Happy Chicken

Diligently working on my National Park Project - here's a goofy little piece I wrote after a trip in May, 2009

Sometimes things are just funny. Sometime just one word can send a perfectly normal person into hysterics. That was the case with Chester the Fried Chicken episode.

We were travelling from Moab, Utah to Monument Valley in Arizona. We stopped at the Hole in the Wall gift shop, which is plenty weird in its own right, and stopped again at a gas station to use the rest room. I sat in the car waiting. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was idly staring out the window, lost in thought, when I began to notice two things. There were a lot of people going in and out the side door near where we were parked. And, there was a smell of fried chicken infusing the air.

That’s when I saw the sign, which should have caught my eye right away since it was large and mounted on the side of the building about six feet from where I sat. “Chicken to Go” was in white letters on a red background – hence the large white boxes all the people coming through the door were hauling out of there. Above that were the words “Chester Fried” and a cartoon character of a rooster dressed in a red cowboy hat, gun holster and a sheriff’s badge. He had one wing raised up in a friendly wave. It was the small words below the title that really sent me off – “the crispy moisturized chicken.” To be specific, the word “moisturized.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how “moisturized” could apply to chicken!

All I could picture was someone rubbing a chicken with Oil of Olay. Dozens and dozens of naked chickens being lovingly massaged with moisturizer before being thrown into the cooker. I just started laughing and simply could not stop. Why did that rooster sheriff looks so cheerful? Didn’t he know he was on the verge of becoming “moisturized?” By the time Sloan and Tom returned to the car, I had tears running down my cheeks and tried, between gasps, to explain the whole moisturizing thing. They smiled vaguely – but I could tell they didn’t think it was all that funny.

We pulled back out onto the road and left Chester behind, but I knew for a fact what a lot of people in that town were having for supper that night – crispy, moisturized chicken!