Eight Shows A Week. Plus One.

Sunday, 11pm, Christopher Street, West Village

I'm on my cellphone, leaning against a tree. A handsome young man comes running up the sidewalk at me. His jerky gait on the broken cement suggests he's trying not to break his mother's back. Or maybe trying TO break it, I can't tell. He's shouting something, but I can't make it out with my friend chattering away in my ear. When the guy gets about 20 feet away, his yelps gel into discernible words. "Chicken noodle soup! Chicken noodle soup!" OK, then.

I step off the curb to let him pass, but he follows me into the street to do a manic little tap dance in a circle around me. "Chicken noodle soup! Chicken fuckin' noodle fuckin' SOUP, muthafucka! Chicken! Noodle! SOUP!! " He punctuates each of the last three words with a spastic, but stylish, jazz-hands-ish sort of "ta-dah!" move, then steps up onto the curb for his encore. "Chicken!" (Ta-dah!) "Noodle!" (Ta-dah!) "SOUP!" (big finish TA-DAH!)

And then he looks at me, expectantly. "Very nice," I say, with my phone resting on my shoulder. "You'll be out of the chorus before you know it." The young man beams, takes one of those "You are too, too kind" bows, and skips into a shop across the street, one of those neon-fronted joints that sells hand blown ornamental glass objets d'art, which are sold strictly as decorative novelties, and not for use as smoking devices, officer, sir.

I return to my cellphone, where my friend naturally asks, "What the fuck was all that?" I say, "Sweetie, you only left New York a year ago. Surely you can't have forgotten what happens at this hour on Sunday nights." A pause. Then, "Oh! Right! You know, I always used to wish that Broadway was dark on Sundays instead of Mondays. I could never keep up with those chorus boys on a school night." I console my friend. "Don't worry, nobody's keeping up with that one tonight." And they won't. I watch the young man spin out of the shop and double-step to the corner of Bleecker, leaving uncountable broken-backed mothers in his wake. It's a one-man show in a one-man world, likely playing non-stop until 8pm. On Tuesday.

UPDATE: I've gotten a couple dozen emails advising me that the Chicken Noodle Soup dance has been a hip-hop cultural juggernaut since emerging at a street party in East Harlem last summer. See that door marked "It"? That's me out in front. I hate being out of It. Stupid inventive teenagers. Hey, have y'all heard about the lambada yet? It's forbidden. JMG reader Eric, who bills himself as "America's First White Jewish Gay Bear Hip-Hopper And Krumper" pointed me to the many Chicken Noodle Soup clips on YouTube. This home vid gets across the idea, some of the others are burdened by typical hip-hop F-bomb overkill. I think the last dance craze I actually enhusiastically took part in was either the Freak or the Bump. No Roger Rabbit. No Running Man. And certainly no Cabbage Patch. There may have been one tragic Electric Slide incident, but in my defense, I ate those brownies accidentally. For real.
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