I couldn’t sleep, Saturday night. Tossed and turned.
I’d set my alarm for 4am, and was sleeping with my clothes on, ready to jump right out of bed. But I kept checking the clock anyway. What if the alarm didn’t work for some ungodly reason? I would miss the interview — the most important interview of my writing career.
A five-minute interview with the Easter Bunny, scheduled to start at exactly 4:08am, when Mr. Bunny would be passing through Pagosa Springs with his magic basket of colored eggs. His agent had promised me five minutes, not a minute longer.
In my experience, celebrities generally avoid interviews, unless they have a new movie or autobiography coming out, in which case they will pick one or two well-known reporters who write for big-name magazines.
Why the Easter Bunny agreed to an interview for the Daily Post, I had no idea. I did understand the five-minute limit, however. Hiding eggs all over the world, between midnight Saturday night and 6am Sunday morning… doesn’t leave much time for chitchat.
I was out on the front porch, sitting on my green, second-hand sofa… with a list of clever questions, and my audio recorder ready… at 4:07am. The cloudless Easter morning sky was burning with stars, a quarter moon hanging like an LED light fixture.
I heard a strange whirring noise, off in the distance, that grew rapidly louder and nearer, and suddenly the Easter Bunny himself was sitting beside me on the sofa, looking at his watch. He held in his lap rather beat-up-looking wicker basket, filled with what looked like plastic eggs.
“Five minutes,” he warned me. “And yes, you can record our conversation. Just don’t take me out of context.”
“Great!” I sputtered. “I really want to thanks you for making the time…”
“Let’s skip the niceties and introductions,” he smiled. “I imagine you have a list of clever questions.”
“As a matter of fact,” I began…
“But in the interests of time, let’s skip the questions and I’ll just give you the story.” Clearly, this celebrity, as small and fuzzy as he might have appeared, was accustomed to being in charge.
“How long have I been doing this? 500 years, give or take,” he began. “Some Greek Orthodox priests borrowed the ‘colored eggs’ idea from the Persians, but once the Protestants got hold of it, it became too big a business for the Church to handle, so they went looking for an independent contractor. I was out of work at the time — you might remember the big recession in 1503? Seemed like a good job, with a future, and all the hard-boiled eggs I could eat.
“People needed some pleasant distractions, back in those days. They were smack dab in the middle of the Inquisition, and they’d just gone through the Plague, so some brightly colored eggs delivered by a cute bunny was pretty much guaranteed to raise everyone’s spirits.
“Of course, I was cute, back then…”
I started to say, “Well, I think you’re still cute…” but he interrupted me.
“I know, you think I’m still cute. But I was really cute, back then,” he sighed wistfully.
“Anyway, human was going through some rough times. Revolutions. Civil wars. Religious divisions. Famines. You probably can’t imagine how tough things were for ordinary families. I mean, you think your internet service is bad. They didn’t even have telephones.
“But I was right when I said the job had a future. When I started this gig, I was delivering to about 100 million households. The number this year is about 2 billion. So that’s close to 50 billion colored eggs.”
I must have had a surprised look on my face at that point, from the way the Easter Bunny smiled.
“Yes, I know; that’s hard to believe. 50 billion colored eggs. And that doesn’t include the chocolate eggs or the marshmallow chicks and ducks.
“As you can imagine, I had to expand my staff. But even with a larger workforce, we never could have kept up if someone hadn’t come up with the idea of plastic eggs. What a time-saver! A hen can lay about one egg per day. One single factory in China can turn out 10,000 plastic eggs per day. I don’t know where we would be today, without the Chinese plastics industry.
“And the cool way the plastic eggs can open and close!” The Easter bunny pulled a pink plastic egg out of his magic basket, and demonstrated the egg opening and closing. “Isn’t that just too cool? You can put stuff inside!”
I started to say something, but was again interrupted.
“Yes, I know. You think it’s silly that I would be so excited by an egg that opens and closes. But you haven’t spent almost 500 years dyeing eggs — and breaking half of them. Do you know how many eggs I have broken?”
He touched the back of his paw to his forehead. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“And these plastic eggs, they come already colored!” He gave a laugh. “It’s so amazing.”
Suddenly, an anxious expression appeared on his face, and he looked at his watch. “So, do you have enough for your article? I hope so, because I gotta get back to my delivery schedule. 20 million households left to do, mostly in South America.”
He stood up. “Back to work…”
I blinked, and he had completely disappeared. I heard that same strange whirring noise fade off into the distance.
Where he’d been sitting on the porch sofa, I saw a pink plastic egg.
I opened the egg and found a tiny folded rectangle of light blue paper. I unfolded the paper and read the hand-written message.
“Don’t quote me out of context, okay?”