A while back, Sars over at Tomato Nation wrote a nostalgic piece about being a giddy junior-high girl and the candies we all liked back in those days. Spree was the confection that had kicked off her train of nostalgia. Spree, as anyone between the ages of 25 and 35 may know, are these rather loathsome sweet-n-sour candies which were extraordinarily popular around 1990-1993. I can’t exactly determine why, as they really weren’t very good. They were hard little discs of sour, unflavored candy with a flavored coating in the standard candy color/flavors of red, purple, orange, green, and yellow. The yellow and orange were the closest to pleasant, in my memories. I wonder if there had been some kind of nationalized advertising campaign, because Sars’ memory of her friend squeeing, “Spreeeeeeeee!†whenever she had procured a roll of Sprees was exactly something a couple of my friends did, too.
Anyway, I know I’ve written before that you sometimes can’t go back. I can’t eat Doritoes anymore. I loved those things when I was a kid, but nowadays? Barf. There’s something about their salty, garlickly, cornmealy, vaguely cheese-infested flavor that just sits very badly on my palate. I suppose that is very strange as most of those same flavor elements are present, to one extent or another, in Cheetoes, and I like Cheetoes. In fact, when I am PMS-ing, I tend to crave Cheetoes. Either the spicy kind or the regular flavor, but only the “crunchy†texture. The ones which are large and puffy and crispy don’t do me much good. I like the harder, lumpy ones. I know, very gross.
Yesterday, I discovered another treasured childhood favorite that I can no longer stomach: watermelon-flavor Bubbalicious. Oh wow! I bought a pack of that stuff when I was out and about running some errands, and either it has become grosser over the years, or I simply have lost my appreciation for mushy bubble-gum laden with faux-melon flavoring. I think my tolerances for fake melon have been slipping anyway. A few years ago, one of my aunts gave me a gift basket from Bath & Bodyworks with an assorted sample of their various products. There were three glycerine soaps, scented in mango, grapefruit, and strawberry, a lovely jar or bath salts with an orange and sandalwood scent, a little bottle of “Sweet-Pea†lotion, and a little bottle of their then super-hot Cucumber Melon body spray. I really liked the Cucumber Melon body spray at first, but it was some potent stuff. A little went a long way, and it could easily and rapidly become cloying. Unfortunately, the vast legions of teenyboppers who were trampling about in clouds of the stuff kind of ruined it for me. Girls who are just learning how to wear scent have an unfortunate tendency to wear way too much of it, and when it is a scent that is easy to overdo anyway, the result can only be sadness. Also because Cucumber Melon became very popular and trendy, everyone and their dog started making a knockoff of the stuff. Some of them were pretty decent, like the St. Ives one, and some were downright nasty, like the generic version in the “Everything’s $1.00 aisle†in the grocery. That bottle smelt like a three way cross involving some regular bubblegum, some fake melon, and some roach spray. By that point, I was well and thoroughly tired of faux-cucumber/melon scent anyway.