Pearl’s Big Moment as a Performer in Her Own Comedy Show
This was as much fun to write and draw as anything I’ve ever done! I love Pearl for how she believes in herself and loves others so truly and deeply.
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You will notice portions of the text below are in French. The French language words are handled differently from any portions of text in the Chicken language. For Chicken language words, I expect readers will want to use context clues to figure out their meaning, and in fact, that’s how they are written. But for French language words, said by Nate and recorded by him in his journal, the English translation appears before or after the French words. The order varies to keep things interesting! French words appear in italic which is standard practice for words in another language. Chicken language words never appear in italic because they are not a foreign language to Nate, but French is a foreign language to him and the chickens. Fun Fact: In the written Chicken language, Köö is written to look like two wide-eyed, open-mouthed audience members who are captivated by the performer.
The evening for Pearl’s Comedy Coop finally arrived. Anticipation had been building throughout the day after we found a newspaper collage poster over the nesting boxes.
Pearl had carefully clipped out a picture of a white chicken from an advertisement for The Chicken Place Restaurant. It showed a happy chicken, standing tall and proud, and so Pearl believed pictures were for happy things. Her show was sure to make everyone happy.
Without any scissors or hands, she had punched small holes around the picture with her beak like those found on a postage stamp. After she had carefully removed the picture from the scrap of newspaper, she rearranged one foot to be kicking high up in the air. (This would later be known as her signature “Trick Or Treat! Smell My Feet!” dramatic pose.) Another picture of some bananas in a fruit bowl was glued with tree sap on top of the chicken’s head like a hat.
Pearl had definitely been very clever when making her own show poster and had even included some marks which seemed like writing. Only she knew what those marks meant, but they added to everyone’s anticipation. It all looked curiously funny, and we tried to imagine what was going to happen later in her show.
Somehow, Pearl had also come up with “Admit One” tickets which Amelia had passed out ahead of time. None of them matched, and some looked as if they had been torn and glued back together again, but they were tickets to her show. That was what truly mattered.
Just before showtime, Pearl had all of the other chickens lined up, standing one behind the other and waiting patiently with their tickets in their beaks. Normally they would have paid no attention to what Pearl told them to do, but this seemed as if it was going to be an extraordinary evening, and absolutely no one wanted to be left out. Then she went behind the stage to prepare herself.
After turning on the strings of lights draped above the stage, I collected each ticket and helped everyone to their seats. Blanche had the best seat right in the middle so she would not miss anything. Gracie and Bessie were on her right. Emily was on her left with Amelia at the end.
Then I laid out small, individual snack bowls.
“Would you care for complimentary roasted pumpkin seeds, madam? Graine de citrouille grillées, Madame?” I asked each of them while bowing stiffly from the waist, just as Pearl had directed me. “Perhaps some assorted vegetables? Crudités assorties?”
Pearl had reassured me that everything tastes better when you give it a French name.
All of them chattered with excitement because this seemed like such a grand occasion. They didn’t get some of these treats every day, and the strings of lights made us all feel like anything could happen.
Blanche was the first to get to the bottom of her bowl, and she let out a cackle of delighted surprise when she saw a picture of Pearl’s face staring back at her. Everyone else hurried to see if the others were the same, and they were.
Pearl had been very resourceful and had planned extremely well. She had definitely fooled me with her comment about how she would “just wing it” for the show.
There was no time to ask her about the tickets or snack bowls before she motioned for me to turn on the spotlight. As soon as it illuminated the backdrop, microphone and stool, muffled clucks of excitement spread throughout her audience. Then she motioned for me to announce her performance with the words she had decided I should say.
“Mesdames! Il me fait grand plaisir de vous presenter Ma Jolie Peale! Ladies! It is my great pleasure to present to you My Pretty Pearl! Allons les bananes! Let’s go bananas!”
From one side of the stage, Pearl appeared wearing a cerise-red, sequined jacket with heliotrope-purple lapels. But she did not walk, or run, or stumble. Instead, she hovered in midair as if flying. Her wings and tail feathers were stretched out motionless in all of their splendid whiteness. Slowly she moved across the stage in midair and lit down ever so lightly on her stool with pointed toes as if she was a dainty ballerina.
