816: Poultry Slam

Ira Glass

When I talked to Scharlette Holdman, she'd spent 35 years working with defense teams on death penalty cases, including a very high-profile cases. But she hadn't given an interview to the press in decades, ever since an incident where she had a few drinks with a reporter, and said some things she was unhappy to see in print.

Ira Glass

That is not just what this story is about. That is what a lot of today's radio show is about. Back in the early days of our radio show, once a year, during the highest poultry consumption time in the country, which is, of course-- if you about this for a second, you can guess the answer to this. It's the weeks that begin with Thanksgiving, and go through Christmas and New Year's.

Anyway, during that period, for years on our show, we had a tradition here, where we would devote an entire hour of our program to stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind. In an homage to Chicago's poetry slams, which were spread across the country, but were created at the Green Mill Bar on the North side by poet Marc Smith, we named these programs "poultry" slams-- poultry.

But I just want to be clear, before we begin, the word "slam," we are using that with no malice toward any bird of any kind at all. No birds were hurt, no birds were slaughtered, no birds were slammed in the making of today's program. And we have incredible stories today, incredible enough that at least one woman has ended a quarter-century moratorium on talking to the press to be here with me. And you should too. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, Witness for the Barbicue-tion. Scharlette Holdman didn't just get the idea of calling a chicken as a witness in a murder case out of the blue. She was working on this case-- and we're going to call this guy Harry-- and there was no question that the guy had killed somebody. This wasn't about whether he'd done it. It was about what sentence he would get.

He had sat on death row at San Quentin for 10 years. But Scharlette says he was schizophrenic, with an IQ of 58, and just out of touch with reality.

Ira Glass

It's against the law to execute somebody who is so crazy he doesn't understand why he's being executed. And Scharlette said that was true for this guy.

Ira Glass

The state of California did not agree with Scharlette about this guy. They wanted to execute him in 30 days. Scharlette's team was making a last-ditch appeal to stay this execution. Meanwhile, the state was gathering its evidence.

Ira Glass

Scharlette thought-- and this is not a joke. It's not an exaggeration-- she thought that a chicken like that could save this man's life. Jurors, after all, tend to believe the state and its witnesses. And a chicken like that could totally undermine the psychiatrist's testimony, by proving that playing tic-tac-toe doesn't mean that you understand things like why you're being executed.

Ira Glass

Well, this task fell to the legal interns. A man was scheduled to die, at that point, in less than two weeks. And they needed a chicken. And they searched the places that you find tic-tac-toe playing chickens, namely county fairs, carnivals. And really, within hours, they found a tic-tac-toe playing goose in Montana. But of course, Scharlette says that was totally unacceptable.

Ira Glass

Next was a guy at a roadside stand in Wyoming who did have a chicken. And it did play tic-tac-toe. But he said that flying or driving it to California for the trial would probably upset it so much that he could not guarantee that it would win the game of tic-tac-toe. So he was out.

Finally, they found a fellow in Arkansas who trains chickens to play tic-tac-toe. And he had a whole list of chickens that he had trained around the country. And he sent the legal team to one of those birds, in San Francisco. That turned out to be a dead end. San Francisco had actually passed an ordinance banning the playing of tic-tac-toe by chickens, as animal cruelty. Fortunately, another chicken on the list was not far from there, at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. They had their chicken.

Ira Glass

They weren't even allowed to show the jury a video of the chicken playing tic-tac-toe. And without a chicken on the stand, without a video of a chicken, the jury found the psychiatrist credible, and ruled to execute Scharlette's client. His life was saved, later, on appeal. And in the years since then, in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that a person at his level of mental retardation cannot be executed.

For Scharlette, though, the story stays with her, the story of the chicken, because in decades of doing these capital trials, bringing hundreds of witnesses, it is the greatest courtroom move she ever invented, bringing in the chicken. And she never got to try it. She invented this thing. She never got to try it. It was snatched away from her. Something like that sticks in your craw.

