Excerpt: Prologue to Show Me the Pretty Bird

Cockatiels are the love of my life. When I feel down they give me joy. Their antics also keep me grounded, something every creative person needs. This winter I decided to take my experiences over the last few years and put them into a comedy play. It’s a glimpse into my world as a bird person and is completely autobiographical. I hope you will enjoy it and if you want to produce this play as a show at your school or community theater, by all means email at the address provided in the front matter of the play.

Prologue

LAUREL stands downstage on the apron and addresses the audience.

LAUREL

(Singing to the tune of “the Brady Bunch” theme)

HERE’S A STORY OF A LOVELY LADY. WHO WAS BRINGING UP TWO VERY LOVELY BIRDS. BOTH OF THEM WITH SNOWY CRESTS, LIKE THEIR MOTHERS. THE YOUNGEST ONE WITH PEARLS.

(Switching to normal voice)

If you are like most people, you have never heard lyrics quite like that applied to that song!  In fact, if you are like most people, you have no clue what the _____ I just said. How do birds have pearls?

Now of course if you are a cockatiel person, you are thinking, ‘yeah, of course one has pearls – but most pearl cockatiels don’t have white crests. Is this cockatiel a whiteface pearl?’ 

If you are really a cockatiel person you immediately want to know the exact genetic history of my bird – Arwen in this case.  To which I am happy to tell you that Arwen is a dominate silver whiteface pearl pied hen and granddaughter of a National Cockatiel Society champion named Caspian. Her mother, Caspian’s daughter, was Cloud, a whiteface pearl pied hen. Arwen’s father was named Sterling and he was a dominate silver whiteface pearl pied.

Are the rest of you completely lost yet? Yeah, I thought so!  That’s because you are used to dog and cat breeds where people value uniform traits. When I say ‘Cavalier King Charles Spaniel’ you know exactly what that dog looks like. Mix another breed with that beautiful cav and you end up with a cute, lovable mutt who will never win the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

But parrots are literally of a different class – Aves – and order – Psittaciformes – from we mammals. All captive raised parrots are wild animals socialized around humans, but still retaining their wild instincts. Selective breeding has created what we call ‘colour mutations’ that only change the plumage of our captive raised birds, usually by suppressing a specific hue like yellow – for pied cockatiels – or grey – for lutino cockatiels. 

With cockatiels, the more of these mutations a bird has, the better – in most cases.  Therefore, a whiteface lutino cockatiel – which is what my older bird Mithril is – is more prized than a regular lutino cockatiel. Combining whiteface and lutino gives you a very different looking bird.  In this case, a whiteface lutino which has all white feathers, pink eyes, pink beak, pink skin, and pink nails.

Are you ready for the science lecture to be over yet?  Okay! Good! I swear the point of getting together today is not actually to trick you into a zoology class!  Rather we are gathered today to celebrate the wonders that come with living with cockatiels – and the crazy things I encounter in my regular life when I’m around people who aren’t as in love with these amazing and incredibly bright balls of feathered mischief.

On a technical note I want to mention that what you are about to watch is not always presented in chronological order.  All of my cockatiels across the years have something to say – or do – that conveys the magic that is life with cockatiels.

Part tornado, part fluffy ball of feathers, and mixed with insane capacities for mischief, life is never dull around cockatiels.  By the end of this show, you will know exactly what I mean.

(END OF SCENE)

Available in digital and paperback at a library (including Hoopla) and retailer near you including Apple, Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes/Noble, Everand, and Kobo.

Book Review: “I Love the Bones of You” by Christopher Eccleston

I love the Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston. You already know that by my recent discussion about the Ninth Doctor. When I found out he wrote an autobiography focusing on his relationship with his father and his struggles with both anorexia and depression, I knew I had to buy a copy and read the book.

“I Love the Bones of You” is very much a tell-all sort of autobiography. Eccleston holds nothing back, beginning with his earliest childhood memories. The book is somewhat arranged topically and in quasi chronological order that actually works fairly fluidly – except in the final three or four chapters when it’s a bit confusing in terms of what happened relative to other events. It is certainly well written, a compliment I offer less often than people would like.

On the surface, Christopher’s life seems idyllic, especially his family life. Both his parents and his twin older brothers are loving and kind. No abuse in his family, though his father Ronnie does have a temper of sorts. Christopher emphasizes their working class status that colors almost everything in their lives. This is not the United States with its ideas of everyone being the same class (false of course – but that’s what Americans tend to believe): this is England. The England of Christopher’s time (and perhaps still true today) is very much stratified between the working class, the middle class, and the upper classes. Where you are born in that hierarchy dictates nearly everything in your life; Christopher Eccleston shows us exactly how he experienced it and how it affected each member of his family.

