The Pink Flamingo Mafia

Dear well-loved and appreciated readers,
I’m wondering if I might ask you favor.
If you’ve read and enjoyed either of my books, ​

...would you please take a moment to leave a review – just a sentence or two would do – on Amazon and/or Goodreads?
Here are the links:
For Amazon:
"Equal and Opposite Reactions":  http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
"Hail Mary":  https://www.amzn.com/1684334888

For Goodreads: 
"Equal and Opposite Reactions": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35521059-equal-and-opposite-reactions
"Hail Mary": www.goodreads.com/book/show/53468697-hail-mary

​   Online reviews are the best kind of word-of-mouth for helping an author’s book make it in the world and I would so appreciate a few words from you.
    Thanks so much, and enjoy today’s Ailantha!
​

​The Pink Flamingo Mafia

     I got the flamingo idea from  a couple weeks ago from a friend who told me about  two pink flamingos that had mysteriously shown up in her front yard.

    After a  a bit of sleuthing my friend discovered that it was one of her friends who had  flamingoed her.
​     My initial reaction was that I really wished someone would flamingo me. My second reaction was that I really wanted to flamingo someone else. 
      Then I was hit with the inspiration: I would pink flamingo The Posse! The Posse - aka The Panera Posse - is my girl group that meets every Wednesday morning, formerly at Panera, 

...but in more recent times via Houseparty (see post from 4/10/2020, "The Posse Rides Again").

        Yes, I decided, I would plant a pair of pink birds on the lawn of each Posse member. 
     The only consideration was that there were, beside myself, nine active Posse members. That would mean that I would have to procure 18 flamingos. That was a lot of flamingos. And where, I wondered, does one go in these parts to buy large quantities of flamingos? Where does one to go buy anything at all that one might wish to acquire? Amazon, of course!
       So I proceeded to Amazon where I learned that I could buy pink flamingos in bulk parcels of 12 each. 

     However, as kismet would have it, the day I placed my order the flamingos, by luck, happened to be on sale:

     And so I bought two packs of flamingos, and was greatly excited when they arrived last Saturday, March 6.

      Since I had a few pink flamingos to spare, I decided that I would do a flamingo hit trial run on the yard of my son Tommy and his girlfriend Emily.​

      That night around 11:00 pm my daughter Theresa and I drove to Tommy and Emily's house, quickly planted two flamingos, then zipped away undetected. 

     Our practice hit was a success. 
      The following morning Tommy called me to ask if I knew about the birdies, and I instantly fessed up. Tommy was glad to hear that I was the pink flamingo perpetrator as neither he nor Emily quite knew what to make of the mysterious birds perched on their lawn. Was it a friendly gesture, they wondered,  or perhaps something of a more sinister nature, akin to the marking of a victim's house for identification by a hit man, a scenario they'd once seen on a TV crime show?
       "Should we call the police?" Emily wondered.
       "How about we call my mom first," Tommy suggested.
        Once they learned that it was I, and not the Mafia, behind the escapade they were tickled as pink as the flamingos, and from this first successful hit-and-run was born the Pink Flamingo Mafia. All two of us. 

      However Emily offered that I might consider from now on attaching  friendly little notes to my flamingos so that any future visitation by the Pink Flamingo Mafia might not be mistaken for  a visitation from the other Mafia. 
        I took Emily's advice as I planned  our big hit to the lawns of all nine Posse members for that  night, Sunday night. I decided that after all the birds were assembled, ​

​...I would cut out cardboard hearts,

...trace and cut out contact paper hearts,

...write a friendly note on each heart,

...stick the contact paper hearts to the cardboard hearts,

...then tie a heart onto one of each pair of flamingos.

    When all the flamingos were tagged, boxed, and ready to go, we waited for nightfall to make our move.  

    In the meantime my Pink flamingo consigliere realized that this night was in fact the night on which she and a few old high school chums had planned a social-distanced get-together. I'd need a new second. I found a recruit (and made him an offer he couldn't refuse) whom I will call The Scoutmaster.

      I decided we should move out at 8 pm, a time at which people would probably be settling in to watch their Sunday night TV shows. As the departure time approached, The Scoutmaster donned his neon yellow reflectorized safety hoodie. "It'll be dark out there," he said.
      "Aw, for cryin' out loud, Tom," I pouted, "this isn't a Boy Scout function! It's a danged clandestine operation!"
       The Scoutmaster rolled his eyes, duly switched to a dark grey hoodie, and loaded up the flamingos.

      The locations of the houses of my nine Posse members covered about a nine-mile radius. As I would have two left-over pairs of flamingos after flamingoing my Posse, I decided to flamingo my nephew Randy's and his wife Anusha's house as well, as they were sort of along  the way.

       Under cover of darkness we hit each front yard with lightening speed, then zipped away, pulses pounding,  praying we wouldn't be caught in the act. ​

         "What if somebody sees us and calls the police?" Tom brought up at one point.
        "What if they do?" said I. "It's not like if I'm arrested I'll lose my piano-teaching business. I've already lost my piano teaching business to COVID. And it's not like if you're arrested you'll be fired from you're job. You're retired. So even if we are arrested, what difference will it make?"
         But luck was on our side, and nobody caught us or called the police. 
        It  took us about an hour of quick  work to hit all our precalculated targets. I had one pair of flamingos left over and so I thought I'd do a hit on our front yard, too. But then I thought of one of our neighbors whom I reckoned it would be fun to hit as well. Besides, we did actually already have a cute little flamingo perched in our back yard.  

      So we did one more lightening strike,    

...then we headed home, I, for one, exulting in having pulled off a dozen superlatively-executed flamingo hits in one weekend.
     Epilogue:
     As of today, Today, March 11, to my knowledge five of the twelve targets of the Pink Flamingo Mafia have solved the mystery of the birds in their yard.   
       One from among those who still don't know who flamingoed them put up this post on Facebook on the day after the hit:

     Among those who do know and to whom I've spoken, surprise and delight, as well as some confusion, were pretty general among their initial responses. Most of them shared with  me that they subsequently went online to find out if randomly planting two flamingos in someone's front yard was a thing. One of my friends learned that it was in fact a thing in Vermont.
     A couple of recipients decided that they were going to pass the flamingos on to another friend or family member's front yard with an additional attachment stating that whoever recieves the friendly flamingos should then in turn pass them on to someone else's front yard, and so on. I think it's a spendid idea. ​Maybe  the Pink Flamingo Mafia will, in fact, become a thing.