skit #4: useless and luxurious furniture

A creature poses above the flaking lacquer tag, Mustela erminea. White-nailed pink-fleshed claws remain motionless, like tome-pressed baby's breath. A mouth toothed with miniature gumdrops, pimple-ivory and incapable; A svelte trunk arches like a sculpted eyebrow; Whiteless black eyes, beads that suggest taxidermy before and after it had been stuffed. These features whisper still still still life

Mother poses no threat, pecking with that seed-cracking beak. Fledglings slide down the stoat's throat, tickled by no feathers. Intercepted by an acrobatic lunge, the stoat separates the grieving mother in a ravenous flurry of snaps and shreds. Adult bluejay feathers flutter to the forest floor. Stare-by-stare, the stoat replies to each concerned neighboring nest-hen with whiteless black eyes. The mothers bark confident threats over the din of warbling chicks. The stoat selects meals as it pleases.

Toledo's Predator Procession exhibits the museum's useless and luxurious furniture: Unmade rugs, cloaks, stoles; Undone Ursus arctos, Panthera tigris, Mustela erminea. In the Predator Procession, the guile and mastery of these carnivores receive their due celebration. The placard lists jaw compression PSI, subordinate species eaten, mating habits, breadth of domain, and dropping samples. Humans are nowhere on this list, but we have our own Procession.

Montpelier's Presidential Procession exhibits the world's famous and infamous politicos: Some alive (Jimmy Carter, Hugo Chavez, George Walker Bush); Some dead (Ronald Reagan, Josef Stalin, Ulysses Grant). The stock room contains phalanxes of the marginally famous. Their countenances are only as detailed as their legacies are significant; Many of the wax figures are indistinguishable save for flaking lacquer tags. Such ugly anonymous faces.