Cat Greenleaf is a mom, wife, pet collector, adoption advocate, urban hillbilly, owner of The Catskill Mountain House event and retreat venue in Roxbury, NY, and creator/host of the four-time Emmy Award-winning series Talk Stoop on both NBC & USA Networks. And YES, she pinches herself daily on the commute from her bedroom to her front steps where she gets to drink coffee with the world’s most interesting people, accompanied by her faithful Great Danes, Molly and Michael Jackson. Between broadcast, digital, and out-of-home platforms like taxi cabs and gas pumps, Talk Stoop is viewed over 12 million times a week.
Among those who have stopped by the stoop: Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart, Don Cheadle, Woody Harrelson, Mick Jagger, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Arianna Huffington, Claire Danes, Dan Rather, Katie Holmes, every Kardashian possible, Selena Gomez, Wilco, the Muppets, Tony Robbins, Joel Osteen, JLO, Dick Cavett, Elliot Spitzer, Jesse Jackson, Rahm Emmanuel, Dan Ackroyd, Heather Graham, A-Rod, Mike Tyson, Kate Hudson, Martha Stewart, James Spader, Michael Strahan, Barry Manilow, Alan Cumming, Nas, Orlando Bloom and Michael J. Fox.
At the age of four, Greenleaf learned that her older sister was adopted. That’s when she told everyone she’d build her own family through adoption someday. Four sounds young to make a choice like that, but no choice was made. Cat simply knew it. Several years and four continents later, Cat ended up back in her native New York only to marry a boy from the next town over. Together, Cat and her husband Michael Rey welcomed their first son, Primo, from Lafayette, Louisiana, and then their youngest, Truman, from Oklahoma City. Although Cat maintains warm relationships with her sons’ biological families, she blanches at the term “adoptive mother”. That simply isn’t how it feels.
In 2010, Greenleaf started the LUST campaign - it sounds dirty, but don’t get too excited! LUST is an acronym for Look Up Stop Texting. LUST began in the name of traffic safety, but Cat quickly realized that cellphone and social media addiction was real, robbing people of concentration, manners, and experience. She quickly created items ranging from smartphone covers to T-shirts to baby onesies, reminding folks to Put It Down & to Stop Texting Start Living. Macy’s and Fred Segal were early adopters of LUST products, and Arianna Huffington tapped Greenleaf to spread the word through positive TV pieces on HuffPost RISE. Cellphones get shut off when Cat and Mike get home - great for family life, frustrating for their friends and colleagues. They ain’t saints, but like everything, screen time is just another road this family is learning to navigate together.
Cat’s sincere curiosity and irreverent sense of humor fuel her Talk Stoop interviews, making her a regular stop on A-List press tours. The conversations she values most, however, take place when celebs swing by the Stoop without anything to promote. Sometimes people just want to talk, even the famous ones!
