Shopping For Kielbasa
My last two blogs are ethnically connected.
They are both rooted in New Britain, Connecticut. This is where my Polish grandparents lived, and where my doctor’s office is.
When I was a little girl, my Babci used to take me down Broad Street to all the Polish shops. Lots of little markets, and no one speaking English. Babci’s English consisted mostly of the question, “You like it?” and if I said yes, and it wasn’t expensive, there was a good chance she’d buy it for me. Coloring books, candy bars, and gum mostly. Although she had a penchant for little ankle socks–I think because they cost $0.49 back then, and which she’d measure by wrapping them around my fist. She’d buy me my little treat, paid for with dimes and pennies out of the world’s oldest coin purse, and then she’d go back to her long mysterious conversation with the shopkeeper. All those years, and I never learned more Polish than ‘Please’, ‘Thank You’, and my numbers from one to ten. I never even got to eleven.
Last week, in the hour and forty-five minutes that I sat in my new (and young) doctor’s waiting room, I read a quarter of a book. But I also eavesdropped on a lot of familiar mysterious conversations.
Polish immigrants still abound in New Britain.
So after the good news (I didn’t sever my spinal column, thank god…although now I’ve got a colonoscopy hanging over my head…which is a weird metaphor) I had a strong hankering.
For kielbasa.
I convinced my husband (in about 1.5 seconds-his mother was Polish too) to go down to Broad Street to the Polish markets.
If anything, the stores on Broad Street have become even more Polish in the last sixty years. Not only can you go to the Polish deli, you can go to the Polish hairdresser, Polish travel agency and Polish tattoo parlor. We stuck to the deli.
This Polish deli has everything. This is not your mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall. We’re talking multiple aisles of every kind of food and a take-a-number deli counter.
The choices are marvelous.
Here’s the kielbasa:
But that may not be exactly what you want. So here are the hanging kielbasas:
Now with this selection, you may wonder how you choose. Especially when the nice girls (there are four clerks behind the deli counter) speak a different language.
You pick out a kielbasa that looks like what your grandmother used to make (or any one… it’s a sausage after all, not a baby). And you point to it.
And we wanted prepared food too – we wanted golumpki (or golabki, galumbka, gawumpky – there are as many spellings as there are kielbasas. Stuffed cabbage. And pierogi (dumplings). I channeled my Babci and said those words with the best Polish inflection I could summon. The girl smiled. I’m sure she laughed like hell as soon as I was out of earshot.
While we waited for our turn at the deli, we watched the ads on the wall-mounted TV. They mostly were about voting for beauty queens, I think. There were girls and zodiac signs and phone numbers. It could have been phone-sex, but there were lots of old ladies there, and they didn’t seem offended.
When I say that they have all kinds of food, I’m serious. It’s not just Polish food. You can buy anything you want in a Polish package. They had Polish pizza and corn chips and pasta. And just in case you feel like sushi, you can do that too:
With all the cooking instructions conveniently in Polish.
We bought a Polish babka (bread) and headed to my mother’s to share the feast. (She was delighted.)
On the way out, I noticed that you can even buy Polish porn.
This is a really fine idea. What good would girly magazines be if you couldn’t read the thought-provoking articles?
Passing The Torch
So as soon as I proclaimed that Zumba was the most delightful exercise in the world – I seem to have thrown out my back at the very next class.
I had gone to bed a tiny bit sore, and woke up immobile. For the next three days I inched my way from the bed to the shower to the closet to the car to the office to the car and back to bed. But I didn’t call in sick – I only take days off when I can have fun. If I’m going to be miserable, I might as well go to work.
But three days was enough and I called the doctor. I made an appointment for the next afternoon.
Naturally, the following morning I had a miraculous recovery. But my husband convinced me to keep the appointment anyway. He wanted the doctor to give me the okay to go back to Yoga and Zumba, and I admitted that it might be good idea.
One of the unfortunate facts of growing older is that you begin to outlive (so to speak) all the folks you depended on.
My doctor retired this year.