Christopher’s challenges with body image and eating are explored at length in often shocking detail. That he manage to survive and to do his work is very much surprising. In this he gets very honest about how the film industry works, especially towards food, eating, and body expectations. He holds nothing back and does not try to paint the film and television industry along rosy lines.

This candor persists when the subject switches to his struggles with depression. The narrative is straight forward, including the cause of his decision to seek in-patient treatment. In a pattern I recognize in my own autobiographical writings, Christopher is ruthlessly honest while still building a protective bubble of privacy. He gives you just enough details to see why he needed professional help – but no more. Skillful writing to accomplish what he does.

In the middle of this and about halfway through the book Christopher Eccleston turns to his professional life, giving us inside insights into films and television shows most of us know him for. Surprising to me because I watch the movie every December is how much he dislikes the movie “The Seeker: the Dark Also Rises” which is one of his most family-friendly films and made shortly after stepping down from Doctor Who. He covers most if not all of his major projects – what he liked, what he thinks of himself, and so forth. He’s very self critical in all of this.

Jude (1996)

The one project Christopher is not critical of is his 1996 film “Jude.” He devotes a full chapter to it entitled, “Strangled at Birth.” Jude sounds like a great film I would love to watch – until I read this chapter.

Earlier in the book Christopher tells us that shortly after finishing drama school he worked as a nude model for art classes. Okay, I knew that before I started this book. Actor straight out of college doing whatever he has to for rent money. Fine. He previewed that he did a lot a projects requiring him to take his clothes off. Fine. But it’s only in this chapter, “Strangled at Birth” where he gets graphic on the matter. Jude is absolutely not a film for children. There is a lot of very explicit sex and violence to the film. Wonderfully artistic, but not for viewers who abstain from erotica and/or horror genres. Christopher is very matter-of-fact and very honest about the film and its content. It’s also one that both he and his family happen to really like among his extensive filmography.

Logically, there’s a fair amount of Mancunian dialect and a lot of references to film, television, and footballers that most Americans probably have never heard of. These references do make the book a bit confusing at times. Chris assumes (rightly or wrongly) that these names are familiar. For me, they are not.

After Chris writes the usual career stuff, he returns to family. There are two short chapters recording what happened when he finally watched his season of Doctor Who with his son and daughter that are light and airy, a break from some of the darker material.

But inevitably the book returns to his father’s decline and 2012 death. This is a book focused on his relationship with his father, after all, a man whose life and character saturates and informs his own life, especially as he raises his son and daughter now.

The final cadence of the book is the eulogy that Chris gave at his father’s funeral. The ultimate salute to the man told him during his dementia, “I Love the Bones of You.”

If you love Christopher Eccleston’s work or simply want a great read exploring dementia, depression, and/or eating disorders, “I Love the Bones of You” is a must-read.

Four stars.

Excerpt from Mithril and Me: a Love Story

Mithril on October 28, 2022.

Happy bird day Mithril! This week my beloved Mithril turns twenty years old. It’s an accomplishment far too few cockatiels complete, despite a 20-35 year life span. People don’t take good enough care of their birds to reach 20 years old – though I’m hoping my book “Preparing for My Senior Cockatiel” will help more of you reach this milestone with your own birds.

In 2021 I wrote my biography of all the parrots who have shared their lives with me. It’s called “Mithril and Me: A Love Story” but it actually begins in my childhood with my first bird, a budgerigar named Luke Skywalker. Mithril’s part of the story started in 2003. In honor of her 20th bird day I would like to share with you now an excerpt from the book telling you all about how my journey with Mithril began.

From Chapter Three: An Unexpected Opportunity

Winter 2003 arrive bright and snowy. Going to the basement office where my building manager and superintendent worked, I chatted contently with the manager, a Mrs. Bellos.  Sweet lady from Brazil.  As I collected the packages waiting for me, she gave me unexpected news:  her two lutino cockatiels had eggs which were just starting to hatch.  Casually I asked her if I could have one of the babies. Without knowing much about cockatiels, she said sure, I could have a chick. And why not?  What was she going to do with the babies?  This was clearly before she talked it over with her husband, a man who saw a chance for profit instead of a chance to enjoy the experience of baby birds in the house.

