Cue music: a tense, vibrant march of piano notes fills the luxuriant downtown office of a little literary magazine. One by one, the heads of the editors pop up from their paper-strewn desks, wondering what heavenly source spews this otherwordly voice, sirenesque, and yet clearly endowed with decades of street-earned wisdom: Just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world… (Is this a backwards town? A backwards world?) While a vicious guitar solo pummels their collective senses, the once-hunched figures are up and away from their workspaces now, the blood draining from their bleary eyes, spines fortified, and without a word, the team forms the most natural of circles, unbreakably tight, strengthened as one arm after another climbs the shoulders of a comrade in all things. The human halo sways to the music. Liberated lips butcher lyrics. But one line phoenixes into the fluorescent night: Don’t stop believin’…

So what if those hacks over at The Sopranos stole our thunder, snatching our swan song out from under us? You think we’re going to back down? Fuggetaboutit, you know better than that. You’re a BCR reader. A citizen of this fair city. Savvy, enlightened, optimally nerdish. You know the pen is mightier than the other thing. You know that we’ve tasted a big red sauce in our time. We’re over here, Tony, come and get us.

Besides, they probably got the idea from Laguna Beach just like we did.

Yes, the founders of the BCR are stepping down. Our city is ripe for regime change. Citizens with pitchforks. Rhythmic chants. But we have not thrown the baby out with the bathwater. This little toddler will continue, there’s a new mayor in town, and remember, it takes a village. Another squad of hungry editors, right at this very moment, is waiting to get their hands on the next batch of oddities that you so crave. The magazine is in excellent hands. Our neighborhood, our city, our backwards nation is strong. It will prosper, thrive, probably get better, as hard as that is to imagine. And if it doesn’t, we’ll bash the kneecaps of each of those youngbloods.

Thanks for reading.

Gerry, Tom, Patrick, Jaimee, Jennifer,
and—somewhere out there—Ezra

Cut to black.