Cathy Farmer is on the phone. She's trying to rent 56 pink flamingos for her mother's birthday. The plastic kind.
It's not easy.
The pink flamingo lawn ornaments have waded into American culture.
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Not every place she calls -- party stores and such -- even has pink flamingos, much less 56 of them. Or if they do, they're for sale -- not rent -- and that can get pricey, considering how many she needs.
Also, Cathy wants to surprise Mom. That means fetching the flamingos Friday, hiding them in her brother's pickup, and sneaking out at midnight to stick them into the lawn so her unsuspecting mother will awaken Saturday to their cheerful presence.
Also, all of this will happen in Florida, and Cathy lives in Maryland.
And, her mother has a postage stamp lawn so it's not clear if all those 'mingos will fit.
Then there is this little factoid: "My mother hates pink flamingos. She may just go after them with a baseball bat."
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The earliest known rendering of a flamingo by a human artist is a Neolithic cave drawing in Spain, of approximately 5000 B.C.
-- "Ballerinas in Pink" by Carleton Mitchell
National Geographic, October 1957
As these words are being written, Cathy and hubby Mike and yellow lab Jax are driving to Florida in their teal Tahoe, not knowing how their 'mingo adventure will turn out.
Not realizing, either, that they're part of a Great American Flamingo Fling. For reasons that no doubt lie deep in the national psyche, there has been a flamingo craze afoot for a few decades now. It flares with special intensity at this time each year as the unbearable lightness of spring spreads over the land, filling winter-weary souls with fresh joys and wacky ideas.
Flamingos 'r just so us.
"It's taking the country by storm," says Ralph Fazio, who with his brother Rick runs Flamingo Surprise in Cleveland and Chicago.
For a fee, Fazio crews sneak to your lawn at midnight and stick plastic flamingos -- or any of 74 other items including cows and eight-foot storks -- into the grass. They're getting 30 to 100 orders a day, have franchises in San Francisco, Oklahoma City and Atlanta.
"It's huge, it's crazy, it's expanding all over the country," Ralph claims. "People love it because it's just so wonderfully gaudy."
When Washington developer Conrad Cafritz turned 60, he awoke to find five dozen flamingos on his Foxhall Road lawn. A woman in Centreville, Md., has organized a Pink Flamingo Club and staged a flamingo Nativity scene. A Washington nurse reportedly takes her plastic flamingo on vacation and sticks it in front of her tent.
Steve Colby, who operates the Flamingomania Web site ("a temple to tacky") with wife Sally out of Hagerstown, says sales are "excellent" -- not only of classic lawn flamingos, but flamingo aloha shirts, flamingo picture frames, flamingo angel ornaments, flamingo toilet bowl brush holders and the wildly popular "Stupid Flamingo Hat."
"It's just fun," Colby says. "We've sold 'em to churches for fundraising, to individuals trying to bust neighborhood covenants. Flamingos are big with sport parachutists as mascots. We sold inflatable flamingos to a group that travels -- they take pictures with their flamingos at places like the Arc de Triomphe."
Colby speculates that people like them because "there's so much uptightness anymore about status, it's kind of a reverse-status, anti-snob kind of thing."
Some like them more than others. Gail Hoehl of Silver Spring, a 39-year-old piano teacher, has 2,000 lawn flamingos and related items. "I've done my downstairs studio all in flamingo," she reports. "Flamingo drapes, upholstery, pictures, artwork, everything."
In fact, her whole house is filled. "I can't wait till our addition is built."
Why does she do it?
"It's fun. Friends and neighbors say you just cannot be unhappy in this house, because they're so wonderful."
Even Hoehl, however, has deferred to the sensibilities of neighbors by hiding her lawn flamingos "behind some bushes so you can't see them from the street. But when you walk up to the front door, they're waiting in ambush."
The Web is rife with flamingoiana.
"PINK. PLASTIC. PROUD," proclaims On Stagnant Pond, a site www.ospsitecrafters.com that provides flamingo landscaping tips ("There's no such thing as too many flamingos"), flamingo dance info ("Listen to those steel rods scrapin' "), a guide to "refurbishing" flamingos ("Cement replacement head . . . using NASA #331 multipolymer resealing O-Ring solvent"), even a "Phlamingo Philosophy" ("Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines").
On Flamingo Fanny & Friends, an Internet chat room at Delphi.com, flamingomaniacs enthuse about "the most fabulous nightlight flamingo I've ever seen!" and "my 'mingo . . . all put together with fish line."
Dan and Donna Flamion of Indiana cranked up theirsite, the Pink Flamingo, in '97 after Donna appeared in the audience at NBC's "Today" show clutching a lawn flamingo and Al Roker grabbed it and started squawking.
