The Day Big Bird Got a Reputation

This story is a teaser from Chapter 25 of my upcoming book. It was 1997, I was 19 years old, and at the very beginning of my career as an entertainer, taking on anything I could, balloon twisting, kids’ parties, birthday clown, you name it, just trying to keep the lights on while figuring out how to perform for a living.

This is one of those stories that shows how unpredictable (and hilarious) the road to becoming a professional entertainer can be. It’s also one of the experiences I knew I had to write down just in case I one day decided to write a book.

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Book 3, Chapter 25:

I’d asked Benny to keep me in mind for any gigs that came up, and soon enough, he sent a few birthday party gigs my way.

First up, I was supposed to be Big Bird.

I asked Jonathan about it, and his eyes widened. “Whoa, you're going to be a BIG, Big Bird."

“Why do you say?" I asked.

"That costume has a gigantic headpiece, it sits on your shoulders and straps around your chest, then you look out a hole in the neck part, while the actual head is another 2 feet above you. You're going to be a nine-foot-tall Big Bird.”

Nothing about that description sounded intimidating to me; just a new costume to get used to, I suppose.

On the day of the party, I drove to the address and arrived at a city park. A quintessential California park with faded picnic tables under sun-baked shelters. The family was working-class Latino, and the place was alive with music. The low bass of a norteño song thumped from a boombox propped on a bench. The uncles tended a smoking grill, and the smell of barbacoa drifted across the field. A few of the men wore black chino pants and white wife-beater shirts, tattoos crawling up their arms and shoulders, or even etched across their cheeks or temples.

As soon as I appeared, all of the kids ran up to me, wanting to meet and hug Big Bird. The costume offered zero neck mobility, though, so to see any of the children I was interacting with, I had to bend over from the waist to look down out of the tracheotomy-like viewing screen cut in Big Bird’s neck.

Taking in the view through this three-inch opening, I saw kids running around my legs, and then one I couldn’t see started crying. Often, children would be scared of the costume characters we impersonated, so crying wasn’t out of the ordinary, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then I heard another kid crying, then another.

What I had no way of knowing is that every time I leaned over to see what was happening around my feet, Big Bird’s two-foot-long, hard plastic beak would come crashing down from its nine-foot-tall perch and peck the heads of any children unlucky enough to be in its path. Finally, one of the heavily tattooed dads intervened; he walked over and put one arm around my feathered shoulder. Then, in a brotherly, we need to have a chat kinda tone, he said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Yo Big Bird, you gotta be careful man, you’re hurting people with your big pecker.”

This got a huge laugh from the crowd.

And now that I understood what was happening, I tried to be more conscious of what I was doing with my big pecker.

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