When Ann Fink moved in with her...

When Ann Fink moved in with her boyfriend in Venice, her two cats joined his two. A comic, he was on the road for months at a time.

“I essentially raised those cats myself--fed them, cared for them,” she said.

They broke up after 2 1/2 years and she took all four animals with her. Then the cat fight began.

“He told me to return a saucepan, a pair of socks, a quilt and his two cats,” said Fink, an actress and dance instructor.

She kept the cats; he sued. And so it started.

“He gave a deposition to my lawyer,” Fink said. “I gave a deposition to his lawyer--3 1/2 hours.”

Eventually, the stress and the expense became too much for her. So, she has agreed to return his Romeo and Molly on Saturday, though it will be hard on her Oreo and Elliot.

“They’re all very close,” she explained.

In return, the ex-boyfriend will drop the suit.

“He sued me for $24,000,” Fink said, “$100 per day per cat for loss of companionship.”

You know how things run in threes; so it is with the New York Times’ recent coverage of our little frontier town out here.

First, the other Times ran a map of L.A. that identified Hope Street as “Bunker Hill Avenue.” Then it quoted a commuter as saying that it took him 1 1/2-2 hours to drive downtown from South Pasadena (he was actually coming in from Covina).

Now, in a story on the reopening of the landmark Bradbury Building downtown, the other Times said the first lessee was the state treasurer, “Kathleen Sullivan.” The ex-TV news personality? Actually, the person watching over California’s money is Kathleen Brown.

Of course, Brown is married to an ex-TV news executive.

And, entertainers do gravitate to politics in California. For instance, Sonny Bono, Palm Springs’ singing mayor, will seek Alan Cranston’s U.S. Senate seat next year. When Bono made the announcement in Century City Tuesday, we couldn’t help but think of the poignant lyrics from one of his hit songs, “Laugh at Me”:

Why can’t I

Be like any guy?

Why do they try

To make me run?

Well, we sort of wonder, too.

“Desert Dirt,” a column in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department publication, Star News, reports that a secretary at the Antelope Valley station was overheard asking:

“What state is Utah in?”

All we know is, it’s northeast of Covina.

miscelLAny:

L.A.’s first permanent motion picture studio was a defunct Chinese laundry on Olive Street, where “The Heart of a Racing Tout” was shot in 1909. The landmark location is now a parking lot.