The Chicken Story

 It started, brainstorming in the guys' dorm. "What if we put a live chicken in their room?" said someone. "And then what?" "And then there'd be a live chicken in their room!"

Four of us decided to get it done: Wes Willison, Andrew Van Buren, Jamie Birney, and myself. Wes tapped me on the shoulder at dinner, and we drove off in Jamie's car with no clear destination. We searched the iPhone: farm. petting zoo. pet store. "It's gotta be close. We need to get there, drop the chicken, and get back before anyone suspects anything." Later, we realized that everyone suspected something (though no one suspected the correct thing).  We had no destination within miles, so when we spotted a wild turkey off the side of the road, it was inevitable that we would at least try to chase it down, me holding out my flannel shirt to... I don't even know what. Bag it? Blind it? Prevent it from pecking me to death? In the end, it was irrelevant. Wild turkeys are fast.

We drove into town, despairing. We parked in a parking lot at an ice cream / diner / beer store. Wes and I went in and (I only learned this later) Jamie and Andrew held a brief prayer service for our endeavor. The waitress glared at us. "You want to buy a chicken?" "Renting one would also be good." "You want to rent a live chicken?" The manager came out. "Well I know someone, but, for that, no."

We drove on. There was nothing nearby. We had no leads. So we began the sad process of brainstorming our backup prank. "What about dyeing their toilet water purple?" one of us said. We took this sad approximation of a prank as our only hope, and drove to a grocery store. It was five minutes before closing. At the register, the locals watched us purchase the 'grape' powder, bemused, but not nearly as bemused as they were about to be.

"Do you know where we can find a live chicken?" we asked.

A kid around our age, sitting on the Aged Pine Log Bench ($129.99) answered: "Sure, Anthony Soto, he raises chickens, out in Yulan."

He gave us directions. He may have given us hope as well, but we had settled for grape drink, and weren't willing to be crushed again.

"Tell him John sent you," he said, "no, no, wait--tell him Brian sent you. He knows Brian better."

We drove to Yulan and heard Anthony Soto's dog barking in front of his mobile home. We knocked. We explained our plan, and this time, at the inevitable question "So why do you want a chicken?" we had our answer: "We want them to come back to their room and say "Oh My God, a Chicken!"

"No, sorry," said Anthony Soto, in a tone that indicated that he wasn't.

We went back to the car, and the 'grape' powder. We opened the doors. Jamie may have had the key in the ignition, when the other Anthony Soto (Little Anthony, to his father's Big Anthony) called from the porch: "Hey! If you can catch one, you can take one for the night."

We looked at each other, and stalked back into the yard. The flock scattered. The chickens escaped, one of them into a secure nesting place amidst a metal truss. She stayed there as the four of us surrounded her, sure of her safety. AVB fished her out, telling her that she was a "pretty baby." She rode back to camp in a copy paper box.

If you weren't there (unlikely, if you cared enough to read this far), you will want to know that we took the copy paper box and put it in the girls' shower. We blocked the entrance to the shower with a mattress. We went to our scheduled activity, and walked in at five minute intervals.

"All right, what did you guys do?" we were asked. We smirked and said nothing. "Did you pull a prank?" I think we tried to deny it, but eventually we said something along the lines of "Well yeah, but you could never imagine what it is." Which of course set them to guessing, but we said nothing.

The chicken, for her part, was the best chicken we could've caught. There was a class going on in the girls' dorm, but she squawked only once. She defecated twice, both times in the expendable lid of the copy paper box. She pecked no one, even in the frenzy surrounding her discovery.

We spent a good part of that night being mysterious about where the chicken had come from. We took congratulations and strange looks from folks who hadn't, before that night, known us. "We didn't have to break any laws" (true, unless slipping Little Anthony a twenty as we drove off was illegal) was all we would say about our journey. Until now, that is.