Rico the Pirate Chicken

In honor of the recent holiday, I thought it might be appropriate to tell a short story about this year's Halloween celebration at Bethel New Life's youth mentoring program. Like most good stories, it began with a folding table, fifteen round pumpkins about the size of a soccer ball, and many fistfuls of multi-colored feathers.

We wanted to give the kids in the program a creative activity for Halloween, and painting pumpkins seemed like a great one for the kids we serve, who range in age from five to fifteen. (The thought of carving the pumpkins, while a favorite seasonal activity of mine, with a dozen kids hopped up on Laffy Taffy and fun size Milky Ways scared me more than anything else this Halloween.) When we presented them, along with paper plate palettes of acrylic paint and two old shoe boxes filled with a random assortment of arts and crafts supplies, the kids clamored for the biggest and most misshapen pumpkins of the bunch. When the kids, all in ill-fitting plastic smocks that drooped from their shoulders, had finally settled back in their seats with their bulbous orange canvases waiting expectantly in front of them,  they picked up their paint brushes and got to work.

I'll pause here for a moment to let you all imagine, like I did that afternoon, what your typical painted pumpkin looks like. If you're anything like me, you're imagining pumpkins painted with crooked jack-o-lantern type smiles, green countenances made to look like witches or, with a defter hand, maybe even Frankenstein. Pretty standard, right?

This is not what we got.

I was sitting next to Bobby, a nine year old in the program, who'd asked me to help him with his pumpkin. Admittedly, Bobby is one of my favorite kids in the program -- he generously laughs and my terrible pun jokes and, even though he has a lot of trouble in school, he's one of the quickest and brightest kids I've ever met. While I watched in silent awe, Bobby immediately dug his hand into one of the old shoe boxes and pulled out a handful of artificial feathers and began taking them and stabbing them into the side of his pumpkin. After seven or eight feathers were sticking out from the sides and back of his creation, he turned to me and stated plainly: "It's a chicken."

I looked around the room to gauge the other kids' pumpkins, and saw them gingerly pouring glue and glitter onto the stems, winding pipe cleaners into antennae, and using paint as an afterthought. I turned back to Bobby, who was gently applying a layer of paint to each feather and had just completed a glittery construction paper beak. I asked him what his pumpkin's name was. He paused for a moment and said, "Rico. His name's Rico. He's a pirate chicken." With that declaration he added a large eye patch over to Rico's right eye and then continued working, making a stringy, frazzled beard for Rico out of some pipe cleaners and colored paper.

I am constantly amazed by the kids I get to work with in this program. They are smart, motivated, wickedly funny, living in a world outside the door of our classroom where they are constantly being told (by their friends and often even by their parents and teachers) that they shouldn't be any of those things. Many of them have no support, no one looking out for them, and no one telling them all the good reasons that they shouldn't sell drugs on the corner like their older brothers. Kids with less strength, with less of an ability to buck the system of failure inherent in this neighborhood, lose to drugs and crime every day on the Westside. So every day I see these kids show up at the door, wanting to come into our program, seems like a gift, another day that we've won over some seriously terrible odds.

Bobby signed the gluey, glittery plate under his pumpkin and told me that, when he was rich and famous, I could sell Rico for a million dollars.


Names, except for those of pirate chicken pumpkins, have been changed.