Ira Glass

Scharlette Holdman in New Orleans. Today's show is a rerun. We first broadcast this story back in 2011. In the years since, capital punishment was suspended in the state of California by Governor Gavin Newsom. Scharlette, this incredible person that I loved talking to, she was called the Angel of Death Row for her work in getting proper legal representation for people on death row. She died in 2017.

Ira Glass

Act two, Chicken Diva. Chickens are what we make of them, in lots of ways. If you could possibly need further evidence of that, after that first act, we have this story from Jack Hitt.

Jack Hitt

Oddly enough, it wasn't Susan who was obsessed with chickens. It was Kenny, a pal who worked backstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York. His house was filled with chicken cups, chicken masks. He got the whole staff onto chickens, including Susan. For a time there, in the '80s, poultry-related jokes and references became the fast way to get a laugh at the Y.

I guess most of us are condemned to see nothing more than the easy comedy of chickens. But Susan Vitucci saw something else, their potential greatness, their hidden beauty, their grandeur. One day she glued together some finger puppets for a 10-minute rendition of the Chicken Little story for her nephew. That was 14 years ago.

Today, it is a full-length opera, enjoyed by a cult following whenever it goes up in a workshop or cafe or small theater. It's still performed with finger puppets. But now it has a complete score, written by a noted composer, Henry Krieger, who did Dreamgirls. The Chicken Little opera he wrote with Susan Vitucci is called Love's Fowl. Needless to say, that's F-O-W-L.

Susan and I are sitting at Henry's baby grand piano. Henry's guest is his Maltese terrier, named Toby.

OK, listen carefully because once Toby gets going, he actually harmonizes with Henry and Susan

[MUSIC - HENRY KRIEGER AND SUSAN VITUCCI SINGING IN ITALIAN]

[DOG WHINING AND HOWLING TO MUSIC]

You may have noticed that this libretto is in Italian, just like a real opera.

Jack Hitt

You may recall that when you last heard of Little, back in kindergarten, she was just an average barn-door fowl, who had an acorn drop on her head, which she mistakenly understood to be the sky falling. Her alarms excited her friends, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, and Ducky Lucky. And they join her for a journey to the king, to tell him the important news.

On the way, they meet up with Sly Fox. Little's pals eagerly accept his invitation for dinner, literally as it turns out. Fortunately for Little, hunger is not enough to distract her from her mission. And she tracks on. When she meets the king, he tells her that the sky is not falling. It's just an acorn. So the enlightened Chicken Little returns to her coop. And that's where the story ends.

What are we to take away from Little's experience? I'd like to think it's that Little is rewarded with life, precisely because she went off on this quixotic mission, totally in the grip of a wrong idea.

[SINGING IN ITALIAN]

The children's fable barely figures into the story. It's just one small episode in the life of Chicken Little, now known as La Pulcina Piccola. After the acorn incident, she goes on to become an internationally renowned figure in almost every field imaginable, a diva of politics, academe, theater, art, daring-do.

Like Venus, she arrives from some other world, transported on a scallop shell. But the triumphs of her life began after a youthful love affair with a fighting cock ends bitterly. And she consoles herself, as we all do at some point in our lives, by plunging into Shakespeare. She becomes an overnight sensation as an actress, celebrated all over the world for one role, Juliet, Cleopatra, Ophelia?

Jack Hitt

I can assure you, there is nothing like watching a 4-inch tall finger puppet crying out, "a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" in Italian. Not to mention that puppet is a chicken, surrounded by a whole supporting cast of poultry and other avian supernumeraries. Susan says that artistically, there's something special about chickens.

Jack Hitt

Except for La Pulchina. In the opera, she moves into the field of archaeology, masters it, needless to say, and makes a great discovery, the last tomb of Gallapatra, but not before she sails the seven seas, is shipwrecked, gets rescued, but it's by pirates, and then she meets the pirate king.

