stretchy pyjama-style costume on the verge of exploding. I suspect the only time he used his "heat vision" was to zap hot dogs when he wasn't standing around, hands on hips, deflecting bullets with his super flab. Imagine an older Elvis with a red "S" on his chest instead of a white jumpsuit.
But getting back to me. My superpowers consist mainly of (a) the power to tear open a full bag of Cheetos using only my bare hands; (b) the ability to empty a room of teenagers simply by asking if they feel like cleaning the garage; and (c) using a regulation TV remote control to flick through 375 channels in under 30 seconds.
Given these skills, you can imagine how excited I was when I was invited to portray an actual superhero in a photo shoot for a series of newspaper ads. These ads are for the Winnipeg Humane Society and are intended to promote Adopt-A-Cat Month, which happens to be June.
I was talked into this by Aileen White, the society's outgoing public relations and communications manager, the same person who persuaded me to spend four hours dressed as Santa last Christmas having my picture taken with dozens of dogs, cats, guinea pigs and snakes.
Aileen felt I'd be a perfect superhero, even though I am currently bald (after having my head shaved for a cancer fundraiser) and sporting a hideous Frankenstein-style boot (because, for the second time in eight months, I've torn an Achilles tendon).
"What is not superhero-ish about you?" she said. "The idea of the ads is: You don't have to be a superhero to save a life! If we got a model to do it, they'd do the whole model thing. You're the Everyman."
"You mean, I'm fat," I said.
"No," Aileen beamed, "You're brawny."
Anyway, the big photo shoot took place at my house Monday and, because the whole idea is to get people to adopt cats, Aileen brought along an actual cat named "Stormy" to pose in the photos with me.
Stormy is an exceptionally mellow cat -- he is the Bob Dylan of cats -- and his job at the animal shelter is testing dogs to see how well they get along with cats. Now I happen to own two dogs -- a basset hound and a miniature wiener dog -- both of which have brains the size of Raisinets and neither of which had ever met a cat face-to-face. My dogs believe their sacred duty is to stand at the front door and bark whenever anyone tries to come in because chances are they are (a) bad people; or (b) edible.
Confronted with the first cat they'd ever seen, my dogs reacted like a group of Boy Scouts meeting their first supermodel -- they knew they were supposed to do something with it, but they just weren't sure what.
So the basset hound, after satisfying itself the cat was not edible, lost interest and instead attacked and devoured a sandwich my son had unwisely left undefended on the front table. The wiener dog, on the other hand, bravely yapped at the cat from under our dining room table.
Being the size of a convenience store, it was not easy to track down a superhero suit for the photo shoot. Mine consisted of a red-satin pirate-style shirt, a pair of billowy bright-yellow genie-style pants, a canary yellow cape, and a fire-engine red headscarf.
Given the colour scheme, I looked like Hulk Hogan crossed with a giant bottle of French's mustard. In superhero terms, I was part pirate, part florist. But the shoot, under the guidance of photographer Frank Adam of Adam York photography, went surprisingly smoothly. Stormy was a real pro and I didn't do too badly either, right until the point I discovered my newest cat-induced power -- super-sneezing.
But that's not the main point. The main point is you animal lovers definitely need to go to the Humane Society right away and adopt some cats.
"We've got way too many cats," Aileen told me. "We get three times as many cats as dogs. There's a ton of cats and kittens up for adoption."
Here's my super promise: If enough cats do not get adopted, I will come to your homes and personally demonstrate my amazing powers.
You're going to want to hide your Cheetos!
doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca
Be a hero -- adopt a cat
If you'd like to get a cat or kitten from the humane society, visit the shelter at 45 Hurst Way or go to www.winnipeghumanesociety.ca
Adoption fees start at $79 and include, among other things, the cost of spaying and/or neutering. You don't have to be a hero to save a cat, but you'll definitely feel like one.
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