‘AUDITIONS TONIGHT’ read a big sign positioned over the fonte in the zoo plaza. A crude mesa, tabela had been positioned in front of the fountain, at which sat Mason and Phil. Large piles of papers were stacked all over the mesa, tabela and a huge line was assembled in front of it. Every few seconds, one of the animais in the line would hand one of the chimps a piece of paper, which they would promptly glance at and stack on topo, início of one of their piles. Then the animal would go up onto the side of the fonte and sing a song of their choice from The Barber of Seville for the judges, the chimps and King Julien. After a few segundos they were usually rejected and either left the zoo, skulking or sat down somewhere to watch the others.

King Julien was bored out of his mind, as a sappy rendition of an Italian opera was not exactly his idea of entertainment. The chimps, however (Mason especially) were really getting into the mood, obviously they had been longing for something mais than a CD recording of the opera. They had purposely saved the zoo animais for last, looking to get the stray animais from the park out of the way first. Out of twenty, so far, they had found one who was able to sing well enough to make it in. Most of the animais were cantar in really mechanical voices, due to the fact that none of them had ever even heard of The Barber of Seville, much less a song from it, and had simply memorized the song off a piece of paper and were reciting it like a speech while attempting to add a little musical flair to it. Unfortunantly for them, this did not wow the chimps.

Private was standing in a corner with the rest of the zoo animais that were auditioning, looking very nervous. He didn’t even know why he wanted to be in an opera in the first place, he had never particularly enjoyed the big fat guys cantar in really deep voices and the huge ladies in Viking hats. He glanced across the plaza where Skipper and Rico were sitting. Rico gave him an encouraging wave. Skipper was looking in the opposite direction.

“Good luck Private,” said someone. Private looked behind him and saw Maurice standing there, looking very smug.

“Er…good luck to you too, Maurice” said Private politely.

“Yeah…back in Madagascar, I was…” Maurice began, but Private cut him off.

“Shh…someone else is about to sing!” he said. They turned and watched for four segundos as a porcupine began to sing in a horrible nasally voice, as though he had a terrible cold. The chimps immediately dismissed him and called up the seguinte animal in line.

“I don’t know why the chimps let all of this riffraff into the auditions with us” said a harsh sounding female voice. “It’s not like they’re going to beat out any of us…and couldn’t they have at least let us go first?”

Private and Maurice spun around and saw Darla the babuíno standing there, watching an animal climb onto the side of the fonte with distaste. Private opened his mouth to interject but someone else cut him off.

“Darla, be nice,” said Marlene. “You know how poorly those animais fare outside the zoo…”

“Whatever, hun” said Darla, annoyed. “They’re just wasting my time as far as I’m concerned.”

As the zoo animais continued to bicker, one animal that had been holding up the line for the past four minutos finally cleared up an issue with the song he was planning to sing and walked up to the fountain. Everyone who had been sitting around bored immediately sat up and looked at him. He began to sweat as he struggled to remember the words.

While everyone was waiting for the animal to sing, a dark figure darted behind the viewing animais and dashed up a tree. The trees had been made off-limits due to the fact that a esquilo had tripped and fallen off a branch while everyone was gathering and had to be removed from the zoo grounds due to a leg injury and the chimps, not wanting any lawsuits, decided it was better if everyone sat on the ground.

Kowalski shifted himself so that he was behind a large branch, out of sight from anyone on stage who might happen to look up into the tree, and sat down on a large branch. Not the most comfortable seating arrangement but it worked. He glanced down in order to make sure no one was sitting directly underneath him, then sort of leaned back against the branch so that he could see the auditioning animal with one eye.

Down at the judges bench, Phil and Mason were having trouble keeping up with the crowd, mostly because Julien was snoring loudly seguinte to them and no amount of poking or prodding would awaken him. Not helping was the fact that fred figglehorn the esquilo was up next, and was probably the most frustrating animal that had signed up to audition. For one thing, he had not filled out any of the blanks on his form, which was a long, complicated list of details about the animals’ life. They had been instructed to fill it out before hand, but obviously fred figglehorn had not obeyed.

