I Guess I'll Have the Chicken

"...every town's got two malls: they got the white mall, and the mall white people used to go to. 'Cause there ain't nothing in the black mall. Nothing in the black mall but sneakers and baby clothes." -Chris Rock

There's a mall about 20 minutes from my house that used to be the ghettoest place to be ever. It was, as Jen put it, "the bane of my existence". The only people who went there (I'd say "shopped", but it was mostly just mall rats hanging out and not buying anything) were ghetto kids in puffy jackets and unwed teenage parents with their snot-nose, government-funded children. Now it's cleaned up with a Borders, Target and other places I actually enjoy shopping in, and there's fewer (less?) riff-raff.

Plus: Free chicken. I walked through the food court today with Stu and Rob weighing my options for dinner. At nearly every litte food place, people were leaning over the counters beckoning to me, with offerings of chicken on toothpicks. It reminded me of all the stories I've heard of Mexico where everyone tries to get you to shop with them. It was just chicken; no beef, no mac and cheese, at every place. It was bite-size pieces of chicken like you get when you order chinese, but not actually chinese food. I think this is a new trend in mall food, something a little more healthful than the delicious crappy fast food that my parents bought me in the mall when I was still sporting my saddle shoes (sidenote: these haven't come back WHY? I loved my saddle shoes!) I didn't see any kids' meals, though, which I thought was unusual.

Anyway, free chicken. I wandered around accepting them. There were two Asian places, a Texas Bar-B-Q, a Creole place and some other place. By the end of my walk down the strip, I had five empty toothpicks. The funniest thing was they all tasted exactly the same. Creepy?