85: Poultry Slam 1997

Ira Glass

The argument is simple. Why have an eagle as your national bird? The eagle is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. He sits on the tree branch, watches other birds swoop down for fish. Once they grab the fish, the eagle chases them, steals the fish. Also, he's a coward. At least that is the argument that Benjamin Franklin lays out in a letter dated January 26, 1784.

"It would be far better if the symbol of the new United States of America were a turkey," Franklin writes. Quote, "The turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable, and withal a true, original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on."

A modern American reads this and thinks, bird of courage?

Ira Glass

That's Jack Hitt. He is one of contributing editors here at This American Life. He has written about the Benjamin Franklin papers in The New York Times. He writes about history, biology and pretty much anything else he wants to in various national magazines. And he offered to explain this turkey mystery.

Ira Glass

And is the thing about poultry, that probably more than any other animal, we've turned birds, chicken, turkey, into what we want them to be. Which means that chickens and turkeys, more than other animals, are a mirror of ourselves, of our desires, of our needs. When we tell stories about poultry, we're telling stories about ourselves. And given this, and given the history of the turkey in America, maybe Benjamin Franklin was right. Maybe it should be the symbol of our nation.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. It is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And we, all of us, we stand at this moment poised between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We are in the weeks during the year when Americans consume more poultry than at any other time, which means it's time for This American Life's annual Poultry Slam. Stories about chickens, turkeys, ducks, fowl all kinds, and their mysterious hold over us.

Ira Glass

Well, Act One of our program today, Chicken Diva, in which we hear the story of yes, avian supernumeraries.

Act Two, Headless Chicken in Topless Bar. Actually, there is no topless bar in that act. We just like the sound of that. But there is a headless chicken and a question. What does the headless chicken say about us?

Act Three, Duck Warrior. Michael Lewis explains the natural way to hunt duck and his family's way.

Act Four, Trying to Respect the Chicken, the story of one woman's quest to give chicken the honor and dignity they are rarely accorded, even though the chickens resist her efforts. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Chicken Diva. Chickens are what we make of them. For further evidence of this, we have this story from our contributing editor, 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 92 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 '80's, 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, and this season has a hit on Broadway, a musical called Side Show. 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 - LOVE'S FOWL] [DOG BARKING]

You may have noticed that this libretto is an 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 our 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 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.

[MUSIC - LOVE'S FOWL]

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, 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 [? Gallopatra. ?] But not before she sails the seven seas, is ship wrecked, 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 purer 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 to a larger painted Styrofoam ball, poking on 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 '40's cartoon figure would clamp to his nose around a chunk of Limburger cheese.

[MUSIC - LOVE'S FOWL]

And I could go on. She takes a cowboy lover on the American frontier while on the 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 Clothelines, the official fan club newsletter of the opera. Its 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 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. I only agreed to watch it because I thought I would need the material to put together some wacky piece about poultry for This American Life. 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 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.

[MUSIC - LOVE'S FOWL]

I want a subscription to that newsletter.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt's a writer who lives in New Haven.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Headless Chicken in Topless Bar. Lloyd grew up in rural Virginia. His parents were city people who moved to the farm, people who decided that they'd raise goats, pigs, about 100 chickens. They would slaughter the birds by chopping off their heads with an axe. Now, we're going to get a little explicit here, so just be warned.

Ira Glass

If you spend enough time around chickens, and you are a halfway empathetic or observant person, I think it's inevitable that at certain times, in certain ways, the boundary between the human world and the chicken world will get blurred. That happened to Lloyd.

Ira Glass

One way to look at the world is this. There's a life continuum. One one side, at the extreme end, you have plants and insects and stuff that most of us feel no remorse about killing or mistreating. On the other side of the continuum, at the other extreme, you have dogs and cats and baby seals and human beings, animals we do not feel free to just kill or eat or be cruel to. And the question is, where are chickens located on this continuum?

At different points during our conversation, Lloyd put chickens at different places on the continuum. Sometimes he said that he felt their pain. He empathized with their pain. Sometimes he went on these long tirades about how stupid chickens are.

Ira Glass

Of course, the ultimate test of where you place a living thing on the life continuum is whether or not you're willing to put whatever it is into your mouth and eat it.