Jack Hitt

Let me repeat that lyric for you in a pure translation. "Although I stand before you a chicken who is dripping wet, I am proud. And I am yellow." OK, back to Susan.

Jack Hitt

Keep in mind that all of the action, like everything that occurs in every Susan Vitucci production, ever since the first one for her nephew, and continuing to this day, occurs among characters created by sticking a small, painted Styrofoam ball onto a larger painted Styrofoam ball, poking in two map tacks for eyes, gluing on a tiny felt beak, and then impaling the whole thing on top of one of those really old fashioned clothespins that a '40s cartoon figure would clamp to his nose around a chunk of Limburger cheese.

[SINGING IN ITALIAN]

And I could go on. Susan has written, or as she puts it, translated La Pulcina Piccola's diaries, which detail the other adventures that happen in between those in the opera. There are 60 pages so far, excerpts of which have appeared in Clotheslines, the official fan-club newsletter of the opera. Love's Fowl has a strange effect on people.

I didn't understand it until Susan loaned me a videotape of one performance. To be honest, I thought I would be annoyed at the intentional irony and hokiness of the puppets. But there I was, with my three-year-old daughter, who loved the show, watching a plastic bird pantomime one of the simplest human moments, but also one of the most profound, the confession of a great love, in this case, with a Cock Robin.

Jack Hitt

And after they have agreed to fly together and they are soaring in the air, Cock Robin is shot and killed, murdered by a jealous sparrow. I couldn't believe it, but I was getting choked up, especially when Cock Robin appeared on the stage, his Styrofoam body spray painted black for the lament, his little magic-marker eyes drawn as X's.

I gathered my daughter my arms and held on tight, as I was helplessly drawn into an expression of the grief and suffering of this little sad bird. In this era of slick special effects, there was something unexpectedly liberating in the marriage of this crude medium, painted Styrofoam balls bobbing up and down behind a cardboard box, and the high, melodramatic art of Italian opera. Picture it.

[SINGING IN ITALIAN]

Ira Glass

That story from Jack Hitt.

[SINGING IN ITALIAN]

Coming up, chicken supermodels and chickens who return with a message from the afterlife. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, during this period of greatest poultry consumption in our nation, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we bring you stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, real and imagined.

Ira Glass

We arrived at Act three, of our program, Act Three, Trying to Respect the Chicken.

OK, sure, it's one thing to take a fictional character like Chicken Little and make her into a star. Try doing that with a real chicken. Seriously, just try.

Ira Glass

In a world where chickens get no respect, Tamara Staples treats him the way that humans treat those we revere most. She takes their portraits, lovingly. Her shots are like fashion photographs, beautifully lit, color backdrops. They're beautiful.

Ira Glass

In a way it's like Tamara Staples is running an odd little cross-species science experiment, one that asks this question, what happens when you try to treat a chicken the way we treat humans, even if it's just for the length of a photo shoot? What happens, it turns out, is that you learn just where the thin line is that divides human beings from birds.

All right, maybe it's not such a thin line. But it's definitely a line. And like most city people, I had never thought about it, about where it lays, about what it might be, what it might consist of, until Tamara and I headed out to a farm.

[ROOSTER CROWS]

Ira Glass

We're at the Davidson's dairy farm, about an hour and a half Northwest of Chicago. Family members present, Paul, who's helping Tamara choose a bird to photograph, his sister Laura, who's studying photography at a nearby university, their grandfather, George Cairns, a veteran breeder, their father, Dick, who seems the most skeptical of this whole project, but who patiently shows Tamara and her assistant, Dennis, the milking barn as a possible place to set up and shoot.

Ira Glass

Tamara takes us outside the barn, so dust won't get on her photos, and shows them her shots, name dropping the names of some big chicken people, people whose birds she's photographed, including Bob Wulff, editor of The Poultry Press. Dick notices that a bird in one photo has crooked toes.

