Celebrities, artists, vocalists, poets, and wildlife biologists were rehearsing speeches and performances this week to honor the deceased mountain lion known as P-22, the city’s beloved wild cat, in preparation for a celebration of life event at the Greek Theater.
The internationally-known mountain lion with the moniker “Hollywood Cat” will be memorialized from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 4 in Griffith Park’s outdoor amphitheater, a venue usually reserved for live concerts featuring rock stars, notable bands, and other performances.
As of last month, all tickets for the free event were distributed. About 6,000 people will be in attendance.
“It’s sold out. At capacity. There is no more room,” said Nadia Gonzalez, spokesperson for the event on Wednesday, Feb. 1.
“I am pretty sure this has never happened anywhere in the world,” said Gonzalez, speaking of the unusual event honoring a wild mountain lion. A printed list of notable names in attendance will be distributed at the memorial service.
Performers will be onstage — and so will students who’ve learned from P-22 curricula and their teachers, and artists who’ve crafted murals of the cougar. Also, those who “met” P-22 traveling through their backyards, or tucked in their home crawl spaces, will be on the program.
“We want to emphasize the next part of the story, which is how we can use this for momentum to keep them (Santa Monica Mountain cougars) safe,” she explained.
If you were not lucky enough to secure tickets, the organizers, led by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and its #SaveLA Cougars campaign, will livestream the event on the savelacougars.org website.
Also, 11 brick-and-mortar sites of the Los Angeles City Library system will be live-streaming the memorial service. They are Central Library in downtown Los Angeles and these 10 neighborhood branch libraries: Cypress Park, Granada Hills, John Muir, Lakeview Terrace, Memorial, Pacoima, Palisades, Pio Pico-Koreatown, R.L. Stevenson, and Westwood.
To find the library locations visit lapl.org/p-22 and look under ‘Celebration of Life for Mountain Lion P-22.’ There is no cost to watch the showing.
“It is our opportunity to have people share this moment. It feels like a community activity that people would enjoy sharing,” said Susan Broman, assistant city librarian on Wednesday.
P-22 lived for the last 10 years in the rural hills of L.A.’s Griffith Park, an 8-square mile “island.” He is known for his incredible persistence and nose for survival, having lived until 12, a ripe age for a wild puma.
In 2012, he left his mother in Topanga State Park, and in a 20-mile trek, he became the only big cat to safely cross two freeways — the 101 Freeway and the 405 Freeway — to settle into his home in the city’s largest urban park.
The male puma is the 22nd one to be studied by the U.S. National Park Service, hence the name P-22. The 20-year-long mountain lion study is still going and attempts to identify a segmented population of mountain lions living in the Santa Monica Mountains. The NPS team keeps track of about 12 lions in the region but has collared and tracked, and named, more than 100 in 20 years.