Ira Glass

Lloyd Natoff designs and builds custom furniture for a living here in Chicago. Coming up, the Trojan goose, chicken portraiture and other stories about birds that say more about us than they do about the birds in our annual Poultry Slam. In a minute from 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, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on the theme. Today's program, during the weeks between Thanksgiving Christmas, the weeks of greatest poultry consumption in America, it is our annual Poultry Slam. Stories of chicken, turkeys, ducks, fowl of all kind, and how we turn them into mirrors of ourselves. We have arrived at Act Three of our program, Duck Warrior.

If how we raise chickens says a lot about ourselves, how we hunt them says just as much. We have this account of one family's mortal reckoning with birds, and with their own souls, from Michael Lewis.

Michael Lewis

Every other year or so during Christmas vacation, I stuff myself into the camouflage suit of goose down and rubber and strike out with my father and a few of his friends into the swamps of southwestern Louisiana. For nearly 20 years now, I have followed him into the darkness, as blindly as Isaac followed Abraham, to stalk waterfowl through a gauntlet of pricker bushes, sawgrass, quick mud, snakes, mosquitoes, wild dogs, alligators and even the odd hostile cow.

Because everything in the Louisiana swamp seems slightly unhinged and unpredictable, it seems almost natural there that, for example, the common cow would charge an armed man as fiercely as the rabbit charged Jimmy Carter. And force him to choose between humiliating death and the indignity of shooting a cow in self-defense.

But of all the life in the swamp, nothing is quite so transformed by the place as the otherwise intelligent human being in pursuit of the elusive waterfowl. I suppose I should say that I see nothing immoral in this, though I often have sensed mild disapproval in people who do not hunt of people who do. As they slice deeply into the flesh of what was once an adorable little lamb, and then tear it greedily with their back teeth, these people will say something like, "How can you kill a cute little duck?" The honest answer is, sadly, that I don't.

Looking back on it now, I believe we began two decades ago with the ambition of one day becoming purists. The hunting purist is able to make himself think and feel like a duck or a goose. He enters the swap at 5:00 in the morning with 10 shotgun shells and returns three hours later with his legal limit of three ducks and seven geese. He can carve wooden ducks so similar to live ducks that even ducks don't notice the difference. And make noises with his mouth that sound so much like a female duck on the make that male ducks flock to him like sailors to a brothel.

I confess there was a time when this seemed important to us, and some of my earliest memories are of my father sitting on our back porch imitating for hours a tape recording of duck mating calls. But over the years, it became clear that no matter how long we practiced this inter-species flirtation, we would never score. As this truth dawned, we began busily to fill the gap between our ambitions and our talents with the latest in hunting technology.

Unable to speak with the birds, we communicated instead with each other. We carried Walkie Talkies so that we might fan out in the swamp and relay to each other various duck data. We carried flares to better see each other in the dark. And then there were the more adventurous techniques. In the late 1970's, it was widely believed, for example, that to a goose flying high in the sky, a balled up newspaper resembled a sitting goose. For several years, we spread The Wall Street Journal across the Louisiana wetlands, fully believing that a goose would spot the stock quotes, or perhaps an opera review, and dive down for a closer look.

After a while, when we had nothing to show for this but a soggy mess, we moved on from newspapers to life-sized, plastic replicas of geese. When these also failed, another theory soon made the rounds. Geese lacked size perception. A goose the size of the World Trade Center looked, to a goose, like just another goose. And so, for the next several years, our plastic replicas of the geese swelled to three or four times the size of a live goose. The added size did not help as far as I could see.

Only now do I understand that our many beliefs about geese would lead us inevitably to embrace the Trojan goose. The Trojan goose was advertised by one of the many companies that specialize in supplying frustrated hunters with high technology. It was, as it sounds, a hollowed out replica of a goose, complete with eye holes and large enough for two hunters to stand comfortably inside of it. It was meant to be erected in the middle of a goose feeding ground. One wing disguised a kind of trap door.

The idea was that once the geese gathered around their gargantuan cousin, the hunters might throw open the trap door, storm out into their unsuspecting midst and visit death and destruction upon many wild beasts. Just moments before we purchased the Trojan goose, however, something happened. I'm not sure what, perhaps some combination of self-revulsion and self-examination. At heart, we realized, we were not technologists. We were spiritualists.

The spiritualist is the hunter who has learned to shift the emphasis of the hunting away from the killing. He knows he can shiver ducklessly for hours behind a clump of marsh grass, expertly imitating a pintail's whistle or a mallard drake's quack with a textbook, perfect semicircle of decoys at his front and the wind and the sunrise at his back. Then, the moment he deserts his position to answer a call of nature, the ducks will descend like Japanese zeros. Looking like a cross between a flasher and an advertisement for the National Rifle Association, he will lurch for his gun and go down with a small splash as the ducks exit safely, chuckling lightly.