He was an irascible old coot. The kind of guy that you would cast for a TV show about an irascible old coot doctor. You know the guy: part Walter Brennan and part Captain Kangaroo.
I’d been seeing Captain Kangaroo for more than twenty years. He was my husband’s doctor for more than thirty-five years.
The old coot told my husband to give his successor a chance – that she was smart and current and a very good doctor.
So I went to my three o’clock appointment. My husband drove me. Even though I was feeling quite well, he always wants to take me to the doctor. He’s certain that I will need to go immediately to the hospital – and not only would he want to be there; he’d worry about the car.
I got out of work a few minutes later than I intended, and so my husband drove like a maniac. As if the doctor would send me home unseen if I were a minute late. Because of course doctors never run late.
I saw the doctor at 4:45.
I figured she’d be a little younger than me. Everyone is. And so she was.
Yes, she was Young, with a capital Y. And hip. Fantastically hip. Red funky hair and cool clothes. And what was most incredible – no name tag.
I explained my problem. My former problem. She laughed and said that going to the doctor was just like bringing your car in for service. Suddenly you can’t make the engine do that funny thing you’ve been worrying about.
She thought I must have had some kind of muscle spasm. She also thought I had a very cool watch.
Her recommendation. Skip Zumba for a week, but definitely go to Yoga. She’s a devotee.
She also wants me to have a colonoscopy. Since I’m about ten years late. “I know you don’t feel sixty,” she said. “But well…”
I liked her. It’s comforting to have your doctor look like the Anacin commercial guy. But this woman could be my friend. A trendy, funny, and smart friend. We could go shopping together. Or Yoga.
I’m sure she thought the same thing.
I can just hear her discussing her day with her (very hot, I’m sure) boyfriend, as she relaxes with a glass of Pinot Gris: “….then there was the crazy old lady with the coolest watch…”
Riding In The Car With Daddy
When I was a kid, my father liked to take us all for a ride in the car.
Gas was cheap then.
We’d drive up to the airport and watch the planes take off. That was exciting in the fifties. None of us thought we would ever get in one.
Sometimes we’d go out after a big rainstorm looking for huge puddles to drive through. Or we’d drive out to the countryside and count cows.
On a summer evening, if we spotted a searchlight, we’d go track it down. Somehow this was fun.
Every week after Church, we’d go to Sunday Dinner at my grandparents’. My mother’s parents were immigrants from Poland – my Babci and Dziadzi (“bah-chi” and “jah-ji” for those who need a phonetic hint.)
They lived in a cold-water, toilet-down-the-hall, tenement in the Polish enclave in New Britain, Connecticut. But I loved their apartment–the wringer washer, the treadle sewing machine, the clock that ticked awesomely loud, the exotic smells of Polish food–none of which I touch at that age. And of course, there was the fact that my Babci bought us comic books and Hershey bars.
The drive to Babci’s didn’t take long, we only lived about ten miles away. But to me, the ride was endless.
We all had our places in the car. Daddy drove of course, and Mom was shotgun. My two older sisters each got a window in the back seat. They got along pretty well, but not in the car. Nobody got along well in the car. I don’t know why Daddy liked piling us in there so much.
My baby brother sat between my sisters. There were two reasons why he got this spot. First, my sisters needed a fence. And second, neither of my sisters would sit near me.
That left the spot between Daddy and Mommy. This was back in the days of bench seats and no seat belts. I was a skinny thing, and fit in between them quite nicely. I loved being close to them. I thought this was the princess seat. My mother thought of it as insurance that I wouldn’t act up.
There was a huge drawback in the princess seat. My Dad’s cigar.
I was prone to car-sickness. I inherited that tendency from my mother. I remember my little brother calling excitedly from the back seat, “Look, Mommy, look!” and Mom answering, “Tommy, I can’t look at you. It makes me sick.” That made us girls happy for a very long time. (It still makes me happy, just thinking about it.)
Well, I was car-sick pretty much all the time. My father would break out the cigar at the same time he turned the key. This may have had something to do with being the Man. The car, the cigar. It’s what daddies do.
