Ba-Da Wings!

In a strip mall, between restaurants oft-ballyhooed in the circles of sensitive, overeducated, coffee-drinking liberals, sits a place an island unto itself: Ba-Da Wings. My friend X and I walked past it on the way from the Flying Burrito to Foster’s. We saw people pull up and go in, and she said, “Someone actually drove there.” Like, it was their actual destination for mechanized travel. I asked if they should have instead wandered in by accident, in the course of heading somewhere else. She said, “I just wonder why bother at all.”

I misspoke and called it "Da-Da Wings," and she said, “That would be a place that serves wings that look like tricycles.”

When you think about it, the association in some restaurants of the word “buffalo” with “wings” is rather Dadaesque, no?

But I don’t think the creators of Ba-Da Wings had anything “Dada” in mind. Hooters serves wings. Damon’s serves wings. When I have eaten at Hooters and Damon’s, I have not had the impression that other folks in there are interested in the Dada movement.

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll say I am also generally not interested in the Dada movement. Even less interested in Dada than I, I think, is someone that would start yet another wings restaurant with the word “wings” in its name, when there are already Damon’s and Hooters and countless other sports bars serving wings in the region, plus nearby Spankys, not to mention a restaurant up the street featuring the word “wings” in its name of Buffalo Wild Wings. I think such a person is not thinking of Dada at all. He is instead the sort who frequently drums his fingers on the counter and says ”Ba-da-bing.” And it takes about as much premeditation to say “Ba-da bing” as it does to dream up “Ba-Da Wings” as the name of the establishment where you will risk a small fortune as your investment. (“Sure, anyone can go to Buffalo Wild Wings and eat wings, but we’re Ba-Da Wings! We really serve wings!”)

I once worked on a video with someone who kept saying “Git ‘er done.” She was our subject for that day, and thus was wearing a wireless mic. I must have heard the phrase 50 times that day through the private wireless link between the mic in her turtleneck and the headphones on my ears. She also liked humming the boogie woogie tune from Vonage commercials, “Hoo-hooo, hoo-hoo-hoooooo.” Except she kept putting the first “Hoo” on the downbeat, “one,” rather than on the “and” of “one,” where it’s supposed to be. I wanted to tear the headphones off my head and scream, “It’s syncopated, for Chrissakes!” But I knew it was hopeless. For her, “Hoo-hoooo, hoo-hoo-hoooo” starts on “one.” Who ever heard of starting anything on anything other than “one”? And when you eat at “Ba-Da Wings,” you get wings -- huge heaping plates of them steaming. And when the plate is set before you, you say “Ba-da bing!” which rhymes with “wing,” and you git ‘er done.