I believe Maris was trying to reference illegal immigrants.
I love all of your cat's names (besides the Sweetie Pie one!).
I am aware Maris was attempting to make a political point. However, what he said was true about cats, not immigrants.
Second half of quote, you walked into it!
Snowflake (childhood cat), obviously, pure white and long haired.
Natasha, for Natalia Sedova, Russian revolutionary
Rosalind and Celia were the heroines of Shakespeare's
As You Like It, inseparable friends who called one another "sister" (my Rosalind and Celia were actually sisters) and who run off to have all sorts of adventures together. They are also the "r" and "c" in crandc, short for C, R, and C.
Celia died at 18. Later that year a 5-month male kitten walked up to me in my vegetable garden and told me he was moving in; there is really no other way to describe it. Since the beloved of Rosalind in
As You Like It was named Orlando, the name was a no-brainer.
His 2 sisters did not want to tame so I fed them outdoors. One disappeared, the other showed up with a litter. I realized I'd be feeding 20 cats if nothing was done so I trapped them. One kitten escaped, hung around a few days and then vanished. I had mama and the other 2 kittens in a room overnight to go to the clinic in the morning. Mama was totally wild, shredded everything in site, gouged plaster out of the walls. A feral female who's had kittens will never tame, so I had her spayed and vaccinated, made a bed in the garden shed while she recovered, then she left. The two kittens, meanwhile, were soaring about the room with such an amazing display of leaps and turns it was obvious they were going to be ballet dancers when they grew up, so were named for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf (Rudy) Nureyev.
Rosalind died, just shy of 21 years, in 2007.
Last year an abandoned cat appeared in my yard. He was Brandon, since his first evening he sat by me watching TV when Brandon Roy won the game for the Blazers. Sadly, Brandon had health issues and being abandoned, spending weeks eating and drinking whatever he could find, pushed him over the edge. After only about 6 weeks his kidneys failed and he had to be euthanized. At least he had an easier end than he would have left wild to die of starvation and uremic poisoning.