New Zoo Hopes to Tap Tourist Trade

(The following is an interview I did in response to news reports that more and more people are housing wild animals as pets. I came across this guy who was taking the concept a few steps further – opening an actual zoo in his backyard. It was very controversial in his hometown … too controversial, alas, for any local media outlets to run what I thought was a zinger of a story.)

Which of us, in our wonderful days of youth, didn’t consider, at one time or another, certain shared dream jobs when attaining life as an adult? Professional athlete. Fireman or police officer. Veterinarian or something else touching the animal kingdom.

Well, one local man has made that grade, reached the threshold of opening a business that most children only fantasize about.

That man is Ralph Squengen, and he is director of the new Neighborhood Zoo.

It was Squengen’s desire to provide his community with an affordable, educational and enjoyable excursion. “We wanted this to be a place for the whole family at a fraction of the cost of your ritzier tourist traps in town. Part of the reason an amusement park or aquarium charges a fortune is the land-cost factor. If you’re paying a few million for acreage, you gotta pass that on.”

Which is why Squengen decided to open the zoo at his home.

The idea first presented itself during a dinner party the former hat salesman threw for an out-of-town friend. “This buddy of mine, he favored derbies. He also liked animals very, very much. So he was visiting and, all of a sudden, got a strong urge to see a tiger.” Why a tiger? “I didn’t think to ask. But it didn’t matter since neither of us had a car. But then it was light-bulb time: How many people visit this city? A lot. How many want to see a wild animal as a bit fun? Plenty. How many of them don’t have a car? Enough. The idea seemed too obvious to pass up.”

And Squengen was the man to grab it. His family background had prepared him well for this type of venture. “My parents and grandparents loved going to the zoo, any zoo, and they kept a rhesus monkey named Shank in the basement. True, he was stuffed, but a love of animals, and a need to house them or their carcasses, has illuminated my life.”

Covering fully one-sixth of an acre in Squengen’s impressively landscaped backyard, his zoo is home to seven different species from four different regions. “We may not have a ton of animals, but what we have is cherce,” the director noted.

Apart from the more traditional creatures one expects to find in a collection of this sort, visitors will encounter a truly unique feature, the Bughouse or Bughaus. “This is quite rare, and really puts us on the map,” Squengen explained. “We have the largest grouping of captive insects in any one setting, except for possibly the Louvre. Our special emphasis is on the greatest array of houseflies in the world. Now, these are not your normal, garden-variety flies, although many of them are. Most of these flies, though, come from Germany, and possess a fabulous sort of Teutonic sheen that’s a joy to behold.”

The project has engendered its share of controversy. Accusations of gross negligence and public health and safety violations have cropped up in recent weeks. Critics claimed, for instance, that one of the animals jumped Squengen’s grape-stake fence into an adjacent city park, terrorizing a family picnic before being shot with a tranquilizer dart by an off-duty park ranger. “I’m afraid there was an overreaction on everybody’s part during that incident, and a minor incident it was,” the zookeeper said. “First of all, how much damage, really, can a kangaroo cause? You want to see damage, you should check out my poor garage and what that bloody leopard did to it. God, what a mess. Besides, people got a big kick out of watching that kangaroo hop across the park and through the duck pond, believe me. I think the publicity was immeasurable.

“As to my so-called neighbors and their ridiculous complaints, they just have to sit tight. They’ll get used to the stench. I don’t even notice it anymore. And traffic concerns? It’s a public street. If someone a few doors down throws a party and their friends park in front of my house, do I complain? Of course not. But some of these yokels don’t know any better. This is a perfect economic opportunity for everybody on the block. You know how much extra cash they could make by parking a few cars on their lawns?

“Unfortunately, I’ve come to expect this kind of behavior from my fellow humans. I mean, the permit people at city hall with their extortion demands, the animal rights jerks and their idiotic concerns over natural habitats, my shortsighted landlord and his petty gripes about property values. Well, the heck with them all. I honestly have a better time with the animals, just me and them, out in the yard, having a beer, throwing something on the barbecue. You will too. Come on over, we’re open all the time. And park anywhere you want. It’s a free country.”

Late Composer’s Stuff to be Sold Electronically

(Here was a scoop I got … that everyone ignored until they all picked up a less detailed version from AP.)

