The sofa epic

Today I destroyed my sofa. Actually, my cat destroyed my sofa. I just finished the job for her, with a little help from Herbie, my downstairs neighbor. First, I decided to take one last picture of it. As I set up the composition, Jazzy came walking into the scene:



See the armrest? That's tinfoil. It discourages Jazzy from scratching (a little) and helps hold in the stuffing. Jazzy jumped up on it one last time:



She'll miss it:



Herbie and I started by removing the upholstery. This was held on by staples. Lots of them. So many in fact, I'm surprised that in all the years I sat on that sofa, I was never stuck by one. I was also surprised to find some of the original upholstery underneath the top layer of fabric. Check it out... back in the '70s, this was one happenin' couch:



Herbie and I think that the sofa was intended to last forever, but with much effort, we managed to hack the thing to pieces. Here is the sofa fully deconstructed and at a lower gravitational potential:



The way the sofa was put together, small items could fall through the cracks between the seat, the seat back, and the armrests, where they would end up floating around in the interior of the sofa, never to escape. The dismantling of the sofa liberated decades of crap. Here is an inventory of items found inside the sofa: $1.47 in change, 3 cushion hooks, 2 pencils (one from my high school, never sharpened), one Bugs Bunny patch, one desiccated remains of a pear (consumed), popcorn, pumpkin seeds, jelly beans, one tube of Blistex lip balm, one Old Maid playing card, one Newsweek subscription card, two paper clips, one rubber band, one pen, one brochure for a weight loss pill (?!), one scrap of paper with the name Charlie McCarthy on it, one badly deteriorated fragment of celluloid film featuring Peanuts characters (see picture below), one Jolly Rancher wrapper, one sucker stick, one Hershey's Kisses wrapper, and one green LED (through-hole variety).