Ruffled Feathers

My favourite story about this year's Christmas gigs comes from a friend of mine who assures me this is true. He was doing a gig with a magician well known for his psychotically narcissistic temperament, and this gig turned out to be for quite a wealthy and well-connected mid-time criminal. This guy happened to have a very large house, and in that house he happened to have a parrot. Now, for whatever reason, he'd trained the parrot to say 'that's shit that is!' Maybe that should come as no surprise given the man's dubious occupation. So the narcissist is doing card tricks to one of the guests and the parrot pipes up, that's shit that is! The magician turns to the guest and says, what did that bird say? And the parrot obliges, that's shit that is! So this guy, and I'm not kidding here, this guy gets the hump with the parrot! He spends the whole night, stomping around, shooting that bird filthy looks. If the host hadn't been so shady, things could have got quite nasty for little feathers there.