• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

POPS: With or without the Doberman inside?

LEGHORN: Without the dog.

POPS: A hundred and eighty pounds, medium build, white— yellow feet, yellow beak—believed to be dangerous. Somebody better get out an APB.

LEGHORN: A hundred-and-eighty-pound chicken would feed about two hundred people. A few birds like that would go a long way toward ending the protein shortages in India, in Africa, in Moscow—in Bangladesh. [He considers going out to have a look.]

POPS: Oh, sir—I hate your guts, but I beg of you, please don’t go out there alone.

LEGHORN: I never met the chicken I could not dominate. Besides, gumshoe, I have a gun with five shots left in it. Remember?

[LEGHORN draws the pistol, blows down the barrel, and exits.]

JERRY: Well—that’s all very interesting, but it doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with saving the college, does it?

POPS: You’d think it had to do with everything there ever was, if you saw a chicken that size.

SALLY: Maybe somebody should call the Humane Society.

POPS: The National Guard!

JERRY: Maybe we should put on a cake sale.

[A pistol is fired outside.]

POPS: Four shots left.

SALLY: Is it legal to shoot a chicken that size? POPS: A chicken, no matter how big, has no rights in the state of Pennsylvania.

[Two more pistol shots]

POPS: Two shots left.

[LEGHORN rushes back in, holding the smoking gun.]

LEGHORN: Everybody out! Grab a hammer, a broom—anything! I’m gonna need help with this one. This one must have been fed pure plutonium on Mars. I think I winged it, but I can’t be sure.

[All but KIMBERLY grab makeshift weapons and rush out. SAM is the last one out.]

SAM: You coming, Kimberly?

KIMBERLY: No. I am a follower of Albert Schweitzer. I have reverence for life. Besides, I’m very sleepy.

SAM: Okay, you take a nap.

[SAM exits. Sounds of a chase come from outside, fading off into the distance, as KIMBERLY makes a pillow of a discarded garment and goes to sleep on Dr. Jekyll’s doorstep. She snores softly, sweetly.

There are clumsy, subhuman sounds in the wings. The great chicken which the head of the chemistry department has turned himself into enters, desperately hoping to elude its hunters. It is wounded and enraged. It does not see Kimberly at first, and KIMBERLY goes on sleeping. It tears off the door of the pub, uproots a lamppost and bends it double, and so on.

It sees Kimberly at last, approaches her sleeping form with a mixture of dim-witted awe and lust, after the fashion of King Kong. It decides to do something with her—whether to rape her or abduct her or consume her, it is not clear.

We never find out, for just in the nick of time, LEGHORN enters with his pistol cocked and aimed. He is followed by SAM, SALLY, and JERRY.]

LEGHORN: Reach for the sky.

[The chicken raises its wings, turns around slowly.]

LEGHORN: Don’t try anything fancy. One false move, and you’re fricassee.

JERRY: Some bird!

LEGHORN: I had a hunch this one would double back to the Mildred Peasely Bangtree Memorial Theater and try to hide in here. Do I know chickens, or do I know chickens?

SALLY: Who was Mildred Peasely Bangtree?

JERRY: NO time to wonder that now.

LEGHORN: Quiet now. I’m going to interrogate this roaster.

SALLY: Rooster?

LEGHORN:Roaster.

[LEGHORN now conducts a conversation in chicken language with the chicken. It takes quite a while. It is expressive, with moments of excitement and sadness and so on.]

JERRY: What did it say?

LEGHORN: I thought I had heard every chicken story possible, but this is a new one on me. This is the head of your chemistry department here. He drank a mixture of LSD and chicken tonic and Drano and God only knows what else, in the hopes of winning a Nobel prize. There’s more of the stuff back in his laboratory.

SALLY, JERRY, AND SAM: Dr. Jekyll.

[LEGHORN says something rueful in chicken language, and the chicken agrees.]

SAM: What did you just say to him?

LEGHORN: Said he couldn’t go to Stockholm looking like that.

[Chicken