“Is it Chicken or Fish?”

What is the first thing you think of when you hear (or see) the name “Jessica Simpson”?  Is it a flash of the pop singer herself?  Or do you remember her remarks about Chicken of the Sea tuna? (“Is this chicken, or is it fish?”, approximately.)  Maybe you just remember Justin Timberlake’s parodying of her on SNL.  But whatever you think of when you hear her name, I can guarantee you that I think of something entirely different: she’s a thief!!

I don’t make this accusation lightly.  I know stealing is a crime, and morally wrong, and all that.  But it’s true.  And I have at least a hundred people to back me up on this – my marching band friends.  Because, you see, “Is it chicken or fish?” is OUR joke!  OUR marching band’s personal joke!  It started my freshman year!  It’s in our lore and legends by now!  And Jessica Simpson had to be the one to make the phrase nationally known.

This is actually a funny story – if you’re a band geek.  Every summer before the fall marching season begins, we have a weeklong band camp at a small college about an hour’s drive away from our school.  This college has several characteristics which distinguish it among its peers:

1) It’s in the middle of friggin’ nowhere.

2) Like many other campuses, it has a duck pond.  Unlike many other campuses I know of, it has a flock of Evil Mutant ducks living on the premises.  (Don’t forget the geese, which are fun to chase around with a sousaphone.)

3) Its dining hall has the distinction of “worst cafeteria food in Virginia,” and that’s counting all of the public K-12 school cafeteria foods, too.

So this one time at band camp my freshman year, we’re standing in line in the cafeteria.  As usual, we are the only band that appears sweaty and dirty, a phenomenon we’ve never entirely understood (we think it has to do with how much we work, compared to the other bands here).  Anyway, the lunch ladies are serving us the mystery meat-of-the-day.  Stephanie, a girl in our band, looks at it and pronounces, philosophically, “Hey, you guys, look at this – is it chicken or fish?”

A final verdict was never reached on this issue (In the final stages of the argument, I believe we were caught up between those who said “it’s flaky, so it’s fish” and those who still adamantly clung to the label “chicken”), but that doesn’t matter.  We all thought the quote was hilarious.  And the next year, we thought it was hilarious.  And the year after that, we were still talking about how hilarious it had been (Stephanie was getting rather peeved at this point, I think).

Anyway, don’t you see the travesty of this whole situation?  Jessica Simpson has stolen an integral part of our band’s heritage and called it her own.  And that is why she is a thief, a thief of the worst sort.