Itchy Bitchy - The Ultimate House Pet - Mike Dobrzelecki's House in Montcalir NJ 1978

I was going through boxes of old photos the other day and found a gem
from my immediate post-college days.

While attending Rutger's I was sharing a house, which was a small
mansion on Church St. in Montclair NJ. It was split up years before into
two separate houses and we had 5 girls on one side and 5 guys on the
other. Needless to say, our parties were legendary, especially the
Halloween parties.

One of my roommates (also named Mike) was a curator at Turtle Back Zoo and
he used to bring home animals to stay for a week, or so, at the house
- the most interesting being a lion cub named "Itchy Bitchy". We used to
take the lion cub for a walk on the streets of Montclair and it was a case
study in people seeing what they wanted to see. One woman came up to us
gushing over what an interesting dog we had and we made up an exotic
name on the spot and told her she could go buy one on Rt.46 in Wayne - I
think we sent her to the address of Fountains of Wayne, as I recall. We
also took Itchy Bitchy to a local tavern on Bloomfield Ave which had a long
and narrow bar. We picked up the cub and sat her on the bar stool with her
paws on the bar rail and she just sat there for a time nonchalantly
looking left and right. The barmaid was down at the end and, although
she saw us come in, she was busy cleaning glasses and without looking up
announced, "Sorry, you can't bring your dog in here, you'll have to
leave." To which we responded, This is not our dog, this is our lion."
Well, she flipped out exclaiming, "OMG, IT IS A LION!!". Itchy was good
for a couple of free drinks that afternoon, but we had to cut our stay
short after people started coming in to the bar.

Mike, the zoo curator also worked with Marlin Perkins on the "Wild Kingdom"
TV show and he used to regale us with stories of Marlin being an alledged
angry drunk who abused everyone on his team. He also related the background
story behind the famous scene in the show's opening credits of Marlin fighting
the huge boa constrictor. Marlin was allegedly blitzed as usual and his crew
purposely did not go to aid right away because they hated him. Marlin nearly
checked while they were busy debating whether to lend a hand - hope his Mutual of
Omaha policy was paid up for his wife's sake.

Not to shock people too much, especially those Hyperscalers who know me as a
bearded Grizzly Adams type, that's me at top left loooking ver much like a young
Billy Joel. Compare the 1978 photo to the one below of me in 2007 sitting in a
1st ELT Kosciuszko Squadron Mig-29A at the PAF base at Minsk-Mazowiecki in Poland

Mike Dobrzelecki