scupture by Lindsay Daen
This story was taken from the following site:
www.dpi.state.wi.us/oea/pdf/readrelease8.pdf
Juan Bobo's Pig
retold by Joseph Sobol
Have you heard the story of Juan Bobo and his pig?
Once upon a time in a little village in Puerto Rico, there was a little boy named Juan Bobo. One day Juan Bobo's mother said to him, "Juanito mijo, go and clean p the pig and make her look as beautiful as you can, so that when you take her to market this morning to sell her she will fetch a good price."
Well, Juan Bob always tried to do exactly as his mother told him. So he went and washed the pig with buckets of soapy water, and scrubbed her face with a warm washcloth-but she still didn't look very beautiful.
So Juan Bobo went to his mother's closet and got out her red taffeta skirt with the elastic waistban, and he slipped that around the pig's waist. Then he went to the house of his great-aunt Margarita, who weighed almost three hundred pounds. He borrowed a blouse and a bright red wig, and he fit those onto the pig.
He outlined the pig's eyes as best he could with black eyeliner and a touch of blue eye shadow; he put bright red lipstick on the pig'slips; and he got two pairs of his mother's high-heeled pumps and strapped those onto her trotters. Now the pig looked really beautiful to Juan Bobo! So he put a rope around her neck and started to take her to market.
But halfway along the road to town they came upon a big muddy puddle. Ths big muddy puddle looked really beautiful to the pig. She threw herself down right in the middle of the big muddy puddle, and she rolled around a couple times, because it felt so good to her. There was nothing juan Bobo could do about it--because she was much bigger than he was, and sometimes she just forgot that Juan Bobo was supposed to be in charge.
She kicked off her high-heeled pumps--all except one that got stuck sideways. She got the red taffeta skirt all covered with mud, she ripped one sleeve out of the blouse, tore off her wig, and completely ruined her mascara.
By the time Juan Bobo got the pig out of the puddle and all the way to town, she didn't look so beautiful anymore. In fact, when the towns people saw Juan Bobo and his pig, they laughed and laughed and laughed the two of them all the way back home. So that today in Puerto Rico, whenever somebody gets so dressed up that their friends almost--but not quite--don't recognize them, people say that they are "all dressed up like Juan Bobo's pig."