Happy Pink Flamingo Day

By Gail P. (TinkerPirate)

What are pink, plastic, and iconic pieces of lawn art?

PINK FLAMINGOS!  And, today is the day we honor and celebrate them.

No one is more excited than Myrtle.  She is all a flutter.  For those of you who don’t know, Myrtle is my traveling companion.  I adopted her on the PBS Cruise and now she travels with me where ever I go.  Myrtle has loads of cousins all over the country…there’s Mabel and Maribelle and Mildred and Matilda and lots of other M names…oh, and the latest is Mopsy who I rescued from a family of rabbits (Flopsy and Cottontail were so mean to her) and now lives in Oregon.  Oh, did I happen to mention the Myrtle along with her cousins are inflatable pink flamingos?  Oh, sorry….should have done that straight away.  No wonder you all are so confused about why I’m going on and on about Myrtle when today is Pink Flamingo Day.

Did you ever wonder how those pink flamingos came about?  Wonder no more…

We owe it all to Don Featherstone, who was hired by Union Products of Leominster, MA, to produce a better piece of lawn art.  Lawn art was the rage in the 1950.  It was the one thing that could help personalize all those cookie-cutter houses built to contain the Baby Boomer generation without breaking the bank.  Unfortunately, most lawn art was flat, two-dimensional, and without much character.  Featherstone, a graduate from the Worcester Art Museum’s art school, crafted 3-dimensional pieces…a girl with a watering can…a boy with a dog…a duck…and, finally, in 1957, the flamingo.

“Big deal” you may say.  But, what would you say if you learned he won a Nobel Prize for it?

Changed your tune did you or did you say “Really”?  It’s true.  He won a Nobel Prize…well, not THE Nobel Prize…it was the IG Nobel Prize for Art…but, still, it WAS a Nobel Prize.

On November 1, 2006, Union Products stopped producing the iconic pink flamingos.  Luckily, HMC International LLC purchased the copyright and molds for the flamingos in 2007.  Also in that year, Dean Mazzaralla, the mayor of Leominster, MA, declared June 23^rd Pink Flamingo Day in honor of Mr. Featherstone and his pink creation.

Featherstone’s creation eventually spawned a new industry.  Much of this industry – the lawn greeting industry – is based on installing flocks of pink flamingos on the lawns of poor unsuspecting people in the middle of the night.  The act is known as “flocking”.  I had to scratch my head and say “why?”  Well, they get paid to do it, go figure.

There have been several famous “flockings”.  Probably the most famous – or infamous – occurred over series of weeks in Celebration, Florida and had nothing to do with the lawn greeting industry.  For those who don’t know, Celebration is a planned community…a Disney planned community.  It has strict rules about what color you can paint your house, what color drapes you can have in your front windows, and…you guessed it…what kind of decorations you can place in your front yard.  I am sure it will come as no surprise that plastic pink flamingos are NOT on the approved list. Be that as it may, a flock of flamingos would appear on a yard overnight… only to reappear the next night on another lawn…and, yet, another lawn the next night.  This went on and on and on.  Legend has it, the perpetrators were never actually caught, but everyone “knew” who the ring leader was.  And, I’ve actually met the man.  He’s currently the pastor of my daughter’s church in University Place, WA.

True!  A couple of days ago, my DD mentioned that her pastor was going to go back to Florida.  Back to Florida?  That’s when it hit me that he had once been the pastor of the church in Celebration.  Given that he is the Harley-riding kind of pastor, I thought, his personality would definitely fit the profile of the flamingo planting Celebration pastor.  So, I did some googling and found confirmation in the way of an excerpt for Bill Geist’s book – Way Off the Road –

“Is there a flamingo underground? ‘I can’t talk about that,’ Reverend Wrisley replied.  We’ll see about that.  Might change his mind when we get him down to Disney headquarters?

The birds seem to migrate from yard to yard, staying one step ahead of the law.  Can plastic flamingos fly? I asked.

‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ he replies.  ‘I…I just…I can’t tell you.’

Tough talk from this man of the cloth who does bear an uncanny resemblance to the perpetrator, caught on camera by our tireless night surveillance news team.  Whoever’s responsible, it only goes to show that the best laid planned communities of mouse and men often go awry.

Reverend Wrisley predicts the flamingos will go forth and multiply ‘It’s ironic I think,’ he concludes, ‘that a plastic, gaudy pink flamingo in the land of the mouse represents reality.’”

And, with that, I conclude the PBS Blog celebrating Pink Flamingo Day!

