Chicken of the Street

For some reason last week I just suddenly thought of “city chicken” for the first time in four or five decades. And turns out I apparently did not dream it — as a matter of fact, city chicken even has its own Wikipedia page, which defines it thusly: “An American entrée consisting of cubes of…

A Bubblegum Top 40

Reprinted in the 2001 Kim Cooper and David Smay-edited anthology Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth; possibly excerpted and/or cannibalized in scores of things I’ve written since. But this is how the original version looked on the page. A year later or decades later — after Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, the Spice Girls, Radio Disney, Aqua,…