Now the Flamions (at www.thepinkflamingo.com) are happily selling flamingo flags, kites, windsocks, mailboxes, coffee mugs, pens, wind chimes, plant stakes, earrings and birthday cards.
They'll rent 50 lawn flamingos for $100.
Had Cathy only known.
A New Art Form
America . . . has developed a pink plastic flamingo subculture, replete with rituals, rumors and rites.
-- "The Original Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the
Grass," by Don Featherstone and Tom Herzing
(Schiffer, 1999)
Who knows how it all began? Hoehl, the collector, studied the question and learned that Hialeah Race Track in Florida imported real flamingos from the Caribbean in the '20s, and things just went from there. Pretty soon, the well-to-do were putting out metal or bronze or wooden flamingo ornaments as "status symbols" to show they'd been at a Florida resort.
Flamingos for the masses, however, had to wait for the advent of plastics technology in the '50s.
And the genius of one man.
For it turns out that the three-dimensional lawn flamingo so universally loved and reviled was actually conceived, designed and sculpted in 1957 by a guy named Don Featherstone.
Featherstone, fresh out of art school and unaware of the world-historical significance of what he was about to do, went to work for Union Products in Leominster, Mass., which at the time was producing flat silk-screened animal figures -- ducks, flamingos, chickens, cows and the like.
He was assigned to create full-bodied versions; he started with the duck, "because ducks sold the most. Then I took them one by one and turned them into three-dimensional plastic items," Featherstone says by phone. "That's how it started."
Featherstone, 65, is now enjoying retirement with his wife, Nancy, and their French poodle, Phydeaux. In his four decades with Union, which he now owns, he designed more than 600 animal figures. More than 20 million of his pink lawn flamingos have been sold; in several years, it was the top item.
Remington would be envious.
Featherstone is popular at art shows and trade fairs, and his 1999 book of photographs, "The Original Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass" (with text by Tom Herzing), containing pictures people sent in of his flamingos in various funny and beautiful poses, was an instant cult classic.
"Few imagined the evolutionary cusp on which the civilized world teetered in 1957, when the threat of an atomic holocaust" loomed, Herzing wrote in the introduction. "Unknown to all but a few, in that fateful hour was born an entirely new avian species, phoenicopteris ruber plasticus."
Featherstone had been serious when he sculpted the original bird. Unable to work from live models, as he did with ducks and cows, he sought inspiration in a series of luxuriant flamingo photographs in the October 1957 National Geographic.
Over the years, as his creation came to be seen as the quintessential Icon of Tacky, Featherstone good-naturedly went along.
Even today, he says with a bit of nostalgia: "They touched the fact that we like tropical elegance, but we can't afford it so we settle for plastic. They only look tacky when people do tacky things, like put out a tractor tire and paint it red, white and blue and put petunias in it surrounded by 15 flamingos. If it's done in good taste, it's as nice as anything else."
So what does it all mean?
Cultural historian Colleen J. Sheehy took a stab at an answer in her delightfully dense "The Flamingo in the Garden: American Yard Art and the Vernacular Landscape" (Garland, 1998):
"The paradoxical attitudes represented by the pink flamingo -- its ability to represent mainstream American culture associated with the suburban home, the nuclear family and the work ethic, and an inversion of mainstream values for those with problematic and oppositional relationships to them -- is evident from observing where flamingo imagery appeared commercially," she wrote. "Flamingo lawn ornaments can be bought at mainstream stores: Kmart, Target, garden and hardware stores. At these sites, flamingos are treated as merchandise, not art, in contrast to the prominent treatment they receive at other commercial sites, usually small stores representing countervailing values of the erotic, the sensual, the noncorporate, the idiosyncratic, the ironic and humorous."
Clearly, there's a Larry McMurtry novel here.
"Flamingo Moon."
Talking It Out
In the first century A.D. . . . Pliny recorded in his Naturalis Historia that "Apicius, the most gluttonous gorger . . . established the view that the flamingo's tongue has a specially fine flavor."
-- "Ballerinas in Pink"
Life is funny.
Cathy Farmer had never rented lawn flamingos before, or even thought about them. "The idea just popped into my head. I must have seen them somewhere."
The original plan, she explained before leaving for Florida, was to surprise her mom, Bette Benedik, on her birthday, which was Mother's Day. But her brother, Joe, couldn't get there then with his pickup, so they put it off a week.