No one seemed to have noticed that Amelia was away from her seat on the end. I looked up at the beams that stretched across the top of the stage. They were the beams that I had set up for when the stage was to be used for ballet. There I caught a glimpse of Amelia’s distinctively marked tail feathers.
Pearl’s audience sat stunned, quietly hushing each other. Then one after another, they noticed her pink toenails which matched her sequined jacket exactly. Low coos of amazement and approval came from the audience as everyone inched forward in their seats. They no longer wondered how she had been able to fly through the air without flapping her wings. They wanted to know how she had gotten pink toenails.
No one noticed Amelia returning to her seat while Pearl slid off her sequined jacket. She dropped it down to the stage floor casually, dramatically, enticingly from atop the stool as if it were a common everyday rag. The audience shivered with anticipation.
Then Pearl began.
“Trick or treat!” Pearl called out to the audience as she held up her left foot with its bright pink toenail polish.
“Smell my feet!” She called out as she switched to holding up her right foot.
“Trick or treat! Smell my feet!”
Her audience was stunned and silent. They had never seen a chicken or any other animal do something like this. I had a feeling that in spite of her phenomenal entrance, this was not going to go as Pearl had thought it would. I prepared to step in and rescue her.
“Why did the farmer cross the road?” she asked.
Then she paused, eyeing her audience from one end of their bench to the other.
She was smiling with confidence, but I remembered when she had tried this joke before and everyone had ignored her.
“We don’t know!” they called back.
“To feed the chickens!” Pearl said.
Much to my surprise, everyone thought this joke was funny. It made no sense to me, but to my chickens, it was hilarious.
Pearl was off to an unexpectedly excellent start. Later I would learn this is a classic chicken retort to the old “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. It is one which absolutely no chicken ever finds amusing, not anywhere, not anyway.
Even more to my amazement, the chickens could hardly keep their seats because they were cackling so hard. As far as everyone was concerned, Pearl was an instant star.
“How many farmers does it take to change a lightbulb?” she called out.
No one made a sound.
“Who cares? As long as they feed the chickens!”
Again there was more uproarious laughter, and they all turned around and looked at me as if to say, “Don’t you understand how funny she is?”
Pearl flipped over onto her back and pretended to be taking a dust bath while telling her next few jokes. Each one was funnier than the last and they almost all ended with “feed the chickens!”
“Why couldn’t the farmer write with a broken pencil? Because it had no point, and — “
Even though we all knew what was coming, there was a long pause as everyone waited.
“ — He needed to feed the chickens!”
Pearl stretched her neck out and made a goofy face like she was looking for something to eat. Her audience cheered her on, calling out for more.
“Did you hear about the farmer who forgot to take his umbrella with him when he went outside, but even so, he didn’t get wet?”
“No! Why didn’t he get wet?” they all said.
“Because it wasn’t raining when it was time to — “
The other chickens held their breaths and just before they were ready to burst out laughing, Pearl cackled, “Feed the chickens!”
And then, of course, everyone had to laugh.
While everyone was rocking with laughter, I glanced up and saw a light flip on in one of the upstairs windows of The Bottle Cap Lady’s house. There seemed to be a shadow on the blinds as if someone was standing there, but I could not tell for sure. I hadn’t really wanted anyone but us to see Pearl’s show.
When my attention returned to the show, I saw Pearl had a tall hat decorated with plastic bananas beside her on the stool.
“Hey, Everybody! It’s time to go bananas!” she said.
With a few quick motions, she had the hat’s bow under her chin and had popped off a brown beak cover to reveal her matching hot pink “beak-stick” shaped like a heart. Suddenly, I couldn’t keep myself from joining in the laughter as she hopped up and down with her Let’s Go Bananas Hat flopping wildly from side to side.
“What did the farmer get when he crossed a refrigerator with a robot?” she asked her captivated audience.
“We don’t know!” they all called back.
“I don’t know either, but it keeps the lettuce nice and crisp while it goes outside to — “
The other chickens and I called out as loudly as we could, “Feed the chickens!”
There was uproarious cackling and wing flapping. Everyone laughed so hard I seriously thought they would all lay eggs right then and there.
Pearl held up her left foot.
We caught our breaths and waited, expecting her to repeat her “Trick or treat! Smell my feet!” joke.
