Fund-Raiser’s Targets Seeing Pink

The phone rings and a man speaks briskly:

“The Pink Legion has left a message for you. On your lawn.”

Click.

This isn’t good.

You don’t have to be a full-blown paranoid to be concerned about a man you don’t know who calls at night to convey a statement from the Pink Legion.

The Pink Legion: That rings a bell, doesn’t it?

Isn’t that one of those brutal, neo-Marxist, hostage-torturing guerrilla groups somewhere in Bolivia?

Maybe the women who win the pink Cadillacs selling their friends tanker trucks full of Mary Kay cosmetics can be called the Pink Legion.

But they don’t get men to phone you at night and deposit messages on your lawn.

No, the Pink Legion is a lot more sinister than Mary Kay, and whatever it leaves on your lawn is nothing you would care to receive: a manifesto you are to personally give the president, a bomb set to go off when you crack open your door, the head of a Yanqui factory manager.

Or, perhaps better: 30 plastic pink flamingos, perched on their wire legs, silently denoting your household as a target of those who would put a measure of fun in fund-raising, without which it should be called mere draising.

In their roseate glory, the flamingos that have cropped up here and there around the U.S. have started to appear in Ventura.

For a dollar per bird, a crew from Ventura County Christian High School will plant them in the front lawn of anyone you name. They work under cover of night, and demand a 25-bird minimum.

Students and parents work together on the project, said Susan Haskins, the Parent-Teacher Fellowship secretary who helped organize it.

“We told the kids that if the police come, we’re bailing,” she joked. “They’re on their own.”

Most children assigned to save their school are forced into premature sales, peddling things like wrapping paper and stale peanut brittle. But the world can only use so many rolls of gold-flecked, holly-bedecked, ho-ho-ho gift wrap, and besides, the Ventura County Christian High School wants to make a highly public statement via its mobile aviary.

With fewer than 90 students, the fledgling school is seeking both money and students. It has temporary quarters in a church in midtown Ventura, but in an unusual arrangement with the local school district, it has secured a 20-year lease on the dilapidated and abandoned Washington Elementary School across the street.

Thanks to volunteer labor and donated materials, the school will receive a new roof. The scraggly lot in back will be turned into a verdant playing field. Classrooms will be opened, and what has for 15 years been a neighborhood eyesore will become even more attractive than a flock of 30 flamingos after a heavy rain, gracefully browsing your lawn for shrimp.

On Saturday night, two dozen flamingos were installed on the lawn of Richard Rogers, the school’s new principal. Rogers and his wife were out for the evening and a puzzled baby-sitter answered the Pink Legion’s trademark phone call. On Tuesday, the flamingos still graced the lawn, along with a sign announcing the school’s fund-raiser.

“You can’t miss them, can you?” said Theresa Rogers, the principal’s wife.

Three days after they appear, the flamingos will disappear--or be disappeared, as they say in certain Latin American countries. Recipients may get rid of them sooner for $2 a bird, naming the next recipient; those who wish to remain flamingo-proof may purchase “flamingo insurance” for $25.

“Isn’t that, well, extortion?” I asked Haskins.

“Perhaps,” she said.

But the Pink Legion won’t press the point; if some flamingo-ing victim has no sense of humor about his absolutely magnificent yard being polluted for 72 hours by this universal symbol of tasteless kitsch, then the Legion will swoop in to retrieve the hapless birds.

I hope nobody is so blind to life’s comic possibilities.

If they are, the Pink Legion might think about leaving them a far more serious message.

Peanut brittle.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.