Because I grow up in Houston, you best believe I had tons of options when it came to fried chicken.

There were the national chains you might think of (Kentucky Fried, Popeye’s), but there were also a number of local or regional shops (e.g. Hartz, Church’s). One of the regional bird fryers was Grandy’s. Their logo/icon features a “Meemaw” type little, old lady in granny specs in a way reminiscent of Minnie Pearl. I suppose the image was meant to invoke your country grandmother and good, down-home cooking.

In those days, I wasn’t really into fried chicken…and if ever I were to eat it, you could rest assured that I’d be going for something boring like a drumstick or a breast.

This stands in stark contrast to my father. He’s the kind of guy I’d find, in the middle of the night, standing illuminated by refrigerator light eating fish-in-oil from a tin while accenting each swimmer with dabs of Dijon mustard. His palette was always adventurous. His love of adventurous food led him to Grandy’s, for they served (blanch) fried chicken gizzards.

So on a given summer night in the early 90’s, he and I had been at a hardware

store nearby and we stopped in to bring dinner home to the family. As per usual, news/sports radio on the AM band was playing as we traversed the fallow fields of parking lot between hardware megastore and chicken shack. Throughout my youth, my dad rarely played music in the car outside of weekends (then it was the country countdown on KIKK). His auditory accompaniments were usually business strategy books on tape (forerunner to the podcast) or the latest news, weather, and market news on KPRC AM radio. Thanks to KPRC, I knew the format of the market update: winners, losers, Dow advancing, Dow in retreat, market-impacting news. Tagline. Stinger. Out.

We walked into the Grandy’s with the muted sound of AM radio echoing in our skulls. As we walked in, we were greeted by their chicken slingingers argot:

I’ve got two legs up and 8 biscuits on tray. Tea on tray and order up.

Apropos of nothing else my dad quipped, in the plunging stentorian tones of news radio, something like:

Legs are up and breasts are down with gizzards trading even in the late-afternoon session.

I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. I still do.

I’m not sure whether this is one of those “had to be there jokes” or not, but it still makes me laugh.