You can blame technology. I do. It...

You can blame technology. I do. It just wasn’t around when I starred, if you want to put it that way, in “Peter and the Wolf.” If the video camera had been invented when those hunters carried me into the village upside down, tied to a pole, with my tongue flapping out, the SPCA would have filed a complaint faster than you can say proletarian solidarity.

Yeah, I’m the wolf. And I suppose you’re going to buy the whole ugly story that Sergei Prokofiev set to music, that Russ Tamblyn is going to narrate and the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alvin Mills, is going to perform at 3 p.m. today in the Paul Revere Middle School Auditorium, 1450 Allenford Ave. (free admission).

What ugly story ?

You know. About how I was the villain, the Evil Empirenik who tried to eat this little boy and all.

Well, didn’t you?

Hey, man, it was a bad rap. What I did was, I was running this day-care center outside the village. The Cuddli-Wolfski Progressive Preschool. This was back in the days of the Great Purges. Purge or be purged, baby. No time to look after the kids. Petey’s grandfather was happy to get him off his hands so he could hang out all day in the potato cellar drinking vodka. But you know how people are about day-care centers. Rumors, suspicion . . . it’s terrible, man.

But you did eat Sonia, the duck.

Multiculturalism, baby. I told you, this was a progressive preschool. Each lunch from a different ethnic cuisine. Petey’d already gone through pizza, escargots, tacos, lox, curry and bratwurst, and I thought, Why not Peking duck? And right then, who should come waddling by. . . .

You’re an animal.

Of course I’m an animal. And I’m standing up for animal rights, man. If you can eat Peking duck, why can’t I?

I don’t recall that you cooked Sonia. Or shared your meal with Peter.

Hey, if I lit a fire, the AQMD would have been all over me like a bunch of Cossacks. As for sharing, well, Petey had to learn-- perestroika was huffing and puffing down the tracks of history, whether anybody realized it or not. Capitalism was the future, baby. Tooth and claw.

Tough talk. But how can you explain the fact that you, a wolf in the prime of wolfishness, were hogtied by a bird, a cat and a child barely out of diapers, armed only with a popgun?

Like I say, if I only had a video. Petey was still down in the dumps about Sonia, so I tried to teach him some cowboy rope tricks. Hey, I’m all heart. But the rope slipped--pure accident--and there I was, dangling from that tree. Those hunters came along and drew all the wrong conclusions. I mean, nobody--not even my pal Red Riding Hood--nobody gives a wolf the benefit of the doubt.