Ira Glass

Fact is, while city people usually go nuts when they see Tamara's pictures, a lot of chicken breeders don't like them. And to understand why, to fully comprehend this little culture clash here in America, we have to leave the barnyard for a minute and flashback to something that happened back at Tamara's apartment in the city.

Tamara showed me this old red book from the turn of the century, this book with the seal of the American Poultry Association in gold on the front, and then right there, in gold letters--

Ira Glass

Tamara flipped past the engravings and illustrations of chickens of all types and breeds. These were show chickens, standing the way that chickens stand in competitions. Then Tamara pulled out one of her own photos to compare, to show me how her poses do not meet the standard in the book.

Ira Glass

That's for them. For herself, for her city customers, she chooses the others. OK, back to the barnyard.

[CHICKEN CLUCKING]

Tamara and the Davidsons decide to set up the photo session in a room that's usually used to store feed for the cows. It takes about 45 minutes to set this up. That 45 minutes includes dismantling and moving a wall of hay that is probably 10 feet high and 15 long. This takes five people. Then in comes the power and the fancy lights and the cloth backdrop that gets hung from a steel pole. The backdrop is ironed first with an iron and ironing board, brought from the city just for that purpose.

Ira Glass

It was cold, well below freezing, so cold that the Polaroid film that Tamara uses for lighting tests would not fully develop.

Our first bird is a white Cornish, a show bird who belongs to George. The show bird is used to being picked up and handled. Part of preparing chickens for shows involves handling them a lot so they'll be calm with the judges.

Ira Glass

Tamara has the Cornish stand up on a stack of little red antique books, kind of unsteady. Things go well for a while. She gets a half dozen good shots of the bird, expressive shots, more personality than standard of perfection, George tells me. The bird's chest isn't high enough. Its body is not turned correctly to the camera. And then the bird stops cooperating. He gets tired. Paul has a suggestion.

Ira Glass

Laura grabs a hen and waves at it the flaccid cock. The cock does not rise.

Ira Glass

I can say that on the radio, right?

Ira Glass

For real, the rooster will show off more for a hen that it doesn't know?

Ira Glass

They try this and that, nothing with much success. Finally, with one shot left, Paul suggests putting a hen into the picture with the rooster.

Ira Glass

Not standard of perfection. Even these perfectly-bred Cornishes could not achieve standard of perfection today. And even in this goofy, unbirdlike situation, an hour of watching them makes clear just how hard it is to ever get birds to hit the standard, which is to say, not only do we completely dominate every aspect of the lives of chickens, their birth, their feed, their eggs, their slaughter, not only have we bred them to human specifications to meet human needs, but we have created a standard of what it means to be a chicken that most chickens can never meet.

That's what the standard means. We judge them as chickens. And we find them lacking. If they had the brains to understand this, they would be right to feel indignant.

But of course, this is a city person's perspective. And that means that it is completely wrongheaded from the point of view of anybody who actually raises birds. Standing in the cold feed room, I had a long, long talk with George about this. George is 80 years old. He's been raising birds since the-- I guess the Calvin Coolidge administration. And he says the whole fun of raising birds is raising them to the standard.

Ira Glass

George tells me that when he's breeding a new batch of birds, he'll hatch 65 of them. And only one or two will be anywhere near the standard of perfection. That's how hard it is.

Ira Glass

That's right, the fads, like Cornish's these days are supposed to have shorter legs than the real standard of perfection. Vertical tail feathers are out on all sorts of breeds that really should have them. In the country, among the chicken breeders, they think about a lot of things we never get to in the city.

Ira Glass

George gives me a pamphlet that he's written up. No doctor has actually checked him out to prove the cancer is gone from his body. He's actually got no hard, scientific proof that this really works. But he says God told him that this is the way he should be spending his time. And it has cut into his bird breeding a bit.

