343: Poultry Slam 2007

Ira Glass

There's certain conversations that those of us who do not live on farms get into with people who do live on farms, where you know, as somebody from the city or the suburbs, that the farm person that you're talking to is just thinking, you are so naive. Often these conversations have to do with animals and their deaths. Take this example. The woman who started our program's website, Elizabeth Meister, was at the annual exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio. And here she is, standing in a room with 12,000 chickens. And she gets into a conversation with an 11-year-old girl.

Ira Glass

This is Kamiko Overs from Bliss, New York, who was at the convention to show some of her chickens.

Ira Glass

Kamiko and Elizabeth talked for a while. And then Elizabeth tried very, very gently to ask a question that was on her mind.

Ira Glass

Kamiko's untroubled by this. If a bird has bad feathers or a lopsided comb, it might be a nice bird, but if it's not going to win competitions, you eat it. That's life. Those of us who don't live on farms, we tend to divide animals often into those we love and those we eat. In Kamiko's world, there isn't such a hard line separating the two. You can get to know a bird on an up close, one-to-one basis, and still eat it.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And today, during this period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the highest poultry consumption time of the year in these United States, we bring you a program about poultry, our Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, birds of all kinds, and our relationships with them.

Poultry Slams have been a not-quite annual tradition on our show around this time of year. And putting together this year's program, a very few particular ideas and questions kept coming up in story after story, without us ever intending for it to happen that way. A lot of this year's show has turned into a kind of referendum about where you draw the line between friend and food.

Act one of today's show, Still Life With Chicken. Food writer Jonathan Gold tells what it's like to pan fry a chicken, with a live chicken watching you the entire time. Act two, Last Meal. When the President of France, Francois Mitterrand, knew he was about to die, he decided that the very last food to cross his lips would be poultry, a tiny bird that is actually illegal to eat in France, a bird that by tradition is eaten with a napkin covering your head. Act three, Chicken Diva. Jack Hitt tells the story of a chicken opera complete with, yes, avian supernumeraries. Act four, The Meaning of a Bird. David Rakoff explains how his life was changed in a single evening in a room full of 5,000 chickens. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Still Life With Chicken. It was an accident that Jonathan ended up living with a chicken. He wasn't living the kind of life one usually associates with chickens.

Jonathan Gold

This was during the period when I considered myself to be a performance artist of sorts, a naked performance artist to be specific.

Ira Glass

These days, Jonathan Gold is a food writer in Los Angeles. This all happened 15 years ago. He was putting together a performance. He had a PA system which could put out the requisite amount of annoying feedback sound at high decibels. He had the two full bottles of Glade American Beauty Air Freshener, which he would spray in their entirety in the performance space. And he had a live chicken, which he bought the day before the performance in one of those Chinese poultry markets in Los Angeles. And it comes the day of the show. An audience gathers in a darkened warehouse in West LA.

Ira Glass

So Jonathan cleaned up. And when he was done, he had a chicken. And he didn't feel like he could kill the chicken. Destiny had brought them together. He felt like he could not turn his back. He says it was the same as if a kitten shows up on your back door, scratching and lonely and needy. So he took the chicken home. And in doing that, he stumbled across that thin, thin line that separates food items on the one hand, from pets on the other, that divides the animals we eat from the animals we love.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Gold writes his food column Counter Intelligence for the LA Weekly.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Last Meal. Consider please, poultry consumers, the role of poultry in Francois Mitterrand's last meal. Mitterrand, you'll recall, was President of France who died at the beginning of 1996. A contradictory and enigmatic man. The French press used to call him the Sphinx. He once actually staged his own assassination to help himself in the polls. Obsessed with history and his place in it.

Michael Paterniti wrote about Mitterrand's last meal for the magazine Esquire. Mitterrand found out that he was dying of cancer. Our story begins just weeks before his death.

Ira Glass

Writer Mike Paterniti. He says after focusing so intensely on eating that one meal, where, like Mitterrand, he tried to taste every flavor, it felt weird to get back to normal eating. It felt a little dirty not to pay attention.

Ira Glass

Coming up, tiny Styrofoam balls singing in Italian. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today, during this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time of year when poultry consumption in this country is at its greatest, we bring you our Poultry Slam, stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, and our relationship with them. We have come to act three of our program. Act Three, Chicken Diva. Chickens are what we make of them so much of the time. And if you need any proof of that, 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, porcelain chickens. 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 a cafe or a 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.

Jack Hitt

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

Jack Hitt

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

[MUSIC - "SIAMO DEL TEATRO REPETORIO DELLE MOLLETTE"]

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 treks 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.

Like Goldilocks and so many children's fables, the actual meaning of the story is obscure. What are we to take away from Little's experience? I 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. By clinging to that belief, however crazy, she managed to free herself from the ugly, Darwinian world of the barnyard and of its mandate, eat or be eaten.

