"archy's autobiography" by Don Marquis (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Archy the cockroach is an invention of Don Marquis, who was a newspaper reporter. Archy is the reincarnation of a vers libre poet who leaves messages on Don's typewriter. He types by butting the keys with his head and he can't operate the shift, so it's all in lower case. Amongst archy's friends is Mehitabel the alley cat who claims she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. She leads a wild life with the many tomcat suitors who come courting her. Her view is that, "life is just one damned kitten after another".

If you like the sound of archy and mehitabel you can read more here:
http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/index.html

Don Marquis seems so fresh and modern that it's hard to believe that he was a contemporary of Ruyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.

An opera hat, also called a Gibus, is a silk top hat which collapses. It was meant for patrons of the opera who could sit on the hat. If you hold the flattened hat by the rim and tap it on your other arm it pops up and miraculously become a top hat again. If you watch old musicals you might have seen Fred Astaire use one as a prop.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gib1.htm

Видео "archy's autobiography" by Don Marquis (read by Tom O'Bedlam) канала SpokenVerse