“Why does a chicken often hold up one foot?” she asked.
Her foot just hung there in midair while we waited expectantly.
“Because if it held up two feet, it would fall over!”
Then she waggled her foot and called out “Trick or treat!”
“Smell my feet!” the chickens called back to her.
Then she did it all again except. She switched to holding up her right foot.
They repeated this call and response faster until Pearl was beginning to do a wild and crazy dance. Later she would name it The Dipsy Doodle.
“There is more than one kind of dancing in Paris!” Pearl announced.
The delighted wing-flapping of the audience and the uncertainty in her voice muffled what she said next, but I heard her.
“So maybe there is more than one way of being a good, normal chicken!”
My heart hoped she was right.
I glanced up at the second floor of The Bottle Cap Lady’s House. There was clearly a dark silhouette standing out against the light of a bedroom window. Then, as if someone realized I was looking up at them, the blinds snapped shut and the light went out.
Pearl did her happiest jumping dance on top of the stool to signal the show was complete. She definitely left her audience satisfied yet still wanting more.
It took quite a while to get everyone settled down enough once they had gone into their coop for bedtime. As everyone began drifting off to sleep, there were still a few more soft clucks of “To feed the chickens! To feed the chickens!”
As I headed for my own back door, I heard a sharp and raspy sound. It seemed to come from the far corner of my yard, behind the chicken coop.
“Hah! Hah! Hah!”
I paused before going inside. The light was back on upstairs in The Bottle Cap Lady’s house, but there was no silhouette at the window. Then the upstairs light flipped back off. The sudden darkness was almost as startling as the laughter I had heard. Perhaps I had imagined the raspy laughing. After such an extraordinary show, anything seemed possible. Perhaps this was another of Pearl’s clever performance tricks. Either way, I had to wonder what The Bottle Cap Lady had seen, and what that meant for my chickens.
It seems that chickens find it funny that they have people who are always busy with the activity of feeding the chickens. Anything seems to be funny to a chicken as long as it ends with “Feed the chickens!”
My favorite quotation from Pearl from her show is this one which does not end with “Feed the chickens!”
“There is more than one kind of dancing in Paris! So maybe there is more than one way of being a good, normal chicken!”
It’s the quotation that I hope children and grown-up children (adults) will find relates to their own life experiences. It is actually the lesson that Nate needs to learn as he struggles to make his own way in the world. Nate’s Uncle Buddy is like what the other chickens in the little flock were to Pearl. Uncle Buddy’s criticism and suggestions leave Nate feeling that he will never be a good, normal boy. Those harsh words hurt Nate in the same way that the harsh words and pecks hurt Pearl every day.
You may remember what Nate’s Mother said about him in the first chapter of Volume One: Into the Garden:c
“I don’t care what you do with him. There is something wrong with him, and he will never be good enough. Everyone can see it. He’s not going to ruin my life.”
And The Mother would have likely said this about Pearl:
“I don’t care what you do to her. There is something wrong with her, and she will never be good enough. Everyone can see it. She’s not going to ruin our lives.”
These two chapters in this week’s newsletter prove that any such thoughts about Pearl are very wrong. She is actually an extremely talented performer. Later, at the end of Act Two (just a few chapters away), Pearl will demonstrate that she is actually a good, normal chicken and not a silly, foolish chicken. Even though Gracie and the others believe that silliness never saved a chicken’s life, Pearl will use some silliness from her comedy routine to save the entire flock from an opossum! So you see, there really is more than one way to be a good, normal chicken, just as Pearl said!
Until Next Time
If your French is better than mine, please let me know because that could be important for proper editing. In Volume Three: Through the Gate, the chickens will visit Paris, France and Pearl will become friends with Monsieur Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. She will even perform in the Moulin Rouge for him to earn extra money to purchase pastels and other drawing supplies so that Emily can help them all return to their garden home. (How special Emily’s drawings are will be shown later in this current volume, Volume Two: Over the Chimney. Because Emily loves Amelia so much and truly believes what Nate has told her:
Drawing lets you do things you would never be able to do any other way.
We truly have to put our trust in believing and loving: the two greatest powers in the universe are Faith and Love.
Thank you for reading!
John, Gracie, Bessie, Blanche, Pearl, Emily, and Amelia
