Finding the Best Kitten Names

What I've Been Doing in My Spare Time

Hello!

I have not been watching movies. I have been going over copyedits and naming kittens.

Let’s talk about kittens—unless you want to have a conversation about comma splices and the pros and cons of using a thesaurus? No? Okay. Kittens it is.

For years, I’ve wanted to adopt cats, but I was a renter and didn’t want to limit myself to pet-friendly apartments. I had cats when I was a kid and I have especially fond memories of a brother-sister pair of kittens that we adopted after we moved to a new house. So I thought it would be nice to do the same thing for my children.

I’ve been keeping tabs on the humane society website, looking for potential kittens to adopt and a couple of weeks ago I saw an adorable pair of striped kittens—a male and a female. I hurried to the center to adopt them, but one of the kittens was already gone! The remaining kitten hissed at me. I was about to leave when one of the volunteers pointed me toward a pair of male kittens from Oklahoma. I wanted a male-female pair so I didn’t think I’d take to them, but one was immediately friendly, meowing and bumping his head up against me. His name was Zane; his brother, Wobbles, was hiding under a flannel sheet, but he let me pet him. They were both purring loudly, and had bright clear eyes and shiny coats.

You know how the story ends. I couldn’t leave them behind.

We decided to rename them, because Zane and Wobbles didn’t seem quite right. We wanted to find a pair of male names that went well together, taken from one of our favorite movies. Considering the various options was a lot of fun . . .

Cosmo Brown and Don Lockwood from Singin’ in the Rain were serious contenders. We thought Zane would make a great Cosmo since he was so friendly and funny.

We also considered C.K. Dexter Haven and Macauley “Mike” Connor from The Philadelphia Story. We would call them “C.K. and Mac.”

Max and Grover from Kicking and Screaming were a possibility, especially since, like cats, these characters make an art of doing very little.

My son, who has become a big Wes Anderson fan, wanted us to consider Anthony and Dignan, from Bottlerocket.

But in the end, there was a clear winner. Meet our kittens . . .

Wally (né Zane) and Andre (né Wobbles), named after Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, the stars of one of my all-time favorite films, My Dinner With Andre.

We had to make the call: which kitten was Wally and which was Andre? That was tough. Which kitten was more down to earth, more practical, more likely to be happy with his morning kibble, less likely to wander?

And which kitten would be a seeker, founding theater groups in the forest and staging elaborate rituals to come to terms with his mortality?

I think we chose the right names for the right kittens, but we’re still getting to know them and their wacky personalities. In the mean time, I think it might be time for me to rewatch My Dinner With Andre, preferably with the kittens purring beside me.