P.D. Cagliastro: She’ll mummify your pets
Forget the usual Memorial Day weekend plans. This Sunday, 15 New Yorkers will learn how to mummify a frog.
Brooklyn sorceress P.D. Cagliastro will teach a four-hour class at the Observatory, an art space in Gowanus.
“Mummifying anything,” Cagliastro explains, “is a long-term, intimate relationship. Even with a hamster.”
The $60 class sold out quickly, she said. The frogs are from a Chinese grocery store.
She makes her living mummifying dead pets for mourning owners, charging anywhere from $100 to $4,000 per mummy.
It’s not taxidermy; pets are embalmed and then lovingly wrapped in cotton or linen. The most common requests are for birds, hamsters, kittens and rabbits, she says — but she’ll encase anything under 15 pounds.
Once, she interred a $100,000 Cartier ring inside a 14-year-old cat. Another time she coated a full grown iguana with purple glitter.
