Chicken delivery/performance art

Next year, we will be finding a different way to distribute our chicken. This year, we had drop-off points, much like a vegetable CSA, except we had to sit there with our frozen chickens in a cooler and wait for people. Sometimes people forgot to meet us, and even when they remembered, the experience was often unusual.

One of our drop-off sites was in the public boulevard of Franklin Avenue, right next to Seward Co-op. On a Sunday in August, I drove up from Northfield with a bunch of chickens in a cooler and my late father's ornate cowboy hat. It is woven from straw and has a huge brim, a wild spray of feathers in front, and a slightly more subdued collection of feathers encircling it like a hat band. Co-op shoppers in Minneapolis rarely wear this kind of thing, so my husband thought it would be a good way for our customers to identify us. We sent out an e-mail telling our customers that we would be there at the appointed time, wearing the magnificent hat.

I lugged our cooler out of our car and plopped down in the skimpy shade of a little boulevard tree. There I sat as though my cooler were a little bench. Some pedestrians on the sidewalk glanced at me with curious expressions on their faces, and others kept their gaze resolutely forward. I began to become very self-conscious about my posture because I sense that people were analyzing it as they tried to decide whether I was a threat or not. I rummaged around my purse, found a small notebook and started to write in it, both to pass the time and because I thought it might be a comfort to uncertain bypassers.

Finally someone called out to me. It was our dear friend’s partner Chris, who was there to pick up four chickens, but did not have a bag for them. Because her dog was in her car, we decided that she should don the cowboy hat and stand between the cooler and her dog while I jogged half a block down and around the corner to fetch a bag from my car. That way, we could have a bag for the chickens, a calm dog, and someone with a fabulous hat standing by the cooler in case another customer came.

It did not fully occur to me what I had asked this woman to do until I returned with a bag sometime later. There she stood, looking slightly outlandish on the boulevard of Franklin Avenue. She assured me that she had looked meaningfully at every person who passed, but none of them seemed to be my customers.

We have been told over and over that to market our chicken, we need to sell more than the meat; we have to sell stories, values, and a lifestyle. Apparently we are all so selling opportunities for guerrilla performance art in the streets of Minneapolis. As unique and exciting as that opportunity may be, and as gracefully Chris executed it, I decided at that moment that I do not want to offer that opportunity to anyone else ever again.

After Chris left with her chickens, I sat on the boulevard waiting for a couple of people who never showed. One woman slowed on the sidewalk near me, looking very indecisive, so I asked her if she was there to pick up a chicken, but this only added to her confusion. A lean, wide-shouldered man stared at me with pale blue eyes as piercing as lasers, but mercifully kept walking.

Finally a buddy from worship group strolled out of the co-op and came to chat with me. As he sat on the grass, he remembered that while he was in the co-op, he heard some employees debating about whether they should call the police on the people who were outside. At the time he was assuming that they were talking about some panhandlers, but now he wondered if they might have been talking about me. We had a lovely visit about some worship group business, and no police arrived.