"I asked Mom, 'Do you want me to mail your present?' She said, 'No, wait till you get here.' My brother's kids -- her grandchildren, they're 3 and 4 -- will be there. I think one of them will say on Saturday morning, 'Grandma, what's that in the front yard?' She'll look and say, 'What the . . . ' "
Cathy, 35, is short and peppy, an administrative assistant at the National Archives. She grew up in Canal Fulton, Ohio. Her parents divorced when she was 12 and she moved to Alexandria with her mother. Bette moved to Gainesville, Fla., in '85.
Five years ago, Cathy married Mike Farmer, 39, a friendly, soft-spoken guy who's chief engineer at the Warner Theatre. "Humor is important to our marriage," he says. "We don't go through the day without laughing together."
This goes for their extended family, too. They've enjoyed family get-togethers with Cathy's high-spirited mom and others over the years -- and somehow the stories invariably seem to feature critters. There was that visit to the butterfly farm in Costa Rica, the case of the raccoon that loved peanut-butter crackers, the mouse that hoarded dog food.
And now, flamingos.
A week before their departure for Florida, Cathy and Mike have lunch atop one of the buildings Mike supervises. It's a beautiful warm day and they bask in the sun, enjoying the stunning view as they speculate about Bette's reaction to the coming flamingo surprise for birthday No. 56.
"She likes attention," Cathy says.
"All the neighbors and everybody who drives by will be looking," Mike says, "so that fits her perfect."
"She'll be embarrassed," Cathy says, a little worried.
"A little bit," Mike says, "but she'll like the attention more."
"She's having a few people over for dinner Saturday night, and they're going to see all those pink flamingos in the front yard."
Cathy chuckles.
Mike had tried to talk his wife down from 56 flamingos, just to "lessen the cost. Less will give the same feeling, and if she takes it the wrong way it will cost less to replace a smaller number. We'll have to hide all the baseball bats. You never know how she'll feel."
"She'll be stressed," Cathy realizes, "from all the kids running around."
"Well, she may get upset at first," Mike counsels, "but she'll settle down."
"Yes!" Cathy agrees brightly. "She'll be calling her friends and saying, 'Look at what my kids did for my birthday!' "
They both chuckle.
Flamingo Road
With its hip visual style that thrust flamingos and Florida into the minds of millions of viewers, "Miami Vice" is widely credited with spurring a flamingo craze.
-- "The Flamingo in the Garden"
Working the phone, Cathy finally found a place in Gainesville that would rent flamingos, the Plant Shoppe.
"I called and they said, 'Yes, we have pink flamingos. How many would you like?' When I said 56 I think the woman dropped the phone."
The Shoppe didn't have 56, but would rent her 18. They'd try to get more.
"I locked in the 18," Cathy says, but she forgot to get a price. "I didn't write her name down or get a reservation number. God, maybe I should call again and make sure."
Plant Shoppe owner Betsy Spillers confides by phone: "We have two different kinds. She's going to get the small regular ones that probably stand two, two and a half feet tall. Those are the little pink ones that have been around for years.
"We also have 'Real Mingoes,' which are life-sized. There's a feeding one, with his neck going toward the ground, the back of the body is three feet tall. And there's a standing one, his head goes to four and a half feet."
A pair of "Real Mingoes" sells for $21.99. The smaller ones are $5.99. "I'm charging her $2.50 a flamingo for the weekend," Spillers says.
At dawn last Wednesday, Cathy and Mike saddled up the Tahoe and headed for Florida. The flamingo game plan was more or less in place, but Cathy fretted over the details.
"I guess if the Plant Shoppe has forgotten," she said just before setting off, "I'll just go and buy some somewhere."
If her brother doesn't show up on time with the pickup -- he was busy taking a class in Jacksonville first and might arrive late in Gainesville -- "I'll get them myself and hide them."
It will be another of those crazy and dear family bonding experiences, Cathy hoped.
The Night of the Pink Flamingos.
Epilogue
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
-- Job 1:16
So, how did it turn out?
Cathy reports that Mike put 30 flamingos on the lawn about 11:30 p.m. Friday after she'd picked them up from the Plant Shoppe and kept them hidden in her Aunt Dorothy's van.
Her mother "had no idea what Mike was doing out there," Cathy said. "We kind of kept her inside."
Saturday morning, nobody said anything to give it away. They just opened the front drapes. "It took her two trips through the front room before she saw them," Mike said.
"She shouted, 'Jesus Christ! What's going on here?' She flung the door open and went out and surveyed the situation and came back in happy, laughing and smiling."
According to Cathy, her mom laughed and said, "You couldn't get fake marijuana plants so you had to put these nasty pink flamingos out here!"
Bette Benedik came on the phone. "The flamingos are so South Florida," she said, "and this is North Florida. But we're having fun.
"It's great!"