“Okay…so what goes here?” said Fred. The animais behind him groaned as they realized he was pointing at ‘Birthdate’.

Mason was becoming nearly as frustrated as the other animals. “It says ‘Birthdate’. Do I really need to tell you what that means?”

fred figglehorn started blankly. Mason groaned. “What ano were you born?” he said.

“You mean my birthday?” said Fred.

“YES!” said Mason.

“Okay…my birthday’s on July 6…here you go.”

fred figglehorn handed Mason the form. Mason sighed and stuffed the paper underneath a particularly large stack. “Fine. But hurry up, you’re holding up the line!”

fred figglehorn took his time to climb up onto the fountain. por the time he was ready, Phil had fallen asleep and several animais in the back of the line had given up and walked out of the zoo.

fred figglehorn opened his mouth and began to sing in the most impressive opera voice anyone there had ever heard. King Julien woke up and fell backwards into Mason’s lap before falling to the ground, and everyone else stared at fred figglehorn as he continued to sing. Even Kowalski, sitting across the plaza in the tree, was mightily impressed. Kowalski thought fred figglehorn might be considered on par with the best male singer in the show on Broadway he had seen the other dia and was wondering how he had gotten such an incredible talent for cantar when fred figglehorn stopped and hopped off the fountain.

“How was that?” he said.

Phil and King Julien were both staring, their mouths agape. Mason was busy clapping enthusiastically. “Yes, definitely a yes! But…” he continued in a small voice “If I let you have a part, please try to not take so much time with everything.”

“I’ll try” said Fred, walking away and scratching his chest.

“Aha!” said a roughish voice with a French accent. “Finally! It is time for me, Ze Archer, to…”

“Yes, skip the monologue and get up there,” said Mason unenthusiastically. “And good luck beating that last performance.”

“I assure you, you will not be disappointed,” said The Archer and, with a running start, did a flip up onto the side of the fountain. Before beginning to sing, he beamed at the audience and gave two female raccoons watching the auditions a roguish wink. They swooned, while most of the other animais rolled their eyes and shouted at him to hurry up.

The Archer then took a long time to clear his throat, so long that por the time he had finished several mais animais had left the back of the line and Julien had fallen back asleep and was snoring even mais loudly than before.

Phil slapped Julien to wake him up as The Archer began to sing. Most lamentably for The Archer, he was trying to maintain his fake French accent while singing, but since that was not his natural voice (and the fact that he had not trained in cantar with the French accent, only talking) the song came out in a horrible-sounding mix of unintelligible words.

“Aagh! Stop!” said Mason. “Next please!”

“Wha…?” said The Archer, refusing to step off the side of the fountain. “Just let my try again!” he continued, now using his New York accent. “I promise I’ll…”

“No, you had your go,” said Mason. “I’ve been listening to rubbish for the last hora and I’m not going to waste any mais time listening to that again.”

When he still did not more, Bada and Bing the gorillas came over and threw him off the side of the fountain. Then the seguinte animal in line went up to audition.

It took so long to get through this that Kowalski eventually dozed off (as did several animais in the audience and in the line, who had to be woken up so they could have a chance to audition). However, Mason stood on his escrivaninha, mesa when the non-zoo animais had finished their auditions and screamed very loudly into the air, which surprised Kowalski so much that he nearly fell out of the árvore (Kowalski thought it might be a type of scream therapy).

“Wow, it’s late,” commented Mason when he sat back down. “I’m probably going to end up sleeping till three in the afternoon tomorrow”.

“Well, hopefully, the animais from our own Central Park Zoo will be able to turn this around” announced Mason, noting that only four animais from the park had actually passed the audition. All of the animais in the audience clapped, knowing that it would not take much longer now. Kowalski was drifting off to sleep again, wanting to go to cama but also wanting to stay up for the rest of the auditions.

