Kevin Scanlon

Elayne Boosler

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

"Doesn't she look like Audrey Hepburn?" asks Elayne Boosler of Jazzy, a visiting pit bull–Weimaraner mix. Boosler does an impression of Jazzy as Hepburn, playing off the way the actress would draw out "really" to sound like "raaa-lllly." "I like your hair — raaa-lllly I do," Boosler, 60, coos. When Jazzy starts happily lapping from a water glass, Boosler quips, "She does that with scotch, too, which is even funnier."

From its decor, you would never know that this house in the Studio City hills belongs to a groundbreaking comic, the first female to get her own one-hour cable comedy special. There are no photos of Boosler with former flame Andy Kaufman; none that show her performing on Late Night With David Letterman or The Tonight Show. Instead, it's filled with folk art, much of it made by her. A lifelong Mets fan who grew up in Brooklyn, she also owns a pair of Shea Stadium seats. "The blue ones," she specifies. "Even the seats in my house suck."

Also the founder of Tails of Joy animal rescue organization, Boosler is a dog lover — but other than the occasional visiting pooch, her home is currently dog-free. "I've gone through eight dogs," she says dolefully. "I can't take the heartbreak."

See also:
*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013
*10 Best Stand-Up Comedy Shows in Los Angeles

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Cameron Leung Photography

Donna Salvini provides collar and ID tag for Barry.

Tony, Bau Bau, Barry and Grace are wheeled through customs at the Tom Bradley Terminal at LAX on a recent Saturday. Barking in their crates, the four rescued retrievers are wheeled outside, where volunteers welcome them with food and water after a twenty-one hour flight from Taipei, Taiwan.

They're accompanied on their flight by Judy Sn, a dog rescuer from Orange County. She plans to fly to Taipei and back every twenty days this year, on her own dime, to accompany the lucky dogs -- strays who have been neglected in Taiwan and sent here to be rescued, in a collaboration between a rescue team in Taipei and another one here in Southern California, Indi Lab Rescue. "If you really love dogs you don't want to see them on the street suffering," she explains.

But the Los Angeles Animal Services department kills an average of 20,000 stray dogs per year. So why spend so much effort on saving the lives of animals so far away? Is it ethical, and does it even make sense? Even ardent animal lovers and rescuers have questioned this practice.

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Prancing through the 80,000-gallon lake

Normand Latourelle dreams about horses. Such dreams are appropriate because Latourelle is the creator of the touring shows Cavalia and Odysseo, which, for lack of a better description, have been called "Cirque du Soleil with horses." As one of the original co-founders of Cirque, Latourelle doesn't much mind the comparison.

His dreams are fairly elaborate. One involves Pegasus, the mythological horse with wings — although in this dream it isn't the horse that flies but the spirit of the rider. The spirit is a girl in a diaphanous gown, hovering over the horse and rider like an angel.

Another dream features a jumping competition: horses versus humans, leaping over a bar, Olympics-style.

In yet another, Latourelle walks in a dark forest. He looks up and sees musicians in the trees: The forest is singing.

All these elements now appear in Latourelle's shows, which combine acrobatics and multimedia special effects with the equine arts. The flying girl became one act in Odysseo. The forest became the opening scene, with musicians in the trees standing on hidden platforms.

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From Alex Berg

In a city where no one walks, hundreds of volunteers took to the hilly streets of Silver Lake this past week in search of Tesla, a 25-pound Terrier/Poodle mix, who bolted from her home in search of her owner, Alex Berg, just before New Years Eve. Berg, the artistic director of the L.A. branch of the Upright Citizen's Brigade, one of the top comedy theaters in the city, was in Connecticut for the holidays when Tesla went missing. Upon hearing of her flight, he immediately emailed friends and created a Craigslist post, but it was the hashtag #FindTesla going viral on Twitter that mobilized comedians and dog lovers alike to aid in the search to find Tesla.

"A few friends came up with the #FindTesla idea," said Berg over email Friday when the search was still ongoing. "Former students of mine who'd met Tess when I'd brought her to class started tweeting about it, then performers at the theater, then total strangers who don't know me or her. Without them, the search for Tesla would probably be me sitting around in my underwear being depressed. Now, underwear-clad depression is just one part of a multi-faceted scheme to get her back."

Upon returning home, Berg transformed his Silver Lake apartment into #FindTesla Headquarters. Real-time maps were used to document confirmed Tesla sightings and more than 100 local volunteers, many of whom had never met Tesla or Berg, were organized into teams to maximize their ground coverage and potential impact. The word continued to spread as #FindTesla was tweeted out by celebs such as Gillian Jacobs, Rich Eisen, Jeff Garlin, Ryan Adams, Taran Killam and Jerry Ferrara (aka Turtle from Entourage). #FindTesla was even mentioned on radio station KOST, with the Dido song "Thank You" dedicated to their cause.

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Ted Soqui

Marilyn Krieger, with her Bengal cat, holds a seminar on clicker training and cat behavior.

When professional cat writers get together, certain conventions of the English language go out the window. At the Cat Writers Association Annual Conference, you don't say perfect, but "purrfect." Memories are "meow-mories." Newcomers are "kittens." Old-timers who have attended the conference for the past 19 years of its existence are "nine-lifers." 

But don't be fooled by the fluffy lingo. Cat writing is not for the faint of heart.

There's the pay, for starters. "Our cats work for kibble; so do we," says veteran cat journalist Sandy Robins. The trick, she has discovered, is finding a way to relate everything back to cats. Are you traveling? Try a piece on cat statues around the world. Forgot your alarm clock? "Well, our cats are our alarm clocks." 

