The best $4 I ever spent

I love a good prank. I’m the queen of mischief and shenanigans, in and out of drag.

One of my best ever involved a cock – a rooster, I mean. I was living in my seminarian frat house in college. (Yes, studying to be a Catholic priest. I think we all know how that turned out). One day, as I perused an antique version of Craigslist – a newspaper – an ad selling chickens and roosters caught my eye. A plot immediately hatched in my head. Pun intended, as always.

What if I made the one-hour farm drive and picked up a little cockle-doodle-do and hid him in the basement? Then in the middle of the night, release him into a fellow seminarian’s room? Well, not what if, but how soon can I find someone to drive me out to old MacDonald’s farm? (I never owned a car in college, instead mooching rides off my friends).

It did not take long to find a fellow partner in pranks. Soon enough we were returning to the city with one large cock in a box. (Sung to the tune of Justin Timberlake’s “Dick In A Box.”)

I set my alarm for 4 a.m., a time when I knew everyone in the house would be asleep. I crept down to the basement, then past the second floor to the third. I gingerly opened the door to my victim, setting my poultry pal loose to do whatever fowl things he might. I snuck back down to my second floor room and waited for chaos to ensue. It took a good hour, but once the sun hit the horizon, that rooster let loose with some god-awful crowing. I could hear people running around in Steve Boettcher’s room with their heads cut off, then into the hall trying to chase down my elusive bird.

Meanwhile Steve was bent on finding out who could have possibly done this. There was a light knocking on my door. I lay still as could be. The door creaked open and Steve bent over me, nudging me awake from my fake slumber.

“Did you put a rooster in my room?”

“What? A rooster? What are you talking about?” I said in the best sleepy voice I could muster.

“Oh, I am so sorry to have woken you up. Never mind.”

And just as he was about to leave, I laughed, “Of course I put a rooster in your room. Who else would do that?”

“You better get that rooster out of this house, NOW!”

What does one do with a rooster at 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning? I phoned a friend. Paul Bello lived in the co-ed dorm on campus.

“Hey, you want a rooster to set free on the girls’ floor above you?”

“Sure, bring him on over.”

As girls stumbled down the hall for their morning showers, they came face to face with a clucking cock and ran shrieking in the other direction. The dorm resident assistants tried to corner the bird, which flew out the second-story window into a large bush beneath the Jesuit priests’ sleeping quarters. For an entire week, my cock’s crowing woke those priests at 5 a.m., and for a week the groundskeepers tried catching that bird. Eventually the cock was caught and now resides in a jar of formaldehyde in the college biology lab. Best four dollars I ever spent on cock.

Drag queens like to prank each other. Take Nina Montaldo, for example. She knew that Jazzanne Capri was famous for her rendition of Liza Minnelli.

So for a month before the NGLTF SummerFest show “Les Girls” hosted by Nicole Summers, Nina began telling everyone SHE was going to do Liza. Jazzane was fit to be tied and whined about it all month. But what was she to do, Nina being her elder and all. Nina took it one step further. She showed up at Casselman’s in a Liza wig and dress. Once backstage, Nina informed everyone that she was not doing Liza and had never planned to.

Jazzanne, now wrecked, switched her number to a Liza song. She hit the stage as a brunetted Liza, since she had not brought along any of her Minnelli accoutrements. Bless her heart. You just gotta love a good prank.