It was a large room because the room was large and the house which contained the room contained no other rooms save for a small bath/bedroom which Ellie rented out to people selected at random from the telephone book and to whom she would send bills which threatened legal action if payment was not prompt. It was really Jimmy's room but since he was dead he didn't mind if people rented it, especially since they never occupied the room but rather their respective residences, as Ellie had pointed out several times on several occasions when she gave her daily lecture/discussion session on the stage that occupied the north section of the house. She invited the whole family, and John and Jimmy, and sometimes Plastron the wonder cat, would watch as Ellie paced back and forth across the stage, shouting, sometimes whispering, and always spending minutes on end rearranging her books on the podium. She usually forgot what the lecture/discussion was about and ended up playing violent Bach fuges on the pipe organ instead.

Plastron the wonder cat was almost five years old, and, in spite of the fact that he had been named after the underside of a turtle, he looked remarkably handsome. During the day he would admire himself in the mirror on Jimmy's door and meow mournfully to be let in, not realizing that Jimmy was dead and that his room had already been sold to nameless tenants. This inaction on Jimmy's part troubled Plastron greatly, because Jimmy had always liked Plastron and had often fed him small pieces of machinery, which Plastron had come to enjoy. But somehow, Jimmy would no longer open his door and the cat was left to stare at his own, handsome reflection.

After a while, Plastron began to brood and ponder over his own life, and what he was going to do with it. It occured to him that for most of his existence, he had achieved only superficial recognition rather than the honors, awards, and Nobel prizes which most humans seemed to receive constantly. He decided, finally, in a flash of decisiveness and strength of character, to devote his life to achieving no less than worldwide human recognition. With this new goal in mind, the entire environment took on a new look to Plastron. Trees were no longer trees but were vantage points from which to observe and to be observed by human society. Household objects were tools by which he could gain recognition. The pipe organ was one of Plastron's favorites. Rather than applying a trial and error method to learning its operation (which most cats would have done), he spent hours observing the way Ellie played it. Finally he was able to turn the organ on, pull out as many stops as he could, and play a loud C minor chord in the middle of dinner, which resulted in enormous amounts of recognition from both Ellie and John.

"Who the hell is playing my organ?!" shouted Ellie after a shocked silence during which the slice of roast beef on her knife drooped slowly until it fell into the puddle of gravy in the middle of a large pile of mashed potatoes.

"It's me! It's me!" Plastron the Wonder Cat wanted to shout, but he was sadly unable to speak English.

"It must be Plastron." said John to Ellie, who had vacated her seat and was running to grab the machete from above the mantlepiece. Plastron jumped down from the top keyboard, bounced off the seat, and landed on the G bass pedal. The organ made an extremely low-pitched sound which shook the floor and knocked a small china cup onto John's domino train (the longest in the world with over 750,000 dominos), which began to fall in gracefully curving lines and patterns. John began to quiver in his chair and scream obscenities at the top of his lungs as he watched his creation beautifully destroy itself. Meanwhile, Ellie was hacking Plastron into small pieces in her imagination while Plastron himself was hiding in the maze of pipes, watching his new-found recognition with glee. Glee was a small, green creature with dingy gray wings and a crooked antenna.