Stewart Dawson
The Footprint of the American Chicken
“I was ashamed and also humiliated because I bore the reproach of my youth”
Jeremiah, 31:19)
It was a stifling and sultry day. There were two parades on the Fourth of July, 1983. The first one was in Baileys Harbor. It was a stifling and sultry day. Alex remembers it well because he lost almost twelve pounds. Ninety three degrees and 82% humidity, no breeze, no shade, it was a stifling and sultry day. The chicken outfit was abominable. Alex had to prop the beak open with a stick so he could see out and get the slightest bit of fresh air. He had to use a rubber tube to take a sip of water. It was his idea to wear it. After all, he was the Eggman. It was a costume left over from a play the summer theater had produced. As the first parade started, Alex realized there would be no escape. Big floppy chicken feet make it very hard to walk three miles. The chicken head made everything difficult. The yellow tights made his skin crawl. And the wings. Oh, the wings: A heavy weight upon his flying! Chickens for America! Hooray for the red, white and yellow! Alex knew then he would do almost anything for a laugh.
Alex strutted (stumbled) through two parades that day, over three miles total. “I am the eggman, I am the eggman! Goo goo goo joob!” Children cowered in strange delight and adults threw candy back at him trying to get it down his beak. Some of them did. Fourth of July parades are everywhere in nearly every small town in America. There are clowns on trikes and there are Uncle Sam’s’ on stilts, there are jugglers on unicycles. But there are very few chickens if but maybe only one.
In front of Alex there were three overweight belly-dancers, one of whom really needed to keep dancing. They were heaving their bulks this way and that way to some loud mid-eastern music and they made Alex want to strut backwards. He could hardly see where he was going as it was. Surely Alex feared he would stumble into one of them and they would both lurch to the pavement in a grotesque embrace that would horrify even the least puritan folks in the crowd. Mothers would be shielding their children from the site and fathers would be choking from disgust!
Behind Alex was the company van advertising the playhouse and behind that was an old timey fire truck that kept sounding the siren. There was a clown somewhere nearby blowing an air-horn. Alex could barely see well enough to keep from falling into the crowd and accidentally pecking some little kid. The noise around him was deafening. Somehow the chicken head only amplified the din.
Alex couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear. Sweat was permeating the outfit as if Lake Michigan had sprung a leak. Every now and then someone from the van was kind enough to bring him the tube for a drink of water. A few times they poked him in the eye with the tube before they found his mouth. Candy that found its way into his beak settled in around his neck and began to mingle with the moisture and the heat. The draft coming off the fat in front of him was enough to drop a Musk Ox.
Alex couldn’t shed the costume (unlike Frosty, or not) because he wasn’t wearing anything underneath. His clothes were back at the theater but he was ready to pluck himself and rip that thing off and run down to the lake naked for a skinny dip. “I’ll be the chicken inside,” he thought, “After all, I am the Eggman. But I’ll never dress like a chicken again.” Probably, now, no one else would want to either, at least in that outfit.
So he endured, did the miserable chicken dance through two parades, all in the name of fun. (Alex was the real fifth Beatle.) The second parade was in Egg Harbor (Really. No pun intended.) The belly-dancers bowed out after the first parade. Now in front of him was an oiled up, he-man, body builder in a tiki hut on a trailer flexing his muscles. He didn’t even have to walk. Chippendale type music was blasting. Women were all cackling over Vince Virile. Tall, skinny, scrawny Alex was locked up in a hot-box chicken suit losing more weight. The women were not cackling at him. The unmistakable odor of Noxzema wafting off of Buck Universe was about to wring Alex like an egg-saturated washcloth. Alex bet out loud that if Mr. USA was in the chicken outfit, he would have passed out after five minutes. They’d be hauling his rippling biceps off to the emergency room for a steroid transfusion.
So after both parades and more than three miles trying to climb over floppy chicken feet, wearing that sticky, steam-bath, sauna-ensemble, Alex collapsed in the van, pried off the head, ripped off the top of the snow-mobile suit with wings, and said, “ I’m never putting this fucking thing on again.” He was not mincing words. Then he took off the feet.
“It shall not be plucked up or thrown down anymore forever”
(Jeremiah, 31:40)