Ten miles was about my limit. I would be pretty woozy by the time we hit New Britain. You can see by the picture above that I was a little grayer than everyone else.
If we went further than ten miles, my father usually had to stop the car so that I could throw up.
Motion Sickness is something most kids outgrow. But not always. I threw up on a business trip.
Reverse is hard for me. Just getting out of a long driveway can be a problem. My husband warns me, “Hang on for one more second.”
Looking back on those nausea years, you may ask why we never just asked Daddy to put out the cigar.
It never occurred to us.
My New Career
I love television.
When I write about TV though, I mostly write about the old shows: The Mickey Mouse Club, Ed Sullivan, The Mod Squad.
I’ve pretty much stayed away from today’s shows – mostly because I could never do them justice the way Speaker7 over at RamblingsandRumblings does.
But I watched a show on Sunday Night that took my breath away. I am so inspired I want to change careers. I’ve found my calling (at sixty). I want to be an Adaptation Writer!
The show: “CSI Miami”
In this exciting episode, two guys are skydiving. One guy’s parachute strings (I believe that is the technical term) start to disintegrate. He plummets to a horrific death.
The whispering red-haired detective finds the other parachutist stuck in a tree.”Thank God,” says the guy, “My leg is starting to fall asleep.” I’m sure this is the normal response after watching your friend plummet horrifically. The whispering red-haired guy tells the tree-stuck guy that the police will leave him in the tree for a while, so they’ll know where he is. This is the humor element of the show.
That’s pretty much the end of the whispering red-haired guy for this episode. This was a relief to my husband, who usually has to turn up the volume. Red-haired guy is usually the star, and he employs the acting technique known as “put your head down, peer intently from under your eyebrows, and use a quiet monotone.” This is otherwise known as the ‘David-Janssen-As-The-Fugitive’ method of acting. But Janssen’s dead now, and so it is nice that someone is carrying on his legacy.
Back to the show. The lab team determines that the parachute strings were eaten by some kind of chemical. Also that the something-or-other was tampered with, and so the jumpers jumped out of the plane too low. I guess that guy in the tree was really lucky.
Bug-Eyed lab-cop lady goes to see the wife. Wife (who has great hair, by the way) says that her husband was a sperm donor and one of his sperm results seemed kind of mad at him. And it turns out there is a website devoted to all the sperm offspring of the dead guy, of which there are 103. Dead Guy donated a lot of sperm when he was in college. He had a really nice car now, and so it must have paid well, even allowing for the money that he must have needed for wrist therapy.
Back at the hangar, the pilot of the plane confesses that he changed the altitude thing. He doesn’t like to fly too high because it costs too much. He’s conscientious about energy-saving. And there’s no real harm in shoving the guys out a little sooner. But these jump-dudes were very excited and so they jumped out too soon, before he could descend to his sneaky low preference, which is why tree-guy was okay. He doesn’t explain why, if he doesn’t like to spend the money on altitude, he goes up high before he descends to the energy-saving altitude.
There’s spit on the dead guys shirt. The lab-cops see this right away…”Doesn’t this look like spit to you?” they ask. This must belong to the murderer, because certainly the dead guy wouldn’t drool while plummeting. The spit belongs to an offspring. They know exactly which one because of the website.
So they go to this teenager. But he was in school. So this certainly means that he has an identical twin. Mom says no – she only had one kid. But she didn’t shoot him out of her own womb; she used a surrogate because she was really busy.
Two lab-cops (I don’t remember any of the names, but I am sure this is not the fault of this wonderful writer…I mean, these characters are memorable) go to visit the surrogate. She’s hanging laundry. The two lab-cops hear a sound from the other side of the yard. They pull out their guns. Let me repeat – they are talking to a lady hanging laundry and when they hear a sound, they pull their guns. This show is not only ecology-minded, but offers practical advice: Be careful around people who work in labs. They are trigger-happy.
