Biography
Mazie the Chicken was born in a nest of shredded newspapers on a farm just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She spent her early years clucking and pecking at nothing on the ground. She might still be doing the same thing today if it weren't for an entrepreneurial birthday party magician named Slocum Brooder, who liberated Mazie from her pen one day with the intention of having chicken fingers for dinner but ended up being taken with her seemingly random pecking. Instead, Slocum sold Mazie to the local county Fair as a “Magic Genius Chicken” who could tell the future, guess a person’s weight and pick stocks better than 4/5ths of Wall Street tycoons.

The incredibly gullible Fair promoter bought the story and built Mazie a special box where she sat and pecked at buttons all day. For a small fee, Fairgoers could ask Mazie questions and get their answers on small white cards that said “Made in Hungary” on the back. After a string of amazing predictions, such as “You will smoke until you die. Try again later.” and “You will cut off some tails with a carving knife. Try again later.”, word of Mazie’s abilities spread far and wide.

Before long, word spread to commune editor Red Bagel, who was at a nearby booth ordering a pepperoni hoagie on a stick. Red was so impressed that he liberated Mazie from her box, and took her home to make chicken & dumplings. But once he got home and saw the way she pecked at a copy of the New York Times that he’d left on the floor, Red got a better idea. He remembered that he never got his pepperoni hoagie and decided to order in pizza instead.

Red forgot all about the chicken and weeks passed, until one evening Lil Duncan was over at Bagel’s New York apartment doing research for an article she was writing about the female condom. She asked Red why he had a chicken nesting in his bathroom sink. Red went straight for the butcher block in his kitchen, his hunger for dumplings rekindled. But by the time he had returned, Lil and Mazie had bonded over Mazie’s endearing random pecking behavior. Lil suggested that Red could save some money by firing one of the commune’s writers and hiring Mazie (literally for chicken feed) as an astrologer/advice columnist/fortune-teller. Red stopped listening after the “firing a writer” part as he got excited and immediately picked up the phone and called to have longtime commune columnist Dusty Tickle fired, tarred, feathered and put on a bus to Toledo. Mazie, meanwhile, was snuck into the commune offices by Lil and was given an office, a stack of magazines and newspapers, and a personal assistant named Molly Thatch who writes down whatever words Mazie is pecking at and transcribes them into a new Fortune 500 Cookies every month.

Mazie the Chicken was the winner of the 2000 Goldem-Holden award for excellence in prognosticative journalism and she holds a P.H.D. in being finger-lickin’ good.

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