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Trouble in the Hen House - Hand-made Collage We knew the luminaries of nineteenth century thought were up to something when they stopped coming by the pub after work and instead headed straight to Hegel's hen house. They appeared single-minded and engaged in some unseen task at hand. We figured they were working out some kind of new dialectics or something, but the boombox and power tools gave us pause. For about three weeks all through the night it was nothing but the roar of table saws and Tchaikovsky. Then on an unseasonably warm Thursday evening in October, Nietzsche and Marx burst into the bar and announced that everyone was invited to the hen house the following night at seven o'clock. With that they two of them called out that they still had lots of work ahead of them and exited the pub. The following evening the whole town lined up outside the white clapboard hen house anxious to discover what awaited inside. The town bell tower rang out announcing the hour. The door flew open and there stood Hegel all smiles and radiant in a pink cotton dress. "Please! Please!" he cried with the wave of a hand. "Come in! We are so glad you could make it." Upon entering the building our jaws dropped. Gone were the rows of hay-filled nesting boxes leaving an open space with a stage at one end. Hegel urged us to take our seats on the benches set before it. Once seated, the lights went down, the music began, and one by one the luminaries came out onto stage on point displaying ballet skills that in a million years we never would have dreamed that they possessed. They embodied grace itself. Even Hegel's old hens stopped their incessant pecking, transfixed by this little piece of heaven.
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