With the passing last month of composer Roger Horvath, American music closed the songbook on one of its more memorable chapters. And with Horvath’s death just a short week later, the rest of us came to mourn one of the great losses of 20th-century artistry.

But when E-Bay announced yesterday that the family would be offering key memorabilia from Horvath’s estate on the internet, there came the alluring possibility that anyone could own, and place in the old curio cabinet, a tactile legacy of popular culture from one of the greats.

Best known for his Broadway scores setting Tin Pan Alley melodies within an atonal structure, Horvath had a reputation in his private life as the “pack rat’s pack rat,” although he was referred to by his good friend Richard Rodgers as “the prairie dog’s alley cat,” and often went by the nickname (origin unknown) of “the nanny goat’s second aunt.” Cryptically, the artist called himself – in a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of his pithy liner notes – “Basil Rathbone.” Over his long life, he kept practically every item he ever encountered, and constructed a 20-room French Chateau to house the objects directly across the street from his primary residence, a Dutch-style home in a Bellflower, CA, subdivision. It is this lifetime’s worth of possessions that will go on the block come summer.

And what a bunch of stuff it is:

The composer’s souvenir spoon collection, for instance, which features a special grouping of decorative utensils from the Amana Colonies in Iowa, and of which Stravinsky once remarked, “God, that’s a lot of spoons.” (The collection, by the way, will not be broken up and sold individually, as had been reported, both for historical reasons and to save a lot of time.) Also included is the settee on which Horvath reportedly tried to seduce actress Shirley Booth, whom he sincerely thought was a maid named Hazel, based on the television character she played, and whom he deserted upon learning she was actually an Academy-Award-winning star, since he had vowed never to go out with another artist.

Horvath enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s finest art collectors, and his practice of taking a different painting from his personal gallery to parties as his date is still fondly recalled by the dizzying circles he ran in. His tastes ran from the sublime to the stillborn, with a particular fondness for the Dadaists – specifically their “non-art” pieces invoking, and involving, plumbing fixtures. This special interest will be highlighted in a pre-auction sale held at a local Home Depot.

An additional offering will be Horvath’s 5,000 picture postcards, all depicting two-headed snakes from various roadside attractions in the Midwest.

Among the household items up for sale will be the blender he used to whip up the Brussels sprout concoctions he adored, and that provided Horvath with the right pitch for the infamous 80-minute overture to his Tony-nominated (and then -expelled) musical Tab to Margin. Plus, his egg coddler, and many of the eggs left behind in his refrigerator.

Of special note, artistically, is his final work, sure to fetch a high price, 13 pieces of blank paper that he liked to refer to as "my 13 pieces of blank paper."

The sale will commence this June, unless, as a family spokesperson pointed out, “We change our mind.”

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Frozen Food Section

(I’m a food nut, always have been, with nuts being a special favorite. Here is something I wrote for a local cuisine publication that went belly up before I could get the stamps on my SASE.)

I'm a big fan of the Food Network. Watch it every chance I get. The only programming that takes precedence is sports, and only certain sports, like a really good bowling match-up. But since bowling must be seasonal, or has gone over to the Bowling Network, a channel I don't have in my basic cable package, I have been totally freed up to focus on food.

So there I sit, watching on a Saturday morning. I'm hunched over my little breakfast of fried eggs with the yolks all broken and hard, those toaster hash browns that never really seem to heat all the way through, and a few strips of burnt turkey bacon, all doused with ketchup. (I eat turkey bacon because, on the shows, they always use gobs of butter and cream and oil, so much so that it must ooze out the screen and into my veins by osmosis. So I have to cut back on fat somewhere).

I observe these master chefs preparing delicacies like Southwestern honey/cumin/anchovy chicken breasts; radicchio-wrapped, saffron-dusted medallions of squid; fried, julienned leeks in a turnip vinaigrette; and white chocolate/jalapeno/halibut quesadillas. I observe this with an eye toward one day concocting such savory delights myself.

And I have tried, lord knows I have. I've bought, at great damage to my weekly budget, all sorts of fine ingredients. But ... I have failed ... and I fear that the love affair has sadly begun to wane. After an adult life spent trying to emulate my culinary betters and their deceptively smooth ways, I’m throwing in the potholders. It’s too heartbreaking to realize that, countless failures and life-threatening mishaps later, I can’t match their effortlessness. What’s more, I can’t afford to waste so much food.

Like any good student, I tried to pick up the tricks and the tips. Even the simplest, unfortunately, evade me.

