Guest post by Clea Simon

Somerville, MA is not Minneapolis. But this gritty little city, living cheek by jowl with Boston, is not only fun and funky (second only in artists per capita to New York) but also feline friendly. And so, after seeing the success of the Internet Cat Video Festival at the bigger city’s Walker Art Center, Somerville got on board with the honestly named Copy Cat Festival. Despite a winter storm that brought an additional several inches of snow and gale-force winds to town, on Sunday, February 17, the Somerville Arts Council hosted a total of 600 cat lovers at two iterations of a three-hour fest of local and international cat videos, cat photography and poetry, with a few feline surprise guests thrown in.

Maybe it was the call for local participation. According to the Boston Globe, four dozen local videos were submitted to the cat fest board, which included members of the arts council and Somerville Community Access Television (which was renamed for the festival as “Community Access Television of Somerville” or “CATS”). Tickets for the festival, which was originally scheduled for 4-7 p.m. at the Somerville Armory, were quickly sold out, necessitating the scheduling of an earlier, noon-3 p.m. showing.Continue Reading