Even the simplest of time pegs -- autumn -- can be leveraged for cat relevancy. How many college students take their pets with them to school, for instance. Or how about a pet anxiety piece: empty nest syndrome, as experienced by your cat. 

The savvy cat writer doesn't automatically discount publications outside her field. "Car Wash magazine. You think they'd have nothing to do with cats," Robins says. "But they may be interested in a piece on traveling with cats. Where do you strap a cat's carrier in the car so the cat doesn't fly out the vehicle?"

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Photo by Dana Malbandian/Bravo

Emily Huh (left) shows a visiting student how things work at the office during the "Bring Your Kids To Work Day" episode

How can you make a living creating cat memes? UCLA grad Emily Huh and her husband Ben bought the weblog I Can Has Cheezburger in 2007 and built it into a humor empire. They boast two New York Times best sellers, 500 million page views per month and an additional 110 million video views.

Next, ICHC is set to be the subject of a new reality TV show on Bravo that will reveal the magic behind the meme. LOLwork premieres on Nov. 7 at 11pm Pacific and Eastern time on Bravo. Emily Huh, the editor in chief at ICHC and one of the stars of the show, spoke to us about how she made funny kitties her business and the sociology behind a successful meme.

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Tad Motoyama

UCLA's Barbara Natterson-Horowitz leads a discussion at the Zoobiquity conference, in front of the L.A. Zoo's gorilla enclosure.

Clad in a white coat, teal scrubs and leather clogs, the doctor describes the case to the group. He explains that 27-year-old Rosie had painful periods and trouble conceiving. "She just wouldn't get up in the morning, and she wasn't eating or drinking during her periods," he says. After a sonogram and consultation, the medical team did what it could: surgery to remove the uterine fibroid.

This patient, though, is different from the hundreds of others the doc has treated: Rosie's a 130-pound orangutan at the Los Angeles Zoo.

If her case sounds familiar, it's because animals and humans often have the same afflictions. Some experts believe that increasing communication between veterinarians and physicians might benefit all animals, even the human ones. That's the idea behind Zoobiquity, a second-of-its-kind conference held two weeks ago at UCLA and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, who started the Zoobiquity movement and published a book by the same name in June with science writer Kathryn Bowers, tells the audience of nearly 200 veterinary and medical professionals that the conference is "a living laboratory. Not only is this conference interprofessional and interdisciplinary, it's also interspecies."

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Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell stole Bonny the shih tzu. Woody Harrelson wants her back.

Vito Corleone has his cat. Dr. Evil has Mr. Bigglesworth. Jabba the Hut has whatever this thing is. Even Hitler had a German Shepard named Blondi.

Villains throughout history have had pets. It's an easy way to humanize them, so that they're not just mustache-twisting caricatures. Sometimes they're a source of sympathy for the audience, as with How the Grinch Stole Christmas' melancholic dog Max, resigned to a life of thankless servitude to the cause of holiday hatred. Other times they're more along the lines of henchmen, like Ursula's Flotsam and Jetsam in The Little Mermaid.

The true expert on villains and their pets is Martin McDonagh, the playwright-turned-screenwriter-director. McDonagh's Broadway play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which went up in 2010 at Mark Taper Forum starring Chris Pine, is about the leader of an IRA-like terrorist organization who tears off for home after he hears his cat is sick.

His new movie Seven Psychopaths, which came out Friday, doubles down on the fury-meets-furry motif. The pet shih tzu of a gangster (Woody Harrelson) gets taken by a dog-nappers (Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken), and Harrelson spends most of the film trying to retrieve her. In addition, another of the titular psychopaths, played by Tom Waits, carries around a rabbit. The film even pays a brief visit to the Zodiac Killer, whose wall is adorned with a huge cat photo ("I picked that cat poster myself," McDonagh says).

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Nanette Gonzales

The heat kept away all but two of the neighbors' cats

Writers, novelists in particular, often have a cat or two attending them as they go about the terrifying business of setting words to blank page. Novelist Sandi Tan had 11. One by one the cats began to appear at her doorstep as she was writing her debut novel, The Black Isle.

Tan's novel is about a young medium who moves with her family from Shanghai to a remote, fictional Indonesian island called the Black Isle. The island is overrun with ghosts. Chaos ensues. The darker the scenes Tan worked on, the cuter the creatures that showed up in real life.

She scrolls through photos of them now on her iPad. "That's the thing about writing, you're just this grim creature," she says in her clipped, melodious, Singaporean accent. "And you post these cat pictures on Facebook. And suddenly you seem like less of a goblin, you know?"

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Photo by Steven Leigh Morris

Our houseguest

In our new column, First Person, L.A. writers tackle the good, the bad and the funny about life as they know it.

The other day, a duck flew into our backyard, in one of the canyons of Highland Park. A big white duck. It just dropped out of the sky, in the middle of this huge, inhospitable city.

I know almost nothing about ducks, except that they like water. So on the morning of the duck's arrival, I went outside with a red plastic bucket of water. He let me no closer than about six feet before waddling away. But when I stirred the water with my fingers, the duck's eyes lit up. When I splashed a few drops in his direction, his wings flapped in joy.

I withdrew, and the duck approached the bucket and drank, and drank, and drank. Were the bucket larger, or he smaller, he would have thrown his body into it.

Dropping all prior commitments, my fiancée and I drove to a feed store in Glendale for duck food. (We also bought a gaudy plastic kiddie pool.) The sales clerk tried to answer our stream of questions. "Big white ducks don't fly," she told us. "It's probably a Pekin duck. Somebody tossed it over your fence."

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