We have come very far in these 20 years. A few weeks ago, my father set off one morning on foot through the swamp. He came through a clearing and walked into several acres of ducks and geese feeding on the ground. They continued to feed while he watched. It was the largest collection of potential victims ever to sit quietly within the range of a Lewis gun. He might have murdered a flock had he been that sort of hunter. Instead, he stood in awe and watched until they all flew away.

Ira Glass

Michael Lewis is the author of Trail Fever and other books.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Trying to Respect a Chicken. Sure, it's one thing to take a fictional character like Chicken Little and make her a star. Try doing it with a real chicken, just try.

Ira Glass

In a world where chickens get no respect, Tamara Staples treats them the way that humans treat those we revere the 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 Tamra 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 lies, about what it might be, what it might consist of, until Tamara headed out to a farm.

[CHICKENS CROWING]

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 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 all 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 Wullf editor of The Poultry Press. Dick notices that a bird in one photo has crooked toes.

Ira Glass

The fact is, most 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 and flash back to something 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. 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 feet long. This takes five people. Then, in comes the power and the fancy lights and the cloth backdrop that gets hung from the 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.

Ira Glass

Our first bird is a White Cornish, a show bird who belongs to George. This show bird is used to being picked up and handled. Part of preparing chicken 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 get 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 it at the flaccid cock. The cock does not rise. I can say that on the radio, right?

Ira Glass

They try this and that, nothing with much success. And 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, un-birdlike situation, an hour of watching them makes clear just how hard it is ever to get birds to hit the standard.

Which is to say, not only do we completely dominate every aspect of the lives of chickens, their births, their feed, their eggs, their slaughter. Not only have we bred them to human specifications to meet human needs, but we've created a standard of what it means to be 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 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, 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 Cornishes these days are supposed to have shorter legs than the real standard of perfection. Vertical tail feathers are out and all sorts of breeds that really should have them. In the country, among the chicken breeders, they think about a lot of things you 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 has 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 feather.

Ira Glass

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 has 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. Then there are the props. She's trying an experiment, putting a little toy horse in the picture with the chicken, a tiny wagon. This does not seem to help things. The Davidsons are looking at her skeptically. Paul asks pointedly if she's ever shot a bird this big.

Ira Glass

Imagine this please from the point of view of the chicken. OK, you're surrounded by powerful creatures five times your height. They crowd in at you. They leer at you. You are standing on a surface, Tamara's set, where it is impossible to get decent footing. There is a three foot tall strobe light, a strobe light twice your height, just a wing's length away from your beaky little face.

Ira Glass

This combination of coddling and threats might motivate and aspiring supermodel or an eager puppy, but this, after all, is a chicken. Forget standard of perfection, this chicken does not even stand up straight. It sags. It slouches. 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. Dick and Ella and Gary, two other relatives-- the had all been standing back at the edges of the feed room. Now, they all lean in right next to Tamara. 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 had never really thought about this one way or the other. But partly because Tamara's photos make chickens seem so thoughtful.

Ira Glass

Those photos are a lie.

Ira Glass

As the day continues and Tamara shoots other birds, it becomes clear. The glimpse of personality that she's able to capture on film, these are just momentary. These are fleeting. A bird turns its head for an instant at a certain angle, or a bird squints its eyes at the camera. And for a moment, through the camera lens, to a human, it looks like recognizable personality, emotion. But really, it's just a chicken.

And watching, I think I begin to understand why the people who breed birds have no interest in photos that show chickens' true personalities. It's because that in their true personalities, chickens are kind of a pain in the ass.

Ira Glass

Fact is, you 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, Ameraucana, mixed breeds. They seem utterly uninterested in us. They cluck at each other. There's feed to eat, hay to nestle in. They have better things to do with their time. And you know, there's nothing that makes you realize just how inhuman chickens are than spending a day trying to make them seem human.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margie Rockland and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Rachel Howard and Alex Blumberg. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

If you want to buy a tape of this program, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago. That phone number, 312-832-3380. Again, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected]. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who has found a perfect way to create a new radio host.

Jack Hitt

By sticking in small, painted Styrofoam ball onto a larger painted Styrofoam ball, poking in two map tacks for eyes--

Ira Glass

Oh, you get the idea. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. (HOST) ANNOUNCER: PRI, Public Radio International.