It all started at a July 2011 staff meeting, during which I was ‘taking notes’ on my new iPad. Which of course meant I was on Facebook. Not thinking that anything could possibly go wrong, I clicked on this:

Take a moment to read that blog post. And then imagine you’re sitting in a high-rise office building in downtown San Francisco, working at a dot-com, and in the middle of yet another weekly staff meeting. You’re reading along, happily tuning out the droning of your boss, when all of a sudden you read something so incredibly funny that you snort with laughter. Your eyes start watering, your face turns red, and it’s all you can do to stifle outright laughter. And when you look up, every person in the room is staring at you.

Yeah, that was me. B-U-S-T-E-D.

Naturally, I shared the link with my Facebook friends. One thing led to another, and my neighbor Terry and I decided we each needed a BIG METAL CHICKEN. I started calling around to different Home Goods locations, and was met with confused silence when I asked “Do you have any five-foot-tall metal chickens?”. Even better, when the store associate finally understood my question (and that I wasn’t a prank caller), they had to transfer me to that department. Really? Like, if you worked in a store and there was a five-foot-tall metal chicken, don’t you think you’d know? Don’t you think everyone would know?

In the end, Terry and I were able to buy the last two big metal chickens in the region. Passers by occasionally ask me if I know that “there’s another metal chicken at a house down the block”, and sometimes I tell them that we’re friends, while other times I lie and act totally surprised.

Since I got the BIG METAL CHICKEN in August 2011, I would occasionally decorate it to match the holiday. Bunny ears and a fluffy tail for Easter, American flags for 4th of July, a turkey tail and pilgrim hat for Thanksgiving, or a Santa hat for Christmas. It was all pretty simple and not a very big deal… until Tonya rented my guest bedroom and moved in.

Tonya is an incredibly talented artist, adventurer, traveler, animal lover and ardent supporter of the worldwide wine industry.  One spring day, we were well into a bottle of a lovely French rosé, when an idea was hatched.

It was time to paint the chicken.