Dame Wilburn - An Egg Too Far

 

So, my wife is an organic water kind of person. Like free range, organic, fair trade, small batch, single owner, whatever the buzzwords are, whatever we buy has to cover all of those things. She likes to hike. She likes to fish. She comes from what we call the thumb, because we're a mitten. So, she comes from the thumb area in Michigan. I will admit, it was a bit of a jerk move when I moved her from that forest to Detroit. 

 

Now, when you're married, you get into a lot of conversations. So, her first conversation with me was that she's like, “I really don't know if I can live here, because there's no grocery stores.” And I said, “There are plenty of grocery stores. They just sell socks.” [audience laughter] And then, she said, “Well, I need a grocery store that sells groceries and not socks.” And I said, “Well, then, this might have been a mistake.” So, then she said, “Well, what I really want is fresh eggs.” And I said, “Oh, that's no problem. They have eggs, where they keep the socks.” And she said, “Those aren't fresh eggs.” 

 

And so, we got into this long conversation really about socks, because we're married and we ventured off. But you know how when you've been married a long time, they loop back? The men in here know what I'm talking about. Your wife will just loop back on you, like this was three weeks ago, and all of a sudden, we're back at this again. So, she looped back on me and said, “Yeah, I think I have a solution for the fresh egg problem.” I said, “Well, I'd love to hear that.” And she said, “I think we should raise chickens.” [audience laughter] And I said, “Okay. Now, I need you to help me with this chicken thing, because if you want me to hunt somebody down, if you want me to pull somebody to the side and have a personal and private conversation with them, if you want me to burn down a house and collect the insurance money, I'm a Detroiter. These are skills I have, [audience laughter] okay? I don't know how this chicken thing works.” 

 

And she says, “Well, you get a bunch of chickens, and you feed them and then you eat the eggs.” I'm like, “Okay. I did go to a private school. I got that part. But how do we get the chickens? Do we go to the grocery store and buy eggs and wait? Like, what do we do?” [audience laughter] And she said, “No, you can go to a farmer, and pick them up as chicks and then bring them home.” And for whatever reason, I said, “Okay.” 

 

Now, I think the real reason was, secretly, I wanted to raise my own chickens and stick it to the man. That was my secret theory. So, we go to this farmer to get these chickens. Now, my wife went on. She did a lot of research, which means she went on Wikipedia, and she used the Google. So, the Google and Wikipedia told her, there's all kinds of chickens. I didn't know this. There're chickens that are good for laying eggs. There're chickens that make delicious soup. There're chickens that are so pretty, you don't touch them. I didn't even know that. So, she says to me, “What we're going to get is Buff Orpingtons.” I love that name, because it sounds like a frat guy, right? “Hi, I'm Buff Orpington.” [audience laughter] I love it. I love that. “You want to see my mom's Mercedes?” “No.” 

 

So, we find a farmer in Belleville, Michigan, which is about-- Most people who have never been to Michigan don't understand. Okay, it's Detroit and it's a city, but you're probably 15 to 20 minutes away from farmland at any given minute. So, we get outside the city and we get these birds. Now, we're at the farmers, and the idea is to get five chickens. Pretty sure, we don't know what we're doing. We're expecting three to just die just because we don't know what we're doing. [audience laughter] So, we figure we're going to kill three in general, and that'll leave us with two and two is enough. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we get there, and we're picking out these chicks and they're these cute little blonde chicks. They're making these peeping sounds and they're so cute. But I have this moment, because I was raised in Detroit in the 1970s and the 1980s when it mattered. I am power to the people, my people, black is beautiful. So, I'm looking at these and I'm like, “I'm not raising all these white birds in my backyard in Detroit. [audience laughter] That seems insane.” So, I look in these chicks, and they have black chicks. I didn't know there were black chickens. I didn't know. So, I see this little black chick, and I'm like, “Yeah, [audience laughter] we can get them, the little blonde chicks if you want to, but we going to get one black chick. Yeah.” [audience laughter] So, the farmer gives us five Buff Orpingtons and a Plymouth Barred Rock. 

