Frank Zappa
The Poodle Lecture [Philly ’76]
FZ:
In the beginning GOD made 'the light.' Shortly thereafter GOD made three big mistakes. The first one was THE POODLE. As indicated in Exhibit A. Oh, just a little feedback, don't let it worry ya. Now, when God first constructed the poodle it was an attractive dog. It had hair evenly distributed all over its small piquant charming canine-type body. All the other dogs liked it because it was a regular fella. It had a ha— It had a ha— It had a— It had a haircut just like them, and so it was right in with the other trends that were going on in those days
Then, God made these other two big mistakes. Mistake number two was MAN. Mistake number three was WO-MAN. Okay. Wo-man looked at the poodle with lust in her heart. And she came up with a plan that was about to reshape civilization itself. She looked at the man and knew the man to be a dumbbell, a chump from the word "Go"—which was one of the first words that we had in the old days. So she turned to the man and she said, "Hey, why don't you go get a job?" And because the man was—shall we say—tepid in the mind, he got up off his booty and went out of the Garden of Eden, got himself a job, pushing a broom for about a dollar-2.98 an hour, brought the money back to the woman, she took the money, went to the hardware store, bought a pair of scissors and a pair of zircon encrusted tweezers!
Then she got a hold of the dog and she clipped on the dog. She modified the coat of the dog. She cleaned off on his back here to make it real nice because she wanted the dog to have a disco look. Then she cleaned off his thorax, pardon me, his medulla, his Managua, and all around here, all around Allentown, she cleaned up, really good. Then, as a matter of fact, right over here, if you'll notice, this is the Sheraton in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where they have that glass of orange juice as big as your finger for 75¢. And then she clipped the— she clipped the fur off of the snout so that you could see the succulent little black poodle lips—you know what I'm talking about. A lot of you kids out there who might have the kind of a mother with blue hair who likes to go to Miami with one of these things really knows what I'm talking about. Then she took the poodle and she put it over on the side and made it sit up with his little snout in the air. And she walked over and sat on his face
Purely for demonstration purposes, folks, don't take it seriously. And then, and I don't know how she managed to do this, while she was down there squatting on the poodle snout, she looked deep into the dog's eyes and said these words . .