Rewrite but no path_info

Running shared host Apache 1.3 htaccess only:

I have mod_rewrite working where all requests that don't have a dot
(.html, .css, etc) are rewritten to one web app which dynamically
generates all other content/web pages. This does what I want:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z/-]+)$ cgi-bin/my_app [L]

However, path_info is now null and path_translated is empty when I
printf the content to a web page. Script_name prints as /cgi-bin/
my_app

I wanted to use path_info (I assume) to see what path the request is
actually for. iow, if the request is for example.com/page1/info , I
would like to examine path_info to see /page1/info.