When you awoke this morning, were you aware of a pink plastic flamingo planted overnight on your lawn? If so, the trespassing culprit might have been 11-year-old Jennifer Rubenstein.

Considering your cosmopolitan taste, you might dispose of the eyesore. Or you might be tempted to read the sign attached to the flamingo's neck, words to the effect that, for a fee, Jennifer will dispose of the damned thing for you. After all, she is well known in your neighborhood as a precocious pre-teen saving up for a trip to Australia.

For an extra fee Jennifer will uproot your tacky plastic bird and replant it in your "pesky neighbor's," or in your in-laws', yard as a prank. Whereupon others will be greeted with the same note hitting them up for a removal fee. Jennifer also offers an "insurance policy" guaranteeing no flamingos will ever grace your lawn -- for a modest fee, or even for nothing. On one night Jennifer was paid extra to plant 20 flamingos on one person's lawn.

If this sounds like extortion straight from "The Sopranos," it is another example of devil-may-care shenanigans I associate with the wigged-out 1960s. Jennifer's skullduggery has a straighter edge to it than, say, August Bleed's in "Shoplifting 101." Unlike that goofy scoundrel Bleed, Jennifer is a topnotch achiever in school; she "sings, dances, cheers, does karate, participates in the civil rights club, is in the gifted and talented program and has plans to attend Harvard."

At the rate she's been gently conning her neighbors in Gray, Maine, she's been making about $500 every week and a half. At this rate, she should have $6500 by next June, more than enough to visit aborigines, swim the Great Barrier Reef and visit the Sydney Opera House in what her father calls a "people-to-people ambassadorship" down under. The wonder of it all is that her neighbors consider Jennifer's Flamingo Event a huge joke.

At this rate in another 20 years "flamingo-handler" ("wrangler") Jennifer Rubenstein may be the next Bill Gates!