“This is the amazing transforming flying egg,” announces Neville, who’d rather not use a last name. He’s standing in the front room of his house in Pilsen, demonstrating a skeletal aluminum-wood structure mounted on a homemade carriage. It’s the start of an airplane he’ll try to fly Saturday at Monroe Harbor. “Once it’s all in place and all the connections are in, then I jump in. I start peddling like hell and I have four guys who will be pushing.
Most contestants will build contraptions that aren’t really intended to fly; they’ll try to pick up style points before plunging into the lake. But Neville’s team–“Who Are You Calling Chicken?”–intends to score in both distance and creativity. During their two-minute skit, team members will roll out an egg that unfolds into a plane. The four men pushing the craft will wear yellow outfits and Neville himself will be in a suit that he describes as “English gentleman meets mad scientist meets flying bird.” A “chicken cannon” produced by a Pilsen artist friend will shoot stuffed chickens into the audience. Neville’s girlfriend, Rachel Thoele, an ATA flight attendant who once played bass and sang for San Francisco rock bands, will lead a group of yellow-fur-clad women in a dance routine based on the movements she makes while demonstrating safety procedures to passengers.
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“When I had the opening, there were a lot of people. This little boy, six years old, breaks through. He sees the boxes working at the same time, and he screams. He just lets out this emotional outburst, that I haven’t seen before and haven’t seen since, of joy. They weren’t even words, they were just ‘Aah!’ That is the best compliment I think I’ve ever received from anyone.”
After New York, he and a friend spent a summer staging baby pig races in California, Washington, and Oregon. Passing through Bakersfield, he wandered into a dog pound and met a “mixture of Chihuahua and some other animal” named Mili. She was in a cage, and the keepers had decided to put her to sleep. “They said, ‘Don’t even look at the dog. That dog is vicious and will have to be destroyed.’ I convinced them to open the cage and the dog jumped into my arms. Their mouths dropped. This dog chose me and decided I had to take it home.” Mili lies silently on the floor while Neville recounts the tale. In her honor, he calls his enterprise in gadgetry the Small Dog Theatre Company. The company’s first project, Small Dog Theatre number one, was a set of 55 wooden boxes that each contained a running paper dog. He sold 53. The other two are stashed in his workshop.
But any movie producer would notice that the rules of the contest and the laws of physics guarantee a tragic ending–the chicken will inevitably plunge into the fryer.
