skit #88: ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING

ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING

with Dr. Barbara Dorber

Granddad wakes me up when I'm still tired! He calls me a lazy monkey, but monkeys don't look lazy! Which animal sleeps the most during the day?
- Peggy P., Toledo, OH

Tell your grumpy grampy humans aren't monkeys but primates. As humans get old and cranky, they tend to need fewer hours of sleep. Most humans sleep between 7 and 9 hours a day, sleeping less than any other primate. Elderly humans, like your granddad, may sleep as few as 6 hours a day. Most of our primate cousins, including chimps and baboons, sleep approximately 10 hours a day. The laziest monkey, the owl monkey, sleeps 17 hours a day, devoid of any remarkable personal responsibilities.

So which animal sleeps the most? The nostalgic koala is known to sleep up to twenty hours per day, often dreaming about how elegantly she danced when she was younger, leaving her only four hours to pout in front of her full-body mirror, her middle-age flab extruding from the limb-holes of her joeyhood leotard. Why koalas practice in that which will inevitably depress them remains a controversial question among leading animal behaviorologists.

Why is my dog is so slow! It takes forever to play fetch with him. I want a faster pet. What should I get?
- Shelton F., Tulsa, OK

Do you like polkadots? Consider getting a cheetah! The cheetah is the fastest recorded land mile, sustaining speeds up to 68 miles per hour when sprinting. This is fast enough to run alongside a car on the freeway, and certainly fast enough to catch any prey that looks yummy.

Faster still, field biologists routinely sight hoofprints created by large game traveling at an estimated 82 miles per hour. Scat analyses identify these runners as wildebeest; further, kinesiologists affirm wildebeests' musculature may potentially produce as much thrust with each leg as a junior varsity football team! Wow!

Yet this shy specimen has never been observed moving any faster than what is expected of it, a mere 50 miles per hour, a handicap merrily exploited by trailing hyenas and lions. Under midnight, away from any audience, thundering wildebeests are tracked by seismologists hoping to understand this bashfulness. Regarding the wildebeest's nature, we ask ourselves what hyenas mock us, what cheetahs best us, what of our thunder rarely rumbles, and under what midnight we are free.

Most wildebeest opt for the conventional life: grazing on the savannah, succumbing in negligible numbers to predators, rearing calves, breaking no land speed records, and other matters well-documented.

My mommy is the best mommy for people, but what is the best mommy for animals? I want to draw her being best mommies with the animal for her Mother's Day card.
- Jess M., Las Vegas, NV

There are many kinds of mommies in this world. And just because she's your mommy doesn't mean she's not an animal. Human mommies take care of their babies longer than any other animal! There are all sorts of ways to be a good mommy.

An elephant seal mommy transfers up to six hundred pounds of fatty milk to her pup, draining her of vitality. She serves only as anonymous loins within a harem, then as vessel for nourishment for the parasite she calls her child, eventually returning to the frigid sea without her fat reserves, her lover, or her child to warm her. She finds her place on a chain of existentially-contrived links.

And the kangaroo mommy stows her joey in her pouch, taking her baby wherever she goes. Imagine the weight of it. Utterly responsible in every regard to a living being that is half hers. Now she must carry out her life a time and a half over. And always embarrassing her with caterwauling and odors. Humiliating her at the gala, delaying her attendance dance recitals, thwarts her important interview, dribbling on the forms at the unemployment office, getting her evicted from the flophouses. The weight of it. At least the weight brings them both down.

Above all reigns the rabbit mommy, who abandons her children upon birth. She sets the precedent, freeing her children from the obligation of motherhood, ensuring no rabbits have my regrets by their age.

skit #87: Sweet Osogovo

Shorn summer flocks saturate the Osogovan mountainside like a superfluous sweater. Their unshaven chaperons dawdle in that leisurely way that makes idylls so imperturbably idyllic. Sweet Osogovo poses her hills in rows and rows of verdant mammaries, irresistible to sheep and shepherds alike. She promises an easy day, enticing all creation to indulge.

Stojan haloos Vlatko from afar, his ebullience echoing over and over over the din of bleating. Vlatko, visibly pleased, slips his slender oak kuval from his shirtfolds and begins fluting a low droning note. Stojan approaches, quite unconcerned with whatever his headcount should be, his nibbling flock strewn a league behind him along the buffet. The shepherds all admit the sheep and shepherding are convenient excuses, accessories, only means to this music. Giddy, Stojan eagerly extracts his own kuval from his knapsack.

Like a stolid usuror, Vlatko drones that low uncompromising drone, bedrock on which Stojan gambols freely. Slowly, the players forfeit control of the ezgija's melody, which flourishes as an evocative thicket of brambles and blossoms: fusillades of Slovakian arpeggios, baying of octaval wolves, contemplative wooden textures, and all the contours of Osogovo -- Stojan's and Vlatko's and all the shepherds' insatiable mistress.

When Stojan tires, he drones and Vlatko drives the melody. Perhaps different notes, but it is the same song, for the same idyll, for the same Osogovo. Dozens of shepherds join and leave the ezgija. They dare nothing, coddling every note, repeating this ritual. Worship tolerates no creativity. So they play until lips loosen, until fingers blister, until summer grows cranky. Sweet Osogovo hibernates and her men retreat to Baraklija until next summer awakens her.

Six months linger each year. The village becomes awkward and quiet and manly. None play music.

While their masters mope, agitated black and white wool commingles and demingles in cramped square pens, very reminiscent of the static produced by the defunct television Gjorgji procured this winter. During lucid moments, his television offers occasional glimpses of the world beyond Osogovo: Macedonian not Yugoslovia; how acting now may save 15 denari; St Petersburg not Leningrad; how all ruminants have four stomachs; and other matters inane and grave. These are all diversions from their beloved Osogovo.

The wool grows bushy. The television programming stays bland. The seasons change too slowly.

When summer returns, so does Osogovo. And so do her idylls and their sheep and their shepherds. And so do their kuvals and their ezgijas. And so do their dronings, their melodies, their blossoms, their brambles. And Stojan is there, and Vlatko and Risto are there, and all the shepherds are there. Even Gjorgji, who everyone now calls Television-Man. The ezgijas begin. Stojan goes, then Vlatko goes, and it's just like every year. Osogovo always receives her melodies so nonchalantly that one cannot tell if she receives them at all.

During the trek to the pastures, Gjorgji had confided his mind spent its winter far from Osogovo, far from Baraklija and far from Macedonia, to whereever his crystal ball directed him. It's his turn to play atop the shepherds' drone, his angular and perplexing melodies gouge the round easiness of the pasture, polluting it with whiny traffic horns, fluttering receipts, the syncopated chatter of data computations, terse telephone niceties, the crescendoing inflation of floundering economies. Under these sounds foreign to Osogovo and rare to Baraklija, the shepherds' drones start to falter then give away completely, leaving Gjorgji playing his thin melody a solo. The misfit Gjorgji dismisses himself. The shepherds continue, trying to resume their frivolities.

Summer goes, Baraklija populates with awkward men, summer comes.

The shepherds and sheep return. So does Television-Man. He brings electric guitars, theramins, pyrotechnic rigging, subwoofers, garish costumes, personnel to webcast the ordeal, fettering record contracts. The few sheep his flock retained seem common when hoof-to-hoof with the other shepherds' flocks. But within Gjorgji's herd of ibex, cassowaries, capybara, ride-on gas mowers, and whatever else, the shepherd's sheep remain unique.