The trouble with birds

Did I tell you this before? Stop me if I did.

True story 100%: 

En tiempos muy remotos in a nearby magical land, the local Neusteter's Department store put up a window display coinciding with Denver Museum of Natural History's King Ramses II exhibition. People mistake this for King Tut. Big difference. 

It was a huge deal for the city to snag the exhibition. It involved a lot of monolithic statuary placed over three floors. It was an outstanding exhibition.  I went to it six times. In fact, our Federal Reserve Bank branch where I worked arranged a group trip through their employees' club. A member asked me to make posters advertising their field trip. Always putting me on the spot like that without really knowing or appreciating exactly what they are asking. This could take a whole weekend. I demurred. She begged. I acquiesced. I took large portion of rolled brown paper from their mail department that the bank uses for shipping. (They ship bundles of checks) I drew the silhouette of the Ramses colossus that the museum used for their advertising on a section of paper from the roll. The museum's image for advertising was stamp size, my version of their silhouette is poster size. The black portion was cut out with Xacto and the sheet with holes used as template for black spray paint onto another brown paper sheet from the same roll.  I ripped off a few dozen such posters and the club members tacked up the posters all over the bank. I still have one of the posters in brown paper bag type roll paper. They turned out rather nice, black on brown, and the project not so difficult as I imagined. But that just invited further requests. 

So that was that.

Then later a member of a professional group that I do not belong to called me and said his professional group is hosting a large cocktail party for some hundred or so members. The group will collect at a house directly across the Museum of Natural History on Colorado Boulevard. It is the home of a well-known fancy-pants dentist, Denis (the menace). He acquired several of the Neusteter silhouettes, by then their window display was dismantled, he asked for them and Neusteter's gave the foam core silhouettes to him, and he intended to use the silhouettes for the party at the Dentist's house. Problem is, they are plain white styrofoam filled board. He asked me to come to his apartment to paint them that weekend at 15th and Larimer, the edge of downtown not far from the Federal Reserve.

I agreed. What the heck.

His apartment is on the 22nd floor. The life-size white foam core silhouettes were set up against a glass door to a bedroom. The balcony has three entrances, one from the living room two from bedrooms, one of the bedrooms his pet parrot occupies. The bird's cage takes the whole room. I should offer to paint the room like a jungle for $1,000 to fake out the bird into thinking it's not prisoner. The bird was outside that day with its foot chained to the railing so it could not fly off. 

I hate that bird. 

It is obnoxious. Their relationship is obnoxious. The owner, Bob, is a psychiatrist and he talks to the parrot as if it were a baby. It makes me ill. Bob is about 6'5" real rough looking, and when he talks like a baby it is too much to bear. The bird is chewing on paint brushes. Bob set up a table with paints and rags a water and such. The bird chained on the railing behind it. Gnawing away on consecutive brushes, allowing them to drop from it beak so that they sail down to the alley far below. The bird destroyed about six brushes. Bob kept trying to get the parrot to talk, to show off the bird's mad talking skillz, nothing but taciturn silence, as always. I doubted the bird ever talked.

Then, to my discomfort mid-project Bob said that he must leave briefly for his own dental appointment. Not the same dentist. Not to worry, the dentist is nearby, he'll be back in a flash. He promised to not be gone more than an hour. I thought that was uncool to invite me to work with him at his home, then take off, but I was into it by then. He departed. 

I am alone. I set my mind to the task at hand. The parrot behind me behaving at last, being perfectly quiet in the absence of Bob the psychiatrist. The project is all color fields and outline. I have only to paint a good mouth and one good Egyptian eye and fill in the rest.

Except for the necklace. Concentric semicircles connected with hundreds of lines  in primary colors representing rows of beads. Simple but tedious. My mind was focused at the tip of the brush. Long tedious minutes elapsed. It's quite meditative. The thought process puts one in a trance state like this:

"line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line, line," Tedium. Suddenly the parrot squawked loudly and clearly,

"HELLO BOB!" 

From behind me 22 floors up in the air. I thought a SWAT team was rappelling onto the balcony to assault me from an impossible direction behind me before realizing it was the insanely obnoxious displaced tropical bird, I checked my impulse to kill it by swatting it chained to the railing so Bob would return with it hanging there dead by its foot from a chain.

My little railroad track of 1" painted lines went eeeeerk. 

The living room door opened and Bob walked onto the balcony. "Howzit goin'?"

"Fine."