Way off the Road by Bill Geist

Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price

Flamingo Diner by Sherryl Woods

Cat in a Flamingo Fedora by Carole Nelson Douglas

Ink Flamingos by Karen E. Olson
(Which was reviewed here on the PBS by reacherfan1909 in June 2011. To read the review, click this LINK)

by Gail P. (TinkerPirate)

OMG! OMG!! OMG!!! My heart is racing. I can barely breathe. I have this urge to run around waving my arms shrieking like a little girl…a wild woman…a banshee…a…a…I don’t know what except that it wouldn’t be pretty! OHNO! OHNO!! OHNO!!! It’s happening. AND, it ISN’T pretty….but, ya know, it’s perfectly OK. It’s International PANIC Day!

Why? International Panic Day? Well, I did a little research and nobody knows. Nobody knows who created it or why. But who cares? I sure don’t. However, I did learn some very interesting things about panic and some “entertaining” suggestions about how to celebrate the holiday.

According to Wikipedia (the ultimate source of all information – useful or not, factual or not), panic is “a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction. Panic may occur singularly in individuals or manifest suddenly in large groups as mass panic (closely related to herd behavior)”. I think we have all experienced this. The time you lost sight of your toddler granddaughter in the mall (not that I ever did that, but I’ve heard that it can be pretty scary) or when you realized that you just got everybody else ready for the accreditation survey, but forgot to get your section done (not that I ever did that, but I see how it would be panic time) or you show up to work completely nekkid (oh, wait, that was a dream, right?). These are all “panic” of the individual variety and thankfully can usually be easily rectified with a few deep breaths or a few minutes in the closet whispering “go away to my happy place…go away to my happy place…go away to my happy place”.

What about panic of the group variety? Well, that’s much more difficult to manage. There isn’t a closet big enough to house all the individual happy places for a crowd. The only thing you can do if you are in a mass panic is place your body firmly against the nearest wall and wait for the dust to settle.

But, not all mass panics happen in small places. Probably the most famous episode of mass panic occurred Halloween Eve 1938, when Orson Welles’ radio drama convinced much of America that Martians were invading the eastern seaboard. There were reports of people fleeing from their homes into the countryside to hide. There were people hiding in basements and calling the local police to report the smell of poison gas in the air. We might think that was silly, but to set some context, many listeners only heard part of the broadcast (obviously NOT the Martian-part) and the nation was already full of anxiety about an impeding war in Europe. But, in the aftermath, there was a hint of the familiar to us sitting comfortably in the 21^st century…..yes, dear PBSers, people sued…sued for mental anguish and sued for personal injury. I couldn’t find out how many suits were filed, but did learn that all but one were dismissed – a man sued for a pair of size 9B black men’s shoes. Apparently, he spent the money he was saving for said shoes to escape the Martians. And, Orson Welles himself said he should be paid.

Which leads me to the silliness of the day…a day to celebrate panic? What can we do? What is a suitable activity? I don’t believe a backyard BBQ is appropriate…too easy to panic about getting food poisoning from the potato salad. I also don’t think a beach party is appropriate…too easy to panic about shark attacks or flesh eating bacteria in the water. With the 2 most common ways of celebrating holidays off the table, you may want to consider some of these activities I found on the internet. (DISCLAIMER – If you decide to do any of these, YOU and only YOU are responsible for the outcome. Neither PBS or I will assume any responsibility for your stupidness. Clear?)

• Type everything in CAPS so people will know you are upset about something, but don’t tell them what
• Stuff the suggestion box at work with notes saying you suggest a padded, sound-proof room in which to flee when you feel panicy and just need a place to run around waving your hands pulling your hair with alternating shrieking and sobbing so as not to disturb the other employees
• Steal the water cooler and send a ransom note saying it will not be returned until “things” change
• Organize a flash mob of people demanding all of their money out of their accounts at the local BIG bank
• Re-label the ESC key on all the computers at work with the word PANIC
• Run out of your office screaming, then come back in a little while and act as if nothing has happened
• Stand outside the local zoo and ask people coming out if the lion that escaped has been caught

Or maybe you just want to sit down with a good book. These are currently available on PBS….and there is something for pretty much everyone….so DON’T panic!

The Panic Years by Doree Lewak

War of the Worlds: Mars’ Invasion of Earth Inciting Panic and Inspiring Terror from HG Wells to Orson Welles and Beyond

From Panic to Power: Proven Techniques to Calm Your Anxieties Conquer Your Fears and Put You in Control of Your Life
by Lucinda Bassett

Panic Room  James Ellison (Adapter), David Koepp

Panic X Panic 1 by Mika Kawamura