The Peacock Juggler

A peacock who was starting to lose his tail plumage felt unmasculine and took up juggling to help impress the hens. Soon he could juggle seven bowling pins while standing on one foot. The pea hen he was most interested in didn't seem to care, but other passersby were impressed, so he became a street show on a nearby boardwalk.

On the night of his first show, he juggled 9 pins while skip-roping. And then, (and who can say if this happened because it was in his peacock nature, or just because people weren't putting money in his tip jar), he spread his feathers in an impressive finale. The crowd went wild and he earned a lot of tips. "It was dark, so they couldn't see the missing feathers," he told himself as he went home that night. "But I mustn't let that become part of my act." However, it happened anyway. Every night he would end with a huge flourish of his feathers.

He became a big hit on the boardwalk, and soon was opening for a stage magician. But every morning he would wake up with one fewer feather than before, and he would cry in anguish about the trap he was in. He began drinking heavily, and it started to affect his performance.

Eventually he ordered a very expensive, very elaborate custom taildress. But in order to have it installed, he had to have all his natural tail feathers removed in a painful surgery. There would be no going back from his fake tail feathers.

The new feathers were beautiful, but they didn't look quite real. People noticed. "Hey, those aren't his real feathers!" people would exclaim, especially those who were returning to see his show a second time. "Why did he get fake feathers?" The peacock had no answer to this. The people did not understand, and the peacock did not understand either. He drank more and more heavily until his relatively early demise.