It’s All Happening at the Zoo

Several times a week, Dingo Girl and I walk past the entrance to the Central Park Children’s Zoo.  When she was little, she’d paw at the wall on Fifth Avenue that overlooks the Children’s Zoo.  I would hoist her up so that she could see the animals, particularly the goats.  She was fascinated with the goats.  When I think of a zoo, I think of penguins, polar bears, lions.  Not goats.  I guess it’s not a good public relations move to let children run around a lion enclosure.  It’s not that goats are any less dangerous; not by a long shot.  In fact, at the entrance to the Central Park Children’s Zoo there is a statue of a child being mauled by two goats!  Somehow the goats tearing the clothes off of this child fails to deter parents from buying their overpriced tickets to the “petting zoo.” I have only seen one child balk at entering the Children’s Zoo.  This marvelously prescient child must have realized that the “children’s zoo” was a ruse to get cheap human fodder for the goats and other animals behind the enclosure.  The parents of this child ignored her tears and, as they dragged her through the entrance, I swore I could hear her shout, “Soylent green is people!”

Update:  It is with irony and sadness that I need to update this post to let you know that Charlton Heston, one of the old school actors of the big screen died on Saturday, April 5, 2008.  He was 83.

Heston had a prolific film and television career spanning more than six decades.  Although in his later years Heston became better known as the face of the NRA, at one time the silver screen icon was the king of blockbusters.  He often portrayed the gritty, rough around the edges leading man in blockbusters such as Ben Hur (1959), Planet of the Apes (1968), and one of my favorites as evidenced by the film clip that is linked above, Soylent Green (1973).