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, theatre, art, derring-do. Like Venus, she arrives from some other world, transported on a scallop shell.

But the triumphs of her life begin 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's nothing like watching a four-inch tall finger puppet crying out "a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse," in Italian. Not to mention that 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 Pulcina. 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.

And I could go on. She takes a cowboy lover on the American frontier while on a lecture tour. Then there's an affair with an Italian professor, modeled on a real 15th century naturalist who wrote a treatise on chickens. There's always another adventure, even outside the opera. 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. It's masthead lists every category of donor.

Jack Hitt

I'm not joking when I tell you that the high-end donation is $500. People take this campy finger-puppet opera quite seriously. When I was talking to Henry Krieger, he recalled the night he first saw a bare-bones production of it at the West Bank Cafe in New York. And it was Krieger who approached Vitucci, begging to write music for it. Love's Fowl has this 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've 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 in 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.

I want a subscription to that newsletter.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt lives in New Haven. The online home of the opera is pulcina.org.

Ira Glass

Act Four, The Meaning of a Chicken. We close our show today with this story from David Rakoff, which begins far from any chicken house.

David Rakoff

Friday nights of my childhood and early adolescence were spent at weekly meetings of a Socialist, Zionist youth movement. My brother, sister, and I were members. The meetings took a variety of forms. There were the earnest discussions of Marx and the great Labor Zionist thinkers like Theodore Herzl and A. D. Gordon, bull sessions about who in the group had hurt whose feelings, and playing air guitar to "Come Sail Away" by Styx. All activities that formed us into pretty deeply committed young Socialists, ready at the age of 15 for the ultimate prize the movement could bestow, a summer living and working on a kibbutz, one of the collective farms that were a central part of settling the Jewish state.

There we would meet other members of the movement from all over the world, and spend many a happy hour engaged in honest labor, laughingly baling sheaves of wheat, picking olives, oranges, peaches, grapes, the sweat on our brows a shining reminder of the nobility of collective farming. In the evenings, we would gather together and dance around the fire, sing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young songs, and if one's older siblings were any indication, lose our virginity. Years later, we would renounce our bourgeois upbringings and return to Israel, making lives of simple, agrarian bliss.

This would all change for me in one single evening in a shed of 5,000 chickens. The kibbutz I was assigned to was one of the oldest in Israel, settled in 1928 by Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany. For the most part, our arrival was met with little to no notice. We were just another group of volunteers, no different from the countless other Europeans and Australians just passing through, taking time out to pick fruit, work on their tans, and contracts cystitis from their rampant and unchecked coitus.

But we were different. We were members of the movement. I thought that our political ardor would be immediately apparent. I had visions of our bus being greeted by garlanded, folk-dancing youth, so happy to have us there to share in their dream. I had been raised on a fairly steady diet of just such Socialist Utopian Ziegfeld numbers, songs, film strips, and oral histories that all attested to just this scenario. Trees weren't simply trees. They were jungle gyms of plenty with smiling children clambering over their branches. A field was somewhere you brought your guitar, so that your comrades could dance down the rows after the day's work was over.

I was assigned to pick pears. Work would begin at 4:00 AM and finish sometime mid-morning before the heat had set in. How filled with fervor I was that first morning, the light barely dawning as I headed out in the back of the truck, wearing my simple work shirt, a pair of shorts, and the traditional sun hat worn by so many pioneers who had come before me to make the desert bloom. I should pause here to point out that we actually said things like, "make the desert bloom" all of the time. So off I headed to the orchard.

I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I've turned myself into with single-minded determination when I say this. But the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining. Dyed-in-the-wool Northerner that I am, it became apparent after about two days that I was completely unsuited to working outside, and I was moved around among the kibbutz's various interior jobs, the furniture factory, the metal irrigation parts factory, and the kitchen, assured all the while by the group leader that there was nothing emasculating or ersatz Socialist in being moved inside. After all, each according to his needs, each according to his abilities. My abilities seemed lie in passing out from heat stroke after a scant two hours in an orchard.

This continued for weeks. It was a somewhat idyllic, if not a mite monotonous, existence. That is, until the long night of the chickens. The boys of our group were gathered together one day, and told in the hushed tones reserved for trying to avert impending disaster, that we would forgo our regular work details and spend the night from midnight until dawn packing truckloads of poultry.

Why this needed to be done with such urgent secrecy under cover of night, and why the girls were excused, was never explained to us, and we didn't ask. We greeted the news with the respectful Hemingway silence of the Y chromosome. No dopey girls allowed. It was all imbued with nocturnal, testicular melodrama, like some summer stock production of Das Boot.

We slept that evening from 9:00 to 11:00, what I would come to know later, in a far different context, as a disco nap. We rose, drank some tea. The girls sprayed perfume into some handkerchiefs for us to wear around our noses and mouths. And we were off in trucks to do battle with the insurgent chickens. The scene had everything but the diner waitress standing in the road watching us go, worriedly wiping her hands on her gingham apron.

