(Greatest Hits) Oh Yeah!
(ed. note: Occasionally, to keep this blog fresh, I've decided that every so often, I'm going to repost things I've written ages ago and possibly reposted elsewhere, maybe re-tooling them a bit to stay current. This is just so you'll have something constructive to do while I don't have time to generate new and entertaining things. Besides, you know what they say - if you haven't read it yet, it's new to you.)
The other night, at the supermarket, I had a nigh-Proustian flashback while standing in the check-out line. I spotted a metal rack haphazardly jammed with little paper envelopes in bold reds and purples, and it cried out to me. Kool-Aid. Immediately, I was compelled to step out of line and dig through the rack in search of my favorite flavors. It's summertime, after all. It might be raining, but July is still definitely a Kool-Aid month. I spent every summer of my childhood up to high school drinking more Kool-Aid than was probably advisable or healthy. We sucked it down like water, every summer all summer.
There were a few summers in there where we saved the points and traded them in for plastic cups shaped like the Kool-Aid Man, or entered contests to try to win t-shirts or other assorted Kool-Aid-Man swag (which we never actually won). Oh yeah! Sure, my mom only made it with half the requisite amount of sugar, but I imagine one need only look to Kool-Aid, and the unflouridated Montana tap water, to understand why 90% of my top teeth and 60% of my bottom teeth are filled.
These days, technological advances have enabled me to substitute Splenda instead of sugar, which may not help my teeth, but it will at least help my waistline. To my credit, I still follow my mom's lead and make it with half a cup of sugar instead of a full cup, and it tastes just fine. Almost too sweet, in fact, leading me to wonder if maybe the sugar in her Kool-Aid isn't halved but thirded, or something like that. Once I made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and accidentally totally forgot the sugar. I don't recommend that.
Lately, I've had some trouble locating a few key flavors, particularly Tropical Punch (it's always been my favorite), but to my great relief there's usually Cherry in there among the bizarre, trendy new flavors. They did the trendy flavors when I was a kid, too (remember Purplesaurus Rex? Or Great Bluedini?), but I've always been a traditional kind of girl. Cherry, Raspberry, Tropical Punch. Not so much with the scary Kiwi-Peach-Guava-whatever. And Kool-Aid Lemonade is some nasty shit. If you want lemonade, I can't advocate any other method than fresh, or, in a pinch, the frozen cans that require 4 1/3 cans of water to one can of lemonade.
(Aside: when I was 16, I dyed my hair pink with Raspberry Kool-Aid. It lasted for about three days and smelled great. I tried this again recently. The pink streak stayed in my hair for over six months, until I finally cut it out entirely.)
Anyway, Kool-Aid is a notable substance in my world because Kool-Aid is exactly as good as I remember it. So few things are, you see. Most Disney movies come off as plodding and trite to me these days. Micky Dolenz (complete with ginormous white-boy Afro) is somehow not as cute to me as he was when I was 8. (I switched to Mike sometime during my teens.) Debbie Gibson, once the height of musical excellence for me, makes my teeth hurt. Pizza Hut pizza is just a big flavorless doughy mass to me anymore. Those plastic barrettes with animals on them damage my hair when I try to wear them now. And when I go to the pool nowadays I just swim laps, and that's fun enough, but I don't even remember what kinds of things my stepsiblings and I did at the pool that seemed to make the summer afternoons fly by. Was there really a point where I could amuse myself for three hours playing Marco Polo?
Some of this stuff is the kind of stuff that might not have been that good to begin with, and was only good when experienced as a child. Other stuff is probably not as good anymore because my tastes have expanded and matured and I've (possibly) become more sophisticated. But many things make me wonder if the defect is not in the experience itself, but in me. Maybe I've lost my capacity to enjoy certain things in the process of abandoning other childish conceits, and maybe it's not a good thing. So it's a relief to know that I can still derive the same simple enjoyment from a few of the things that I loved as a kid. And that's where the Kool-Aid comes in.
