And I'm not just talking about Jenny McCarthy leaving MTV's Singled Out, although I suppose that's a good place to start. I mean, she was the only reason to watch the show. Each day at 7:00, every young heterosexual male in America tuned into Singled Out to watch Jenny's new outfit (designed by "Tight Little Pieces of Fabric R' Us") and entertain the small adolescent hope that for some reason, for some obscure little rule in MTV's programming schedule, Jenny would be required to go topless.
Sadly, this never actually happened and instead we were made all the more bitter by subjecting ourselves to watching 50 attractive women who were so eager for dates that they would go out with some random guy they met on a game show, and MTV refused to give out their phone numbers. Even if you went down to their offices, handcuffed yourself to the receptionist's desk, refused to leave and eventually got escorted out by two big security guards.
Uhh... I'm speaking hypothetically, of course.
Actually, I'm just mad because whenever the female contestants picked guys based on height, it's always the shorter guys who were eliminated. I miss the days when Michael J. Fox and possibly that Webster dude were considered sexy.
But I'm not here to complain about Singled Out or to mention that if Jenny is ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, she can mail me at todd@kerp.net. I have much more relevant, pressing, newsworthy commentary for which this column has been overlooked for many prestigious awards. I, of course, am talking about the scarcity of Lick-M-Ades.
Do you remember these things? Lick-M-Ades, as I recall, consisted of three pouches filled with sugar. Each pouch contained a different flavor: sugar with red food coloring, sugar with green food coloring, and sugar with purple food coloring. You ate it by licking this dipping stick (also made of pure sugar), dipping it in one of the packets of sugar, and then licked off the sugar that stuck to your still-wet saliva on the stick. (Trust me, in spite of the fact that I just used the words "wet saliva" in that last sentence, it's not nearly as disgusting as you might think.)
Lately, though, I haven't been able to find them in stores. Sure, there's still all the other childhood candy bars: Snickers, Milky Way, Butterfingers, and those mutant Bit-o-Honey things that I've never seen anybody actually eat. But Lick-M-Ades were different. They had a sense of honesty to them. Other candy bars tried to hide the fact they were all sugar by converting it into nougat, this weird mysterious substance that nobody really understood, but ate anyway. It also came in useful for caulking bathroom fixtures.
Fix-it-guy #1: Say, Bob, those are nice shower tiles!But Lick-M-Ades were direct and up front. They didn't contain anything but sugar, but by golly, they were proud of it. Okay, sure, there were little pictures of fruit on the front of a package (for instance, a picture of a cherry was in front of the "sugar with red food coloring" packet) but I'm pretty sure that was just a ruse to fool our parents.
Fix-it-guy #2: Thanks. I stuck 'em on using half a dozen Three Musketeers bars!1
Fix-it-guy #1: Ya don't say!
Fix-it-guy #2: Plus, in emergencies, you can lick the walls for nourishment!
Concerned mother: Hmmm... it looks green and has a picture of a lime on the front... I guess it contains fruit. Here, son. Have seven more.I think the biggest poseurs in the kids' junk food world, though, has to be the breakfast cereals. Because no matter what sort of crap you put in there, even if you made an entire cereal made out of, like, those dried up marshmallow things in Lucky Charms that also double as packing material, you can still call it "Part of this good nutritious breakfast." I always wondered exactly what part they were talking about. Because when they show the cereal in ads, it's always next to a glass of milk and OJ (the drink, not the ex-murderer-turned-golfer [who as I understand it also played some football]), toast, fruit, bagels, muffins, Taco Bell breakfast burritos, etc. And so I always figured that Lucky Charms could only be part of This Good Nutritious Breakfast if you were using it as a sweetener in your coffee.
Hyperactive child: Thanks mom I really... BOOM! (self-combusts)
To be honest, I wouldn't really know much about these things since I was unfortunate enough to have a parent who cared about what I eat. So while all the other kids were eating Ghostbusters Cereal, Froot Loops (Official motto: "made with real froot-like particles!"), and Cookie Crisp cereal, I had to eat Cheerios. This was a cereal that advertised on the front that they were low in sugar. Like I didn't feel bad enough -- they had to rub it in (I'd say it was like pouring salt on an open wound, except I think they were low-sodium, too). Not only that, but all the other cereals came with cool toys like plastic cars or a Toucan Sam jackknife (these were in the days before child safety was popular -- right up until the Fruity Pebbles Shards Of Glass debacle). Cheerios never had anything like that. They always came with these serious, adult-oriented prizes. ("Get your official Cheerios living will! Free with 5 proofs-of-purchase!")
So I think that's why I'm so interested in all this sugary stuff now; to compensate for my relatively healthy childhood. So in a way my mom's plan backfired, because now that I'm an adult and have disposable income that I would normally blow on things like car insurance and a retirement plan, I can spend it all on gummy bears and Lick-M-Ades. (By the way, one way to immediately impress any five-year-old kid is to point this out to them. "You see that jar of rock candy over there? I could buy the whole thing." This is, of course, assuming that you care about your social status among five-year-olds.)
But I am able to exercise some self-restraint. I mean, if I ate nothing but candy and Froot Loops, I'd get all flabby (and way too hyperactive for my own good). Not to mention the fact that Lick-M-Ades did have the tendency to turn your tongue all purple. I suppose back in third grade, that was pretty cool. Now, it just kind of screams "asphyxiation victim," which just doesn't seem that sexy.
Unless, of course, Jenny McCarthy were doing it.