Meanwhile, fred figglehorn the esquilo had been chatting with some of his friends when they decided to leave the zoo. fred figglehorn declared that he didn’t want to go back to the park yet and wanted to stay and watch the rest of the auditions. The other animais shrugged and walked out and fred figglehorn walked over to find somewhere to sit. All of the comfortable places near the fonte had already been taken and fred figglehorn had not been paying attention when the chimps announced that they didn’t want anyone to be in the trees. So he climbed up a árvore to get a better view. And naturally, that árvore happened to be the one Kowalski was dozing off in.

fred figglehorn was climbing to a particularly large branch about three-quarters of the way up, as it provided a great view. When he was about there, however, he stepped on something soft and sort of squishy. fred figglehorn poked it and the thing (Kowalski, obviously) moaned and sat up.

“Oh, hello” said Fred.

Kowalski yawned. “Hello…” he said sleepily. Then he jerked awake and yelped. He knew that he shouldn’t be drawing too much attention to himself but he also knew that he wasn’t supposed to let anyone see him, and he wasn’t thinking very clearly as he had just woken up. He kicked fred figglehorn from behind, knocked him out of the tree, and made a run for it.

“Aah” said fred figglehorn softly, still very uncaring despite the fact that he had just been kicked out of a tree. He bounced off a branch and landed on the ground with a thunk.

He landed right seguinte to the chimps, who were busy leitura through some papers. Mason jumped, startled, then looked up and saw that he had just fallen out of a tree.

“Now, this is why I said that no one was to sit in the trees during the auditions!” scolded Mason. “What happened?”

“I dunno…I was just climbing up the árvore and I stepped on someone, and I guess they didn’t like it because the seguinte minuto they just kicked me out of the tree.”

“Who?” said Mason.

fred figglehorn shrugged. “All I saw was that he was all black and pretty tall.”

“All black and pretty tall?” said Mason, obviously disappointed por the description.

“Hah! I’ll bet it was that silly penguin…the tall one. He was always coming up to me and talking to me about…oops” said King Julien, quickly covering his mouth. Of course, everyone turned and stared him down.

“Who, Kowalski?” said Mason. “I bet you’re right, remember the other dia when Skipper gave that announcement about him?”

In just a few moments everyone in the plaza was mumbling to another animal about something Kowalski-related.

“Well, you seem to know a bit about what’s going on here,” said Mason, turning to King Julien. But when he glanced towards where the lémure, lemur had just been sitting, there was no sign of him.

“He’s gone!” said several animals, flabbergasted.

“He was taken por Kowalski! Who will be next?” shouted the flamingo. (In truth Julien had simply snuck away from the plaza while everyone was mumbling to each other and ran back to the lémure, lemur habitat).

“Calm down!” said Mason, projecting his voice around the plaza. “Need I remind everyone that he is a penguin, one which is about a quarter of your height, Pinky” he stared coldly at the flamingo, who giggled.

“And based on what Skipper has said over the passed few years he has lived at this zoo, Kowalski is the worst fighter of all the penguins. So how many of you really think that this is something to be worried about?”

Mort, who was sitting in the audience, raised his tiny hand. When he saw that no one else had, be giggled put his hand down.

Skipper did not want to share the news with everyone that Kowalski was dead, but if he didn’t they would soon be blaming Kowalski for everything that happened around the zoo, which would get annoying…and the worst part is that they would probably expect the penguins to do something about it! So Skipper waddled on up to the side of the fonte and shouted to direct everyone’s attention to him.

“Listen, everyone. It’s not Kowalski.”

“How do you know?” said the flamingo. “Just yesterday you got up here and told us all how ‘dangerous’ he was!”

“Well, it’s just that…he’s dead,” said Skipper sadly.

It was obvious that the animais did not believe him, so Private, Marlene and Maurice, who had been waiting patiently in line, got up onto the side of the fonte as well.

“It’s true,” said Private. The other two nodded.

“You KILLED him?” said the flamingo, backing several steps away from the fonte even though he was already quite far away from it.

“No, of course I didn’t kill him!” he snapped at the flamingo. “It’s a long story…”