So what are yours? What's still as good now as it was when you were a kid? What's a disappointment?
(By the way, the best paean to summer nostalgia that I've ever read is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I need to drag that out and give it a re-read.)
The other night, at the supermarket, I had a nigh-Proustian flashback while standing in the check-out line. I spotted a metal rack haphazardly jammed with little paper envelopes in bold reds and purples, and it cried out to me. Kool-Aid. Immediately, I was compelled to step out of line and dig through the rack in search of my favorite flavors. It's summertime, after all. It might be raining, but July is still definitely a Kool-Aid month. I spent every summer of my childhood up to high school drinking more Kool-Aid than was probably advisable or healthy. We sucked it down like water, every summer all summer.
There were a few summers in there where we saved the points and traded them in for plastic cups shaped like the Kool-Aid Man, or entered contests to try to win t-shirts or other assorted Kool-Aid-Man swag (which we never actually won). Oh yeah! Sure, my mom only made it with half the requisite amount of sugar, but I imagine one need only look to Kool-Aid, and the unflouridated Montana tap water, to understand why 90% of my top teeth and 60% of my bottom teeth are filled.
These days, technological advances have enabled me to substitute Splenda instead of sugar, which may not help my teeth, but it will at least help my waistline. To my credit, I still follow my mom's lead and make it with half a cup of sugar instead of a full cup, and it tastes just fine. Almost too sweet, in fact, leading me to wonder if maybe the sugar in her Kool-Aid isn't halved but thirded, or something like that. Once I made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and accidentally totally forgot the sugar. I don't recommend that.
Lately, I've had some trouble locating a few key flavors, particularly Tropical Punch (it's always been my favorite), but to my great relief there's usually Cherry in there among the bizarre, trendy new flavors. They did the trendy flavors when I was a kid, too (remember Purplesaurus Rex? Or Great Bluedini?), but I've always been a traditional kind of girl. Cherry, Raspberry, Tropical Punch. Not so much with the scary Kiwi-Peach-Guava-whatever. And Kool-Aid Lemonade is some nasty shit. If you want lemonade, I can't advocate any other method than fresh, or, in a pinch, the frozen cans that require 4 1/3 cans of water to one can of lemonade.
(Aside: when I was 16, I dyed my hair pink with Raspberry Kool-Aid. It lasted for about three days and smelled great. I tried this again recently. The pink streak stayed in my hair for over six months, until I finally cut it out entirely.)
Anyway, Kool-Aid is a notable substance in my world because Kool-Aid is exactly as good as I remember it. So few things are, you see. Most Disney movies come off as plodding and trite to me these days. Micky Dolenz (complete with ginormous white-boy Afro) is somehow not as cute to me as he was when I was 8. (I switched to Mike sometime during my teens.) Debbie Gibson, once the height of musical excellence for me, makes my teeth hurt. Pizza Hut pizza is just a big flavorless doughy mass to me anymore. Those plastic barrettes with animals on them damage my hair when I try to wear them now. And when I go to the pool nowadays I just swim laps, and that's fun enough, but I don't even remember what kinds of things my stepsiblings and I did at the pool that seemed to make the summer afternoons fly by. Was there really a point where I could amuse myself for three hours playing Marco Polo?
Some of this stuff is the kind of stuff that might not have been that good to begin with, and was only good when experienced as a child. Other stuff is probably not as good anymore because my tastes have expanded and matured and I've (possibly) become more sophisticated. But many things make me wonder if the defect is not in the experience itself, but in me. Maybe I've lost my capacity to enjoy certain things in the process of abandoning other childish conceits, and maybe it's not a good thing. So it's a relief to know that I can still derive the same simple enjoyment from a few of the things that I loved as a kid. And that's where the Kool-Aid comes in.
So what are yours? What's still as good now as it was when you were a kid? What's a disappointment?
(By the way, the best paean to summer nostalgia that I've ever read is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I need to drag that out and give it a re-read.)
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