Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour's Thanksgiving Pageant

(part the seventeenth of "Dreams Can Come True in Thirty Five Minutes")

Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour ran Fortyfour Enterprises, a 44-employee management comsulting firm located on the 44th floor of the Fortyfour building, located at 4444 44th Street in Chicago. Every year, around this time, Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour would begin putting together their annual Thanksgiving pageant, always to be entitled "It's just a coincidence."

Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour were sick of explaining to people that the overwhemling presence of the number "44" in eveyrthing that has to do with their company was not planned at all, and was a complete and total act of randomness. Their suite on the 44th floor of the Fortyfour building at 4444 44th Street began its life in 1957 on the fifth floor of a modest seven-story office building on Baines Avenue in Chicago's "Grand Avenue" district.

It was there that Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour (who oddly enough, aren't even related) went into business together, originally overseeing the distribution of scrap metal to the various factories that dotted the outline of the city at the time. Gradually they shifted the focus of their business from scrap metal distribution to glassware, then from glassware to book publishing (mostly how-to's on Feng Shui), then from publishing to novelty adult costume design, and finally from novelty adult costume design to management consulting.

In 1967, their building was purchased by Swiss pork-product-magnate Hans Fartyfur, who promptly named it after himself. Sadly, the "Fartyfur" building was the subject of much public ridicule, due to the fact that its name conjured up visions of flatulent housepets, so Hans decided to Americanize, renaming his property "The Fortyfour Building" in 1969. In 1973, the city of Chicago expanded Baines Avenue to cross the Union Pacfic tracks and meet up with the recently rerouted 44th Avenue on the other side. Baines Ave. then became "Baines Ave. / 44th St." and gradually public use of the proper name faded, and the street simply became known by its numeric moniker.

In 1981, Hans sold the Fortyfour building to a group of Aboriginal Refugees who had pooled their funds and bought a roller rink, which had made a fortune due to the late 70's roller disco craze. The Aboriginal Refugees decided to vastly expand the Fortyfour building to become a permanent part of the Chicago skyline, so they doubled the building's width and added thirty nine additional floors to it. (However, because the Aborigine know very little in the way of civil engineering, they decided to put the new floors BELOW the existing ones. Amazingly enough, they were successful.)

This put Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour on the 44th floor, instead of the 5th. And yes, when Chicago expanded 44th St. in the other direction in 1987 to meet up with Thigpen St., they renumbered the buildings. And yes, the Fortyfour building on 44th St., home of Arthur Fortyfour and Gene Fortyfour's management consulting firm on the forty fourth floor...changed its address from 2388 to 4444.

After years of explaining this story over and over and over and over, they decided at long last that the best way to drive their point home was through festive holiday pageantry. And who better to star as Pocahontas - in this, their first Thanksgiving pageant - than the reigning Miss Wisconsin.

Katja didn't even hear the phone ring. As usual, she had been playing John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band's classic hit "On the Dark Side" at full volume on her home stereo, but this had nothing to do with why she didn't take the call. In the months since winning the title of "Miss Wisconsin," Katja had gone completely deaf in both ears. This was most likely due to residual effects of the ear-stretching experiments she had been subjected to as a teenager in her native Romania. In late 1986, Romanian Prime Minister Vlach Dithbovhic became enamoured with a peasant girl who had abnormally large ears, and as a tribute to her, had selected one thousand girls from throughout the countryside to undergo radical and painful ear-stretching treatments.

(She played the song at full volume because she had no idea it was at full volume. Katja's inability to comprehend the workings of her home stereo would frequently result in run-ins with the neighbors.)

But when the carrier pigeon brought the invitation to her 9th floor walkup studio apartment in Madison, she could hardly contain her excitement. Katja had always dreamed of portraying Sacagawea in front of a live audience, and this would be pretty god-damned close!