Our flamingo! My mom was over for a barbecue that day, and I carried the recovered bird out back, dusting soil from its wings and waving it aloft. The following spring, though, I whacked the pfitzer with pruning shears and tripped on something beneath it, way in the back, shaded and covered. I was almost glad our flamingo had vanished. Hell, we fit better in “working class.” But we had imitated those who had enough wealth to play with symbols of those who did not. I winced when I read-in Smithsonian magazine, chronicler of the nation’s cultural history-that lawn flamingos gradually became “‘loaded objects,’ classist tools of the well-to-do mocking the taste of the less fortunate.” Louis Hills was not? Working-class, the bird’s intended milieu. Louis Hills hardly resonated with swinging or queer culture. Queer culture, meanwhile, borrowed the flamingo as a symbol of pride, defiance, visibility.īuttoned-up, churchgoing St. To wit, only a pink flamingo on a cruise meant swinging. Their definitions layer over time and often they are yanked out of context and used in a new way. It is also, I learned next, a signal, like an upside-down pineapple, of a couple’s willingness to swing. Times that there are “two pillars of cheesy campiness in the American pantheon. Pop-culture commentator Robert Thompson told the L.A. We were now in a new millennium, one that only rolled its eyes at such whimsy. Thirty years later, on the anniversary of the prank, Madison made the pink plastic lawn flamingo the official bird of the city. They bought 1,008 of them and covered the campus. By 1979, a prankster student government at the University of Wisconsin-Madison knew a flock of plastic flamingos would make the perfect ironic statement. Then, because there were too many and they were cheap and silly and somehow hopeful in that way that begs to be scotched, the flamingos became an object of fun. Flamingo later wrote a book titled, with apparent sincerity, Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass. It was first advertised as a way to “beautify” your lawn, and all those suburbanites with cookie-cutter homes and no trees took the bait. One proud to live in the suburbs, the other ashamed? At any rate, my single, arty flamingo was all wrong, at best an homage. Also, the Featherstone flamingos are sold as a pair: one standing upright, the other with its head bent low. The genuine article is easy to distinguish, though: Featherstone’s initials are etched beneath its tailfeathers. (“See also: artificial turf, lawn jockey,” ends their Wikipedia entry.)Įnvious manufacturers stole the flamingo’s image and reproduced it in promiscuous quantities. Less than two decades later, the pink birds saturated the suburbs and tempted John Waters to write his deliberately shocking comedy Pink Flaming os. It was neon-bright, a cool and recognizable shape, cheap (I found an old Sears catalog selling pairs for $2.76), and in most locations, absurd. ![]() Mass produced in the fashion of the fifties, the lawn flamingo soon became an American pop culture icon. Don Featherstone had designed the first pink flamingo yard ornament in 1957, naming the bird Diego and his species Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus. The whimsy was born in New England, not the Florida it conjured. Our South City flamingo was a nationwide phenomenon. Louis custom I had thought unique (like saying “If you don’t like the weather, it’ll change in an hour”) was not. I looked for another flamingo but could only find the flimsy plastic ones and, my mother’s daughter, I held out for something nicer. If the theft had been driven by artistic impulses, I could forgive it. Theft? A teenage prank? A ransom demand in the offing? We looked all over the yard, the sidewalk, even behind the fence in the backyard. ![]() Neighbors smiled and waved, pleased by our good intentions.Īnd then, just a month later, the flamingo vanished. We planted it right out front, next to a big fluffy blob of a pfitzer bush we hoped would die soon.įriends grinned at the flamingo’s presence. The self-proclaimed arbiter of décor (having registered my new husband’s fondness for plastic spinning daisies), I found an arty metal flamingo, its shade of pink enamelled in a slightly subdued hue. Nonconformity might be fun in politics and art, but it was usually a disaster when you were trying to make new friends. ![]() Newly married and eager to do everything right, we knew we had to prop a flamingo in our yard. Louis Hills, right on the “other side of the tracks” from our smaller, more affordable bungalow. They lined sidewalks, nestled in bushes, popped up in the middle of spongy Bermuda grass. ![]() Louis were dotted with hot pink plastic flamingos.
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