For instance, when placing food into a pan of hot oil, the hip cookers instruct time and time again to lay said vittles in a sweeping motion toward the back of the pan to avoid painful splatters. Don't just drop them in the sizzling fat. I can show you, sad to say, a series of disfiguring scars all over my wrists from haphazard implementation.

It has become unbearable to observe the kitchen whizzes wielding their sharp, shiny knives on the cutting board. Like the artists they are, their movements are balletic. With me, mournfully . . . well, any more efforts at quick dicing and slicing and I’ll be eligible for disability. I am not, I have learned, a handy utensil man.

Far less dangerous, but equally humiliating ... I have never been able to master the simple art of “drizzling” – I inevitably “splash,” “spill” or “slop.”

There are embarrassments galore.

My pinches of salt become ungainly fistfuls of sorrow.

I can never seem to sear, only scorch.

And I blanche when I think of my crudeness at . . . well, blanching.

I gave up on the grilling shows, where they barbecue everything from sauerkraut to salads. I don’t believe my outdoor appliance was ever as clean as theirs, even out of the box. In its current state, let’s just say I wouldn’t dare fix lamp chops almandine (which looked so tasty the other day) for fear their flavor would be polluted by the decade’s worth of hamburger carbon coating my grille.

A major emotion, in my understaffed kitchen, damming my enthusiasm for the gourmet life, is worry. Do you know how many pots and pans and processors it takes to put together one of these meals? I mean, Emeril doesn’t have to clean up afterwards. By the time I’ve plated the dishes I’m a nervous wreck over how long it will to take to scrub up. Puts a wet rag on dinner parties when I’m fretting over Brillo pads.

Perhaps the last straw occurred the other evening. In a test of ingenuity and creativity, I decided to go for broke and devise an exotic combination of disparate tastes and textures, a bold experiment that the stars would be proud of. The result – Yak Zucchini Gumbo Surprise . . . oh, god, I can’t even bring myself to recall it.

So I am saying good-bye to good friends like Bobby and Rachel and Mario. But there are no regrets. Actually, it’s a good thing. I’ve always been a fiend for Hungry Man dinners. And I just had the finger holes in my bowling ball enlarged, too.

"To Open With..."

From the 23rd floor of a Laughlin, Nevada, hotel room I am staring out at the brown stretch of scrub that leads to the bare mountains marking the horizon. My head is tinged with a slight hangover ache and the bedside table is nicely burdened with $48, representing the $28 in winnings I’ve earned against a damnable 25-cent poker machine. I am giddy knowing that, if I leave now, I will be ahead for the first time in 30 years of gambling trips. Of course, I’ve got the room for two more nights, which has been billed to my credit card. So, in fact, I would end up in the hole if I skedaddled. The casinos have screwed me again.

But the searing human drama so inherent in my predicament compels me to tell the world my story. I could write a book – a memoir of sorts, or perhaps a stylishly impressionistic novel. But that takes so long, and would the publishing establishment appreciate my unique voice and point of view? There is the “self-publishing” route. That, though, is looked upon with derision by most in the know as “vanity.” And, again, it takes so long to write a book.

So I will start a blog! That’s the ticket. A bl ... well, I don’t know what the “b” stands for, but I know it’s some kind of a log, on the internet. A diary, so to speak. A place to share one’s life and its striking moments, and to comment on the world at large. Sure, it’s kind of like publishing yourself, but I think it’s free, I’m not “paying” to share my worldview. I’m very comfortable with that.

Still, does the world need one more blog? I hear there are quite a few out in the “ethernet.” But I really couldn’t tell you, since I’ve never seen one, though I read an interesting story about the phenomenon in an old copy of Modern Maturity at the dentist’s office. And, truth be told, I don’t feel an overwhelming need to express my opinions or detail my daily comings and goings. For instance, I can’t think of a thing more to say about Laughlin, other than the buffet last night was quite good, except for the catfish nuggets (too mushy).

I do, though, have a few pieces I’ve written over the years, various projects that, for one reason or another, have been consistently rejected, even by the tiniest, stupidest, most incompetent weekly rags and obscure trade journals. I mean, what the hell else am I gonna do with this stuff? Include it with my annual Christmas letter? Nah. Here, then, is my career, I guess, for what it’s worth. (All material on this blog, Copyright, Chris Callard, 2006)