Well it turns out that the surrogate mother decided to keep one of the babies for herself. Since he was a spare. He’s very sick though. He has a disease and he needs a new liver. I think they called the disease Wilson’s disease, but I could be wrong. It could be Spalding’s disease. Or Top-Flite. This disease is hereditary. The other identical twin with identical DNA didn’t seem to inherit it though.
Some of the other 103 sperm results are sick too. The sperm bank knew this, but they used the sperm anyway. Sperm is hard to get, I guess, and so they didn’t worry about hereditary fatal diseases. They still had a jug of the bad stuff on hand (preserved nicely for seventeen years), only someone just broke in and destroyed it. The culprit knew exactly which frozen jug to throw on the floor of the unlocked sperm room.
One sick kid (dead actually) – The Dead Guy Sperm Website is a veritable fountain of sperm info – turns out to be the daughter of the pilot. So back to him. He had been under arrest for altimeter-tampering, but “he just made bail” the Southern-Drawl-Blonde lab-cop says. She was keeping track of him from her lab. But it doesn’t matter. He didn’t do it. The guys jumped too soon, remember?
Southern-Drawl-Blonde spills some of that parachute-string-eating chemical on her arm and gets burned. “Quick, the hydrogen peroxide.” Her arm turns a funny color, and then they know.
It had to be the wife. She was a science teacher. Her arm turns a funny color.
She confesses. She was pissed that her husband had 103 kids. She wanted a kid, but he didn’t. And he was younger than her. “He would have had the energy to chase a kid,” she explains.
Wow. I’m overwhelmed. This story has inspired me. I’m about to embark on my new career. I want to write the adaptation. I think it will go to the big screen. Or maybe Broadway: “CSI- The Musical”
How Funky Winkerbean Changed My Life
First, let me assure you that not all of my Life Philosophies are derived from the Sunday comics.
That being said, I admit that Funky Winkerbean changed my life.
Do you remember hapless Les back in the 70s? (By the way, I’ve never really understood the word ‘hapless’–why does poor Les have no hap?)
Anyway, back in the high school days of the comic strip, Les asked one of the plainer girls for a date. She was very surprised he asked her, and she said so. He explained that he hadn’t had any luck asking out the popular girls and so decided that he should lower his standards.
While this didn’t exactly win over the girl, it won me over.
I’ve been setting my goals pretty low ever since. It works so much better than failure.
This is why I was able to return the beginner’s Yoga class, despite my considerable ego. For a couple of weeks I tried to graduate to the advanced class, but then I reminded myself that my goal was never to touch my feet to the back of my head in Bow. My goal was to be able to get up off the floor after Corpse.
Do I need a higher goal after ten years of Yoga? Maybe. Aspiration is a good thing. So I have decided that this year, my goal will be to stand on one foot. If I can stand on one foot, I can do Tree. I can do Eagle, Crane, and Warrior III. That will be good. That it will have taken me eleven years to stand on one foot just goes to show you how patient I am. Which is an admirable Yoga goal.
The risk of low ambitions is that you still might not exactly achieve them, and that could be a little embarrassing.
I was reminded of this a few days ago, during lunch with some friends.
One of my friends is an avid music fan, and he was speaking of Keith Richards’ autobiography. According to Richards, Marianne Faithfull was so crazy that Mick Jagger finally had to call it quits. Just think about that. How sane are you if you are not sane enough for The Rolling Stones?
And here is the clincher – the epitome of underachieving: Two of my lunch-mates were reminiscing about their high school buddies. One of their friends back then had always wanted to become a clown. And she had applied to Clown College. But she had not been accepted.
That’s a pretty low threshold to miss.
Rejection Letter
The Best Book I Ever Read
We haven’t had much snow this Winter (Autumn, however, was ridiculous).
We had a little snow last weekend, and as I looked out over the slope of our backyard, I thought about sledding. And the image of sledding always reminds me of…
Annette Funicello.
When I was about ten, I became friends with a girl in my class. Maureen only lived two blocks away. I don’t know why we hadn’t made friends before. I have no idea whether she was new to the neighborhood or the school, but I have no recollection of her before fourth grade.
