If you were a child of Fun Dip of the 80’s you should remember this stuff.  What Fun Dip was was an edible stick (similar to the candy cigarettes of years past) that you stuck in your mouth to get wet and dipped into a flavored power mix that was usually cherry or grape.  After you were done with the powder you could eat the stick.  So, this was like two snacks in one.

Well, I remember when I attempted a DIY of Fun Dip.  I loved tasting the flavored powder and didn’t feel like I they gave me enough to enjoy.  So, instead of opening a second packet and enjoying that one I tried to be resourceful and stretch out the lifespan of the first one.

I searched through the cabinets and tried to find something similar to Fun Dip.  I did find a packet of cherry flavored Kool-Aid mix.  I figured that would work.  It’s powder and it has a cherry flavor.  What could go wrong?

The thing about being a child is that if two things look alike they must taste alike.  Unfortunately, kids don’t understand that Kool-Aid needs to have sugar added to it to be tolerable.  I ripped open the packet and saw the red powder inside begging to me to put the Fun Dip stick in there.  The moment that powder hit my tastebuds my mouth imploded.  On a scale of 1 to 10 of tartness this has to be a 50!  They call it cherry flavor, but I didn’t taste any cherry.  I ran over to the sink and drank two large glasses of water trying to dilute the tartness in my mouth.  That didn’t work.  I kept spitting in the sink too.  I think that my saliva was pink for the next couple of days from this experiment.

Lesson learned.  If I wanted more Fun Dip then I should’ve opened up a SECOND ONE!

Go back to when you were in elementary school (people my age or older will understand this more.  When you used to sit in those chairs that were bolted to the desks and the comfort level was almost as bad as sitting on broken glass.  The teacher would yell at anyone that would even talk.  So, what did you do?  that’s right, you would right a note.

Pulling out a piece of lined paper from your spiral binder (the edges all frayed) you would start at the top and write something and fold it up and have it passed off to someone.  Within a few minutes the note would come back to you folded up the same way.  When you opened it up there would be a response underneath yours, sometimes in a different color, but definitely in a different writing style.  Enter the instant messenger of yesteryear.

Of course, you wouldn’t get all the ‘bells and whistles’ as you would with the IM programs of today, but it did serve it’s purpose.

It was sometime between 1983 and 1984, when this strange even occurred – all the girls changed. One day, they were all ‘normal’ then a switch was hit and they started speaking a new language.

Enter the Valley Girl.

The Valley Girl was this strange new language that every sentence seemed to have the word “like” in it, and included phrases such as, “Grody to the max!”, and “Like, oh my god!”.

It drove me crazy.  What the heck happened to these girls?  It wasn’t a fad, more like a cult.  I don’t remember any girls that didn’t speak in this strange tongue.  If I heard “gag with me a spoon” one more time I would have wanted to be held back at least a year just to get away from it.

And, how in the world, and I suppose to understand what the heck they were saying?  There was no Internet around.  We didn’t have an English to Valley Girl dictionary.  There was no one that worked at the UN that was a translator.  I think all I did was smile and nod when some strange phrase came out of these girls mouths.

Being an 11-year old I didn’t talk too girls that much.  (Things haven’t changed nowadays either.)  So I didn’t get the full exposure to it.

I think that this was really a cult thing, because when we came back to school the next year the Valley Girl was gone.  I think that separating the “cult members” for three months might have unprogrammed them.

The ’80’s had some great things: Rubik’s Cube, Jersey Hair and even Hacky Sack.  Seems like most things from that decade have come back to haunt us; fortunately, this isn’t one of them.

If that language every decides to make an appearance again, I think that I’ll have to leave the country and move somewhere where they don’t speak English.  Is there a version of this stuff in France?

When I was a small child (maybe 2 or 3), my mother would always bribe me to go out with her by taking me out to eat.  (If you look at me now you can tell that she bribed me a lot of times!)

This one time my mom had to go grocery shopping and bribed me with McDonalds.  We went to eat before going shopping.  (This would be a mistake that my mother wouldn’t make again.)

When we get to the store I get seated in the shopping cart so she can keep an eye on me.  We go through the store for a while as she’s shopping, filling up the cart with the standards in groceries – bread, vegetables, meats, cereals, etc.  Of course, since the cart was full some of the stuff would have to sit next to me.  For some reason, I decided to get loud and tell my mom that “I was hungry.”  She kept on insisting that we just went and ate lunch and I wasn’t hungry, but bored.  This would go on several times with people starting to stare at me.

My mom would keep insisting that I’m not hungry.  And, being the brat I am, I grabbed a head of lettuce that was next to me and took a big bite out of just to prove that I was hungry.  My mom got really embarrassed.

(On a side note:  When I tell people that story I tell them, jokingly, that that’s the reason why they put cellophane on the lettuce!)