After that conversion I didn’t hear anything further about her birds and wasn’t invited at that point to her apartment on the first floor of the building.  Not for such a long time that the subject seemed dropped entirely.

June came. Mrs. Bellos came to me and said there was another clutch of babies and I could have one of those.  She promised me the youngest, the runt of the clutch that her husband didn’t think would survive at all, therefore nullifying our verbal agreement if it died.

She didn’t. Around the first week of July I was invited to meet the little chick promised to me.  She was perfect. Mrs. Bellos put the little baby in my cupped palms, her first feathers just starting to grow in.  Instinctively I gave her some kisses.  Mithril’s feathers were growing in nicely. But what wasn’t obvious at first was just how different she was from her older siblings.

Why? Firstly, there wasn’t anything obvious in her parents’ appearance to suggest that that any of the babies would look remotely different from them. I didn’t know anything about cockatiel genetics back then and the Bellos family knew even less.  The assumption was that pale yellow (lutino) parents mean pale yellow babies. Cream colored bodies. More intense yellow on the head. Pink eyes. Pink beak. Pink legs and feet. Like mom and dad, like baby, right?

Well, not exactly. You see there are multiple genes that control the feather colors and patterns (called “color mutations”) with cockatiels. The body feathers are controlled by the amount of and placement of melanin. That’s the same pigment that causes human skin tones to vary.  For cockatiels, melanin is expressed as grey and sometimes a wash of brown called cinnamon.  Take away that melanin –partially or entirely – and you get yellow feathers.  Take away the yellow through mutation of another gene (notably the one that produces blues and greens in most rain forest parrots) and you get white.  Since cockatoos evolved away from needing the cover of the forest canopy, that gene that used to control blue controls how much yellow and red the bird can produce, notably on the feathers covering their ears.

Lutino and lutino-pearl cockatiels have no grey on their bodies and a normal saturation of yellow and red on their heads to produce the classic orange cheek spots that are normal for cockatiels. This normal face is what I saw when I met Mithril’s father.

Looking at Mithril’s clutch mates, there was no obvious reason to think their parents were not normal lutinos and that Mithril would not in the classic orange eventually.

Except …

Mr. and Mrs. Bellos did not notice that when she first hatched, her natal down feathers were a different color from her siblings.

Mithril’s down feathers were bright white, not yellow. So when Mithril started really growing in her first feathers, it was a shock to everyone but Mithril herself. Up until Mithril, there was no reason to believe either of Mithril’s parents were genetically any different from what they appeared to be. 

By four weeks, Mithril’s whiteface mutation became obvious.  The little bird I first held wasn’t an ivory bodied lutino, but a truly all white bird, a combination properly called “whiteface lutino.”

Mithril a few days after she arrived home. Mithril eats baby parrot formula from a dish.

Whiteface lutino.  An all-white bird. No grey. No cheek spots. Snowy white, rare, and pure. Rare and precious – like the Mithril (Moria silver) in JRR Tolkien’s books. It seemed like the perfect name for her, for describing what a special little bird she was.  And that before I knew her well.

Holding her close and petting her, I asked Mrs. Bellos for some millet to try. Greedily Mithril tried it, quickly associating me with a comforting, trustworthy touch and delicious food. It was a quick and solid bond of mutual like and love.  I was Mithril’s mommy and she was my baby.  The “Mithril and Mommy Show” as I put it to her had begun!

Several days passed. When I came to see Mithril for the second time, it was clear that Mr. Bellos had figured out that Mithril might be worth some money.  As I played with Mithril and bonded even tighter to her, I heard Mr. Bellos tell his wife to give me a different bird so he could sell Mithril for money.  Mrs. Bellos refused, citing that Mithril and me were already too bonded.  The argument worked.  All that remained now was for Mithril to grow up enough to come home with me.

That day came much sooner than I expected.  Mrs. Bello knocked on my door unexpectedly a few days later in early August.  Mithril’s mother had just tried to kill her and needed to be removed from their household right away.  She had Mithril in a small budgie cage.  Naturally I accepted Mithril and we let her out in my bedroom.  She was just getting ready to fledge, but not flying yet.  Mrs. Bello gave me a small container with baby parrot formula powder and showed me some hand feeding basics before leaving me alone with Mithril and with Aragorn at a watchful distance.  She was finally my bird.

Available at a retailer near you in your choice of format including Smashwords, Apple, Barnes/Noble, and Amazon. Audio edition available at Apple and Audible. Hardcover edition available!