I loved Maureen’s house. Specifically, her front yard.
(I pulled this picture off of Google maps, and then blew it up. It’s not your eyes; it’s pretty blurry. Of course, I could drive over to Maureen’s old house and take a photo. But I’m sitting by the toasty woodstove and I can’t possibly get up.)
Anyway, Maureen’s front yard: it was a long gentle slope. It was created by God for sledding. And God even added a stone wall at the bottom to keep you from sledding right into the traffic.
I loved sledding. And Maureen was a nice little girl. So I was very industrious in being the best friend I could possibly be. Even if some of Maureen’s other activities were a bit suspect, even to a ten-year-old.
Maureen loved Annette Funicello. She had all her records and books. Maureen often tied a little scarf around her neck, like this:
Maureen also liked to dress in capris and dance to Annette albums.
This was Maureen’s favorite:
Now I may have been only ten, but I knew corny when I saw it. But my love for Maureen’s front yard was so intense, that I often donned a pair of Maureen’s capris, tied a scarf sideways on my neck, and Hucklebucked in Maureen’s living room.
Maureen liked to call herself Mo. But I thought that was a very unattractive name, and I always called her Maureen. I’m sure she thanks me for that today.
Maureen had an extremely nice mother too. Once, on parent’s day, the teacher gave me a bad scolding for forgetting my homework, and when I turned around, I saw that Maureen’s Mom was in the back of the room. Her Ma told me later that it was completely unprofessional for the teacher to humiliate me in front of everyone. She was a wonderful mother, even if she did give us healthy snacks.
Maureen had a brother who was already grown-up. He was a jockey, and that’s why Maureen had so many record albums. (I found out much later than jockeys and disc jockeys were not exactly the same thing.)
When Maureen and I went sledding, she wore her good coat. This amazed me. Sometimes she wore her good coat and plaid capris. I wore snow pants.
Then we went in for healthy snacks and dancing with Annette. I would have danced to Annette albums every day in order to slide down Maureen’s front yard. It was SO worth it.
Maureen gave me Swan Lake paper dolls for Christmas, which I was quick to tell everyone in class that I collected, as all the other girls were already giving up playing with dolls. Or claiming to.
When the book fair came to our school, I bought a book intended to impress Maureen, even though it was already Spring and past sledding season. I was a very good planner.
Anyway, here is the book:
But it turned out that I loved this book.
“Annette: Sierra Summer” is – to this very day – the best book I ever read in my life.
It must be. I read it three times.
I haven’t even read “Hamlet” three times.
Again With Boots
If I appear slightly obsessed with boots… well…I guess I can live with that.
But it’s not my fault. Boots just keep tromping into my life.
To recap (yeah, that’s another post; everything converges), I bought these great boots, although I had to get them two sizes too big in order to zip them up around my sixty-year-old calves.
They’re big, dark, biker boots, but I like them. I am still on the lookout though, for the classy version. (The yellow rainboots will stay in my fantasy life.)
The weather was kind of nasty Monday, so I wore them to my Yoga class. Not to do Yoga in – just to leave them looking fabulous by the door.
This is my new Yoga class. To be exact, it’s my second new Yoga class this year. At the beginning of January, I decided to step it up and I enrolled in the advanced Yoga class at a terrific new studio. I’ve been practicing Yoga for ten years. I figured it was time to advance. I took two classes. After the first class, the very kind instructor pointed out that I might want to consider the 7PM beginner’s class. I explained that I wanted to challenge myself.
After the second class, the very kind instructor pointed out that the beginner’s class is still available.
So after considerable soul-searching (actually, it wasn’t so much soul-searching as wrist-searching; thirty plank asanas per class is a LOT), I went to the beginner’s class this week.
After all, Yoga is not a competition (Yes, I have a blogpost about that too). It is a state of mind. It is ‘being in the moment’. I just happen to have been in the same moment for ten years.
