Taken Somehow By Surprise

The Flamingos Have Left the Building

17 Just shy of fifty years since it arrived, the classic pink flamingo’s gone extinct, done in by the rising cost of plastic and unrelenting flood of Chinese knockoffs. A 22-year-old Don Featherstone designed the birds for hometown Union Products. They flew off store shelves, landing everywhere, and Leominster, Mass., was in the pink. They ruled the roost of lawn-art kitsch before the gnomes and bug-eyed frogs moved in to stay— a nod to all those bronze and marble statues on more expansive properties than theirs. In those days one was never quite enough. You paired them up or, better yet: a flock, a sudden conflagration of bright pink flamingos in the hottest yards around, The Flamingos Have Left the Building Place them in garden or on lawn to beautify landscape—$2.76 per pair. —1957 Sears Catalogue listing for the original flamingo lawn ornament (Union Products, Leominster, Massachusetts) for Becky Shaw, conservator 18 and next-door neighbors surely had to think, There goes the neighborhood, or else, We’ve got to get us some of those before too long. But now it’s too late—going, going, gone. In pink flamingo transmigration they left their yards for other habitats— festooning tablecloths and dinner plates or showing up in paint-by-number kits, as earrings, window shades, and whirligigs, and in disguise: sunglasses, bedroom slippers, umbrellas, walking-sticks, and floppy hats, then stirring cocktails, shaking salt and pepper, or trapped inside of souvenir snow-globes a long way from the natural Florida sun. When a good flamingo idea goes bad, they’re accessories after the plastic fact. My friend insists her purple house is where she caught a poacher in her yard, pink-handed, in floodlights she installed after she learned new birds of Featherstone would flock no more. Like any cause that’s lost, they were absorbed into the culture they did not bring down. No leg to stand on now, defenseless, but still undeniably there on Becky’s lawn. ...