The Happy Family

The Happy Family or Fox and Rabbit. Both trickers and shape-shifter transgressors.

The Fox, shown in profile, in a preliminary exhibition in Hartford Village, ca. 1999, c.e.

Description of the Diorama

The Happy Family. A diorama display featuring the Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) (also: “Cross Fox”) and the Rabbit (Leporidae immanus, or Lepus miniatus [immanus] absentis manus) (also: “Bunny”).

A ponderous base of birch bark and birch logs forms a plinth for the display of these two mammals. Accessories of flowers (both real and artificial), dyed grasses, mosses, lichens (including red-tipped clidonia and others) and ornamental leaves create a pleasing, indeed, an unforgetable impression.

The Happy Family, detail.

Descriptive text from the combined Main Street Museum, Chadbourne Thaumaturgium exhibition

For this Exhibition our mascot is the fox, here emblematic of the trickster myth. The Trickster. That ubiquitous figure in the therianthropic human mythos who appears and re-appears as Huck Finn; Brier Rabbit; Hermes; the Winnebago Coyote, et al. He is both shape-shifter and boundary transgressor of ludic liminality; often a politician getting out of crisis as a modern stage magician denying the laws of physics. Thus, the Trickster has been grist for editorial cartoonists and other chroniclers of the passing scene. —Montague Chadbourne

fa:1912:001:di: Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) 
fa:2883:001:di: Rabbit (Leoporidae immanus)