Of course, if Yoga was a competition, I could win in the most-consistent category.
…By the way, here is my favorite (i.e., only) Yoga joke: What did the yogi say to the hot dog vendor? ‘Make me one with everything.’ …
Okay, that’s not exactly the moment.
But beginner’s class was good. I liked it. So what if everyone else was trying Yoga for the very first time? That just made me the most graceful person in the class. Except for falling out of my ‘tree’ of course. My tree always sways in the breeze. I am a birch, not an oak.
After class, I sat on the bench in the anteroom to put on my gorgeous boots.
A tall, willowy beginner yogini – so, okay, she could hold her tree…big deal…showed me again that she could stand on one foot. She put on her boots standing up. Long skinny black boots.
But here was the amazing part: While I struggled to get the two sides of the zipper to meet around my calf, this young thing’s boots were already zipped. She must have pulled them off without bothering to unzip them. And then she put them back on the same way. She just pulled them on.
Those boots must have been made out of the most stretchy material ever invented.
She just pulled them on!
I was filled with awe. Which is a by-product of Yoga.
And hostility. Which is not exactly.
Now Let’s Recap
It’s been a few weeks since I last marveled (a sweet word for it, huh?) at the differences between my husband and me.
As a kid, my husband did not watch a lot of TV. Not that he didn’t watch any – “Hopalong Cassidy” was his favorite show. He sported cowboy attire on a regular basis.
My guy in his cowboy get-up.
Mostly, though, he just wasn’t interested in television. I give him tons of credit for that.
Me, on the other hand – well, TV was my religion. I was a devout worshipper. I stood (only sitting down when I was threatened) transfixed before that big snowy god.
I started with “Mickey Mouse Club”, but soon advanced to “Circus Boy” to “Rawhide” to “Combat” to “I Spy” to “The Mod Squad”. How I loved adventure shows.
Because I am still addicted to TV, my husband, as faithful companion, also watches a lot more than he ever did before.
He seems to enjoy it. He turns it on when I am not home. But just like when he was a kid, it simply doesn’t matter to him.
I envy that, but his apathy can be somewhat exasperating.
A few years ago, our favorite (well, my favorite and so his too by default) was “Boston Legal”. He looked forward to it. He laughed – and it’s not easy to make him laugh unless someone drives a Chevy into a swamp.
Every week, before the opening credits, there was a recap of the previous episode. (pretty standard stuff) Every week, after about forty seconds, my husband would say,
“Oh, we saw this already.”
And I would explain, that it was just a recap and the new episode was about to start.
The next week, about forty seconds into the show, Hubby would say,
“Oh, we saw this already.”
And I would explain (perhaps just slightly louder), “No this is just a recap. The new episode will start in a minute.”
Years went by. There was no progress.
Currently I have to explain “Top Chef.”
But last night surprised me.
We were watching an old rerun of “NCIS” – which is becoming the new “Law and Order” of syndication eternity.
My husband was engrossed.
At exactly 57 minutes into the show, Mark Harmon and the team were storming the old warehouse to rescue whoever it was…
...by the way, it appears that the most dangerous military assignment in the world is the Annapolis Naval Base. If you are in the Navy, you’d probably be safer in North Korea. Someone gets murdered every week in Annapolis…. it’s almost as dangerous as Cabot Cove… Never ever go to Maine….
as I was saying… 57 minutes into the show, at the extreme ultimate climax, he said the magic words:
“Oh, we saw this already.”
Youth Yearning
There are at least 25 reasons I wouldn’t be 25 again. I’ll write about it someday… In fact, I’ll write about it several times, since I think I can squeeze at least five blogs out of the misery of youth, using an average of five bullet points per post.
But there are definitely a few reasons why, every so often (like today), I wish I were 25 again.
- I didn’t worry about money back then. My job paid $6,000 per year, and I had a little apartment, an old car, and tuna casserole three times a week. I went to the library. If I had $5.00 left at the end of the week, I bought a coffee cake for the office.