 

Now, it's time to outfit their warm space. So, for those of you who don't know, now I've got to buy heating lamps. I'm buying heating lamps, and my wife is building all this weird construction in the middle of the living room, and we're buying organic feed and it's costing lots of money. I'm unprepared to be a farmer, because I showed up at the tractor supply company in a Honda Element. [audience laughter] The guy at the cash register looked at me, looked at my car and said, “What are y' all doing?” [audience laughter] And I said, “We are raising chickens, sir.” 

 

So, we get them home, and we get them all set up. And the only people who are really interested in the chickens are the cats. [audience laughter] The cats are like, “Ooh, look, meals on wheels.” [audience laughter] And once we calm them down, we are now chicken parents. Now, it took a minute for them to stop looking like brooms that nobody had cleaned. And it started actually being birds. So, we finally moved them outside. My wife builds them a chicken coop. Another way that you know that we're unprepared to be chicken farmers, is that my wife built their coop out of butcher block from IKEA. [audience laughter] Their entire coop was built from the scraps section at IKEA. Their house was better than the house we were living in. [audience laughter] 

 

So, they're outside. There's a couple things that I don't know if you know, so I'm going to share them. Number one. Chickens lay one egg a day, six days, and then they cycle. They take a day off. Now, that's fine unless you have six chickens. [audience laughter] I don't know about you, but you can't give the eggs to the neighbors because the neighbors go from, “Oh, thank you for the eggs,” to “Yo, where's my eggs” in a week. And no one wants to deal with that. [audience laughter] So, we are now eating eggs with everything. [audience laughter] I'm eating hard boiled eggs like Oreos. [audience laughter] People are coming to the house and it's like, “Would you like a cup of tea and possibly an egg? [audience laughter] Would you like a piece of pizza? Here's your pizza and an egg.” [audience laughter] We are eating more eggs than we could shake a stick at. 

 

Now, that egg thing was easily a problem. But then the birds became a little too much to handle. And the day we knew they were too much to handle turned out to be a Sunday. Now, I wake up to the sound. [crowing sound] [audience laughter] And I say to my wife, “What the hell was that?” [audience laughter] Here's something else they don't teach you on the Wikipedia. Chickens are natural lesbians. If there's no rooster around, one of them will butch up on you. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I look out into the backyard and on top of the IKEA chicken coop, who's up there crowing at the sun? That sister I bought. [audience laughter] The buff Orpingtons are, pew, pew, pew, just having their own chicken time. And that girl is up there baaa, just trying to bring the party. That's when I looked at my wife and said, “We got to get rid of them. We can't keep them.” 

 

Now, my wife was concerned that we were going to somehow get arrested or get a ticket. I informed her that were in Detroit, and the Detroit Police Department had a bigger fish to fry, [audience laughter] like we didn't make the list of the things the Detroit Police Department had on their plate. She was still concerned, and Natasha wasn't getting quieter. So, I found a woman north of the city who had her own flock of chickens, and we moved them. Here's another thing you need to know. It's easier to move chickens when they're asleep. [audience laughter] We didn't do that. I just found that it was easier. [audience laughter] Six fully awake chickens in a dog kennel in the back of an element going down the road, [audience laughter] that was easily a mistake. [audience laughter] But we get to this woman's farm and we release our chickens into her flock. 

 

So, a couple of things that we noticed. Number one, our chickens were huge because my wife let them eat whatever they wanted. Also, our chickens were a little weird because my wife had decided that since they didn't have a mother, she would teach them how to scratch the ground and dig up worms. The way they scratched the ground looked a lot like the way my wife scratched the ground, but nothing at all the way a chicken scratches the ground. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we dropped them off and about two days later, the woman who has the flock calls us and says, “What is the deal with these birds?” [audience laughter] And we said, “Well, whatever do you mean.” And she said, “When I go for coffee in the morning, they come up on the porch and sit with me.” [audience laughter] I said, “Well, they used to do that with my wife while she was teaching them how to scratch worms.” [audience laughter] And the lady just hung up on me. [audience laughter] Thank you.