Madison St.

Sometime in December is when we noticed it.

I think we were awoken by a quiet rumbling that grew louder by the minute. The street we think of as our own small quiet urban/suburban interlude was quietly becoming an actual landmark. Yeah, there's the video store on the corner but the small, privately-owned video store in Forest Park has just gone out of business and the Jewel has installed one of those red box video dispensers-which even I was kind of excited about until I saw the selection of movies and uhh yeah no thanks-so that's been a good landmark up until now but nothing you can hang your resale value on.

Then there's the 7-11 across the street. Need a Chicago cop? There's always one parked at the 7-11, except when there's a robbery-go figya.

There's The Jewel, of course, but that's not on our actual street. We have a laundromat and Nick's Auto Body and The Car Wash but we have reason to believe that those businesses have been bought out by Fenwick and pretty soon it will be only us.

Imagine our great joy in December when we saw the full length posters in the former insurance office across the street. Just the thing to return my street to greatness. In tremendous lettering we stood back and read: COMING FALL OF 2009 CHICAGO'S FAMOUS...

(and here we insert a drum roll -just for effect)

CHICKEN AND WAFFLES.

Wait what? We thought. They're gonna have breakfast and lunch at this place? That's the idea? The questions sent us to our keyboard where we managed to dig up this.

Now we spend our days wondering if this qualifies our block as having landmark status, we wonder how long it'll be until we're bothered by traffic jams and limos, we wonder what people will do with all that extra time they'll save by consuming two meals at the very same time but most of all, we wonder how long it'll be before we decide to be the first in line to try it.

Gulp.