- I still thought that any minute I would blossom. I’d have long beautiful hair, streaked with blond highlights. I’d have luscious lips and wide-set eyes. I thought there was still a chance I’d have a bosom. It was just around the corner…
my transformation into …
Peggy Lipton.
- At twenty-five I had just recently finished college. (Yeah, I know everyone else finished at 21. I liked school. I stretched it out by a few years.) Life was full of possibilities.
I could go to New York and live in a brownstone.
photo, NY Observer
I could see myself strolling down the street to my fabulous studio with a bouquet of flowers for my table and a loaf of French bread.
- And speaking of French bread, maybe I would end up as an artist in Paris.
This is Manet’s painting of Monet painting, but it could be me soon. And I even spoke French, as long as the conversation revolved around the pen on the table.
- I was never tired. I could go out dancing on a weeknight and get into work on time the next day. Evenings at home, I watched Johnny Carson. I never fell asleep at 9:01. My hips never hurt. My feet never ached.
- I was skinny. I had gained fifteen pounds in college, and that put me at 114. I drank milk shakes. I ate potato chips. Sometimes at the same time.
- Every man I met could be The One. So every day – every glance, every smile, every conversation held the promise of romance.
- And my most recent reason for wishing I were twenty-five again. I am in love…
With these….
Boots.
No Wonder
I heard the bad news on the radio.
Wonder Bread has filed for bankruptcy. Again.
It’s only been two years since Hostess Brands originally filed for bankruptcy. Apparently that wasn’t enough time to get the American public excited again about Twinkies and Ding Dongs. That surprises me, because a lot of Americans look like they eat nothing but Twinkies and Ding Dongs.
Wonder Bread has been around since 1921. It was the very first sliced bread. Before Wonder Bread, no one ever described something as “the greatest thing since sliced bread” since there was no sliced bread. I guess folks just ate bread by the hunk.
One of the main attractions at the 1939 World’s Fair was the Wonder Bread Pavilion – shaped like a big white loaf in its wrapper of blue, yellow and red balloons. The Fair also exhibited the Magna Carta and Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”. But I’m sure Wonder Bread was the big draw.
When I was a kid, Wonder Bread was ‘fortified’. I think this meant that they put vitamins in the bread – which there was plenty of room for since there was nothing else in it. The TV commercials still play in my head: “Wonder Bread builds strong bodies eight ways.”
And when I was about ten they changed their slogan, and Wonder Bread added four more whatevers – building strong bodies twelve ways. None of those ways includes using a loaf as a dumbbell to improve your biceps. This bread is absolutely weightless. It is so cushy that it has become a party game to see who can squish a loaf of Wonder Bread into the smallest ball possible. You can get a fresh loaf down to the size of your fist. Wonder is a fun bread.
Of course, this is unfair; back in the forties, enriched white bread had NO nutritional value, and then Wonder Bread added those vitamins and minerals, and helped reduced pellagra and beriberi diseases in America. Really.
But boy, are they ever mooshy vitamins and minerals. This is bread that actually dissolves in your mouth. No chewing required.
Soft is their trademark though,and they stuck to it. When everyone started eating whole wheat bread, Wonder entered the market in their own weird way. Wonder makes the softest whole wheat bread in the country. They also use albino wheat to keep it perfectly white. Really.
And then there’s the Hostess products that don’t even pretend to be healthy: Hostess Cupcakes, Twinkies, HoHos, Ding Dongs, Suzie Qs and Sno-Balls.
In the sixties, my brother and I had arguments about what snack my mother should buy to put in our lunches. I was a Yodels fan. But my brother was Ding Dongs all the way.
I remember Sno-Balls too. Sugar remade into sponges that bounce. I remember them from when I was eight. My husband, when he happens upon them in some ancient convenience store, is delighted. So my husband’s memories are a bit more recent.
Hostess Brands has announced that, for their new comeback, they will look to update their product line with snacks more consistent with a healthy lifestyle.
Good luck with that. When I was a kid I used to cut up Wonder Bread to make pillows for my dolls.
notquiteold 
