Years ago, it would have been mildly funny, but not in today’s Naperville, so I just kept walking.
I was downtown, strolling past one of those United Way sculptures, a frog that had just caught a fly on his long tongue. Someone had broken the fly off, so the tongue was just sticking up in the air above the frogs head, and I knew where there was a Tinker Bell doll exactly the right size. For a few seconds, I mused about how I might attach the doll to the tongue, then I shook my head and just kept walking. Everyone had become hypersensitive about the sculptures, especially the frogs, and, although the sculpture wouldn’t have been further damaged, I figured doing anything at all to it would be considered an act of vandalism. I would be cited for defacing public art, stealing from a charity, and who knows what else. They try to make those charges sound as bad as they can. The artist who decorated it would probably accuse me of desecrating his message, and heaven help me if the frog actually symbolized some obscure religious group or a treasured relative. Finally, I had a life-size image of one of our emotionally delicate kids, who can apparently be traumatized by things a lot milder than a frog eating Tinker Bell, having to undergo years of therapy for which I would be held responsible. Things were different in old Naperville, and I think that in many ways it was a healthier climate. Guys played jokes all the time, like the day they slipped a greased pig into Jeff’s pharmacy at the corner of Washington and Jefferson. Everybody started yelling which, of course, scared the pig and it began running around like crazy. It is, as you know, extremely difficult to catch a greased pig without the right kind of tackle with which, oddly enough, very few stores are equipped. The lady at the lunch counter who freaked and dumped her food all over herself was sort of the highlight of the event. It was an inconsiderate joke, but imagine the felonies those guys would have been charged with today. Unless I’m missing something, that means that the only year they actually made money was the year they quit, so it can’t be much of a financial loss for the charity. I guess I can now confess that I always found the sculptures to be on the creepy side of insipid. In my opinion, they were to public art what the Blues Brothers movie was to the blues, a kind of cynical, self-serving indignity.
Maybe the United Way could hold a raffle. I remember one classic old Naperville raffle in which they raffled off a horse. Of course it was fixed so the guy they were after would win, and the horse was an old one that had just died. The morning he won, the guy opened his front door to find a note of congratulation, and the horse, lying on his front porch.