The chicken coop of the kibbutz was a one-storied structure of corrugated iron, about half the size of a football field. It emitted a low rumbling, a vague buzz that you could hear from far away. And of course, from even farther away, there was the smell, a smell of such head-kicking intensity as to make a perfume-sprayed handkerchief almost adorable in its valiant naivety, Wile E. Coyote warding off a falling boulder with his paper parasol.

Chicken [BLEEP] is horrible stuff, Unlike cow manure, which according to David Foster Wallace smells "warm and herbal and blameless," chicken [BLEEP] is an olfactory insult, a snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell, needlessly gratuitously disgusting. A stench of such assaultive tenacity that it burns your eyes. Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard.

One of the barrel-chested Israelis shows us what to do. Pick up four chickens in each hand. This is done by grabbing hold of the birds by one leg. "If the leg snaps," he says, "it doesn't matter. Just to get four in each hand. B'seder," he says, "OK?" He faces us holding the requisite eight, four in each hand, living masses of writhing feathers. He looks like some German expressionist cheerleader, his pompoms alive, convulsing, filthy. "Who will see their dreams fall away into the abyss and eventually succumb to the crushing sadness and meaningless of it all? We will! And what does that spell? Madness! Louder, I can't hear you!"

He crams the chickens roughly into a blue plastic crate smeared with wet guano. "And you close the lid and chick chack," he tells us, clapping his hands with that's-that finality. Before I even try, I know that I will not be able to do this. It is midnight, and we will be here until dawn, or until the truck is piled to capacity with crated birds. I walk out into the sea of chickens. I reach down and grab one. Its leg a slightly thicker segmented chopstick.

I recoil and stand up. I take a fetid breath, regroup, and bend down with new resolve, grab the chicken by its body with both hands, thinking somehow that might be preferable. Although how I think I'm going to get eight of them this way, I'm not sure. Its ribs expand and contract under my fingers, a dirty, warm, live umbrella. I drop the bird as if it were boiling hot.

My friends are all grabbing handfuls of poultry and shoving them into crates, unmindful of splayed wings, attempted peckings of their forearms, and the horrible premorbid squawking of birds on their way to slaughter. My sensibilities are not offended by the processing of animals for foods. I don't care about chickens. I fairly define anthropocentric. I'm crazy about the food chain and love being at the top of it. But like the making of sausages, federal legislation, and the heartwarming film work of Robin Williams, there are some things I just don't want to witness.

I leave the coop and go out to the trucks. Hoisting myself up onto the flatbed, I start to help with the stacking of the full crates. I know that my unilateral decision to change my task is met with displeasure on the part of the men who run the coop, but I do not care. [SPEAKING HEBREW] "What's the matter with him," the head of the work detail asks when he sees me on the truck. [SPEAKING HEBREW] He has answered using the female pronoun when referring to me. "The lady doesn't like the chickens."

It would be years before I was referred to as "she" again, and then very rarely and only as a joke by friends. I turn around to look at the men, making it quite clear to them that I understand what they're saying. The man who called me "she" avoids my eyes and busies himself with straightening a pile of crates and tightening the tarpaulin on the side of the truck. "You're right," I tell him in Hebrew. "She doesn't like the chickens."

At that very moment, I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself. He's right. I don't like chickens. I like men.

Now I live in Manhattan, the un-kibbutz, where the words Karl and Marx generally bring up associations of Lagerfeld and Groucho. At camp when I was young, I, and the other children of affluent professionals, would gather under the trees every day to sing before going in to lunch. One of the songs was always "The Internationale," the hymn of the proletariat. One summer, we were even told to sing it with our left fists raised. We were, none of us, by any stretch of the imagination, what could be described as prisoners of starvation, wretched of the earth or enthralled slaves. Admittedly, they are all catchier metaphors and easier to scan than arise ye children of psychiatrists. But they had little to nothing to do with us personally.

And yet for those few moments when we were singing, those words seemed so true. How can I describe to you that 11-year-old's sense of purpose? That thrill of belonging to something larger, something outside of my own body? The sheer heart-stopping beauty of a world of justice and perfection rising on new foundations? And that one line, "we have been naught, we shall be all." Naught-- it spoke as much about my wish to be delivered from this pre-adolescent self-loathing as it did to any consciousness of liberating the masses. But it held such promise of what I might hope for that even now, as I write this, I can still call up that old fervor. It still makes my breath catch in my throat.

Ira Glass

David Rakoff's a writer in New York.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder.

Special thanks today to Mark Smith, creator of Chicago's semi-legendary Poetry Slam. Our Poultry Slam is named in tribute to it and to him. The title in no way is intended to demean or denigrate poultry. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our show by Mr. Torey Malatia, who describes listening to our program this way.

Ira Glass

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

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