George leaves, off on other business. Tamara's finished hanging and lighting the next backdrop. And the rest of us begin with the second bird, a bird called a Brahma, with elaborately patterned brown-and-white feathers.

[CHICKEN CLUCKS]

Our second bird demonstrates the great distance between bird instinct and intelligence and the demands of modern fashion photography, which is to say of civilization. Called upon to do human tasks, even rather passive ones, a bird remains a bird. Paul carries the huge hen onto the fragile little set Tamara's built.

Ira Glass

I'm scared of this one, she says quietly, as she adjusts her camera. The chicken is so big, nine pounds, the size of a small consumer turkey, that she has to pull the camera back. The Davidsons are looking at her skeptically. Paul asks pointedly if she's ever shot a bird this big?

Ira Glass

This combination of coddling and threats might motivate an aspiring supermodel or an eager puppy. But this, after all, is a chicken. Laura tries to lure it up with a handful of corn.

Ira Glass

Somewhere during this ordeal, a funny thing happens. All the Davidsons, who all started off skeptical, they are completely engaged. Dick suggests a pose that is pure art concept, a pose that could not be further from standard of perfection. Laura lures the bird with corn. Paul smooths feathers. And when the bird quivers or moves a wing, three people jump in to fix it back up.

Ira Glass

It wasn't until this point that I realized that I came into this expecting the bird to be more-- well, more human, partly I think because I never really thought about this one way or the other but partly because Tamara's photos make chickens seem so-- [INHALES, EXHALES] so thoughtful.

Ira Glass

Those photos are a lie.

Ira Glass

Fact is, you can try to give chickens respect. You can try to treat them with dignity, and photograph them the way you'd photograph anything or anyone that's serious. But the chickens will not care. You can make them look dignified. But it is a brainless, bird-like dignity. And it is ephemeral.

Ira Glass

We pack up our gear and move the massive wall of hay back into place. As we do this, chickens hop by, Brahmas, Americanos, mixed breeds. They seem utterly uninterested in us. The cluck at each other. There's feed to eat, hay to nestle in. They have better things to do with their time. And there's nothing that makes you realize just how inhuman chickens are then spending a day trying to make them seem human.

[CHICKENS CLUCKING]

[COW MOOS]

Ira Glass

Act 4, Winged Migration.

Ira Glass

This is Kathie Russo. Her husband was Spalding Gray, who is best known for delivering monologues on stage, like Monster in a Box and Swimming to Cambodia. Both those monologues were also filmed as movies.

Spalding Gray went missing on January 10, 2004. Witnesses say they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night. His body was finally found, pulled out of the East River two months later. Our program today is about birds and the hold they have on us. And Kathie Russo tells the story about Spalding's last night and the days immediately after that.

Like she just said, her husband was with two of their kids that night. She was out. They have a third child, Forrest, who was 11 at the time. He was in Sag Harbor, Long Island, with friends and a babysitter. They had a house out there too.

Well, the various stories in today's rerun were produced by Alex Blumberg, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Blue Chevigny, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alyssa Shipp, Julie Snyder, Alix Spiegel, and Nancy Updike.

Music help from Mr. John Conners. Other help today from Larry Josephson and Jay [? Headblade. ?] Additional production on today's rerun from James Bennett II, Michael Cromartie, and Stowe Nelson.

Some updates on the people in today's rerun. Tamara Staples has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new project, a documentary series about show chickens. It's called The Standard Of Perfection. George Cairns, the grandfather from the Davidson's dairy farm, died back in 2011.

Susan Vitucci's opera about Chicken Little is available on CD and also on several streaming platforms. More information on where you can find it at www.pulcina.org. That is Pulcina spelled, of course, P-U-L-C-I-N-A. [INAUDIBLE] story about her first aired all the way back in 1997.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream over 800 of our episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's merch for your holiday shopping. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know what product drives him crazy? Chicken of the Sea. He's like, it's not chicken. It's tuna. Typical that a tuna would fib like that. Chicken never would.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.