The most fascinating people I’ve ever met share a sentence – at least they share the start of a sentence. They’re the ones that look you in the eye and say “If you would have told me when…”
I love it when someone starts a story with those words. It tells you right off the bat that this is a person who has endured a major course correction in their life. They were on one path, heading in one direction, when something beyond their control happened, and suddenly they were off towards something different- something unpredictable.
The stories all start the same. Then after the “told me when moment” they insert that unique nugget that makes them so intriguing. Afterwards their stories all end the same. “I’d wonder what you were smoking.”
“I hated cats! I mean HATED them with a capital ‘H.’ That’s just how I was raised. My parents hated cats, so I hated cats,too.”
If you would have told my friend Jana Greene that one day she would grow up to produce viral cat videos- not only would she have wondered what you were smoking, she also would have called you insane. And if you told her that years ago, when she was a kid, she would have asked “what’s a viral video?”
None of us heard that phrase back then. Nor did we know what social media was, or apps like Tik-Tok.
“It was when I met Bob,” Jana tells me. “He was a cat person. He had two of them named Hunter and Socks. And as strange as this will sound you really don’t know cats until you meet a cat.”
It didn’t take long for Jana to fall in love with Bob’s cats. I guess she also fell in love with Bob, too. They married a short time later. One day the groom gave the bride her own cat- a tuxie bread she named Catsby. And just like that the five them; Bob, Jana, Hunter, Socks and Catsby were all in the same house- and all was right with the world.
Until it wasn’t!
Over the course of the next decade Hunter and Socks got old and died. Then this past April Bob’s mom got sick. Eventually she passed away, and right around that some time Catsby, now 10 years old, also died.
“It was just such a dark time,” Jana vividly remembers. “When we got back in town from my mother-in-law’s funeral I had to have somewhere for my grief to go. So, I adopted two kittens and started to record them on my phone.”
What happened next was a fluke. The type of thing that you couldn’t plan. Jana was video taping one of the kittens when we can only assume the other one got jealous. The neglected cat butted into the frame- literally butted into the frame, mooning Jana and her camera.
It was done with such impeccable comedy timing, that Jana decided to share the clip on social media. She added some funny music. Uploaded it to Tik-Tok, and within a day more than a million people from around the world watched and liked the clip.
“It was so surreal. I was just trying to get over my sadness. It was just for fun, and suddenly it had a life of its own.”
Other videos would be posted. Many of them became viral hits of their own. Jana and her cats were building a fan base. Currently she has close to 14 thousand followers, all that discovered her in just a few months. And the woman who started a platform to deal with her own grief is making a discovery of her own. Turns out that many of the people who are stumbling upon her content are sad themselves.
“I’ve gotten hundreds of messages from folks all over. They tell me that they were feeling depressed, and then they came across the video and it put a smile on their face,” Jana’s voice almost starts cracking as she finishes her thought. “Everyone has such a heavy heart these days. This is just my way to share some joy.”
So, yes if you would have told Jana that one day she would be producing cat videos she would have thought you were crazy. But then life intervened, and a woman who once hated cats with a capital H, found her destiny with a phone, an app and a couple of furry friends. And thousands of us are glad that she did!
Thank you, Wilmington’s Crazy Cat Lady, for all the smiles!