What ever happened to the Pig-Nosed Boy and Girl?

I was reminiscing the other day about some of the strange and unusual people I have met over the decades working in local restaurants.  Some of them may appear in a future written work which may be titled The Kitchen Misfits, but that is a work not yet begun.

Anyway, I was thinking about these two kids I used to see every working morning, back in 1987.  They themselves were not kitchen misfits, but I would watch them each morning along with two of my fellow misfits, K and J, who worked the lunch shift with me at Waterworks.  The three of us would take the same bus every weekday morning, from Burlington to Winooski.

When you commute by bus, you see the same people every day.  Not just the people riding the same bus, but those waiting for other buses, as well.  We used to see these two kids, a boy and a girl, who looked to be middle school age, perhaps twelve or thirteen, who looked so similar that they had to be siblings, perhaps even twins.  They weren’t exactly ugly, but they each had the same round face and the same round, flat nose.  Yes, their noses looked like pigs’ noses.

So, of course, we called them “the pig-nosed boy and girl.”  Not to their faces, of course.  We weren’t that mean.  Actually, K could be pretty mean, but she never took it out on these two unfortunates.

The three of us were all imbued with the kind of sophisticated humor that breeds in restaurant kitchens, so naturally we speculated a great deal about their family, their past, and their future.  What can the future hold for a pair of pig-nosed children?

I thought perhaps a show business career might beckon, but they would probably end up in a very low budget freak show.

Come see the bearded lady, the man with three buttocks, and the pig-nosed boy and girl!

K came up with the evil suggestion that they were lovers as well as siblings, and that they planned to breed a dominant race of pig-noses to overthrow the existing social order and rule the world.  Now that appealed greatly to J, whose collection titled Poetry for World Domination has, thankfully, been turned down by every publisher in the western world.  He never stopped trying, though.

Now, it occurs to me, as it probably has to you, that the three of us were nothing but a trio of vulgar kitchen misfits whose infantile humor was pathetic and demeaning.  We were “nose-shaming.”

Well, there’s clearly no defense.  “Nose-shaming” was not the mortal sin in progressive circles then that it is today, but still, we should have known better.

But you’re probably wondering what the hell happened to the pig-nosed boy and girl.  Well, I was, too.  So, I took a couple of excursions in The Thoughtmobile (that’s another story–just trust me) and did some diligent research.

 It turns out that their breeding program never got off the ground; they couldn’t do it.  Depending on your moral point of view, they were either not quite evil enough or not quite broadminded enough.  “Bob” and “Daisy” each had brief romances over the years, but nothing lasting.  It turned out that nobody could stand either one of them.  Nobody except each other.  So, they decided they had to succeed together or fail together.

 So they opted for a show business career as Bob and Daisy Pignose.  Really.  I mean, I couldn’t make this stuff up, could I?  They had their ups and downs over the years, but eventually settled into a moderate-sized carnival show working the County Fair circuit in southern Indiana and Illinois.

 Their carnival career came to an ignominious end in the late nineties.  Apparently, Bob had conducted a long, painstaking internet search to find a pig-nosed child that they could bring into the act.  Well, he found one, but his attempts to “acquire” the child through various means, some of which were not quite legal, left the couple in serious financial trouble and out of a job.

 No records exist of any jail time for either Bob or Daisy, but a couple of bad check charges against Daisy in 2001 left the two of them persona non grata on the County Fair circuit, and it looked like the end for them.  But resiliency in the face of adversity, especially when you possess a pair of schnozzes like Bob and Daisy had, is a necessity for success in the modern world.

 Bob and Daisy Pignose re-surfaced as a regional powerhouse on the Indiana pickleball circuit, winning several local tournaments and reaching the Sweet Sixteen in the state tournament.  They now make a tidy living producing instructional videos on Tik-Tok, billed as “Piggie-ball with Bob & Daisy.”   

 I did, of course, learn their real names in the course of my research, but to reveal them would cause dreadful embarrassment to a prominent Burlington family, and my conscience will not permit me to do that. But I am delighted that things have worked out well, finally, for these two kids who once amused me and my misfit friends.  I hope you are pleased, as well.

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