With the mostest
And so, we now contemplate a marketplace of foodstuffs that no longer includes Hostess products. My prediction? The country will respond to this cultural development in pretty much the same way it responded to the disappearance of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We’ll lean on Oreos, Milanos, and Little Debbie to get us through.
Not that multitudes won’t at least pause to reflect and remember some of the good times they’ve enjoyed on this planet as a direct result of unwrapping a Twinkie, Sno Ball or Ding Dong. I suspect that my early experiences with these quasi-pornographic goo-based food forms were repeated over and over for years and years from coast to coast by millions and millions. A daily ritual repeated to the point of Pavlovian super-entrenchment. A kid takes his lunch to school in a brown bag. He knows the bag contains a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and maybe even a little bag of chips. You know, some real food. But he also knows that at the bottom of the sack is The Payoff. The sensory experience that somehow makes lunch worthy of great anticipation. A Hostess cupcake, dramatically dark, almost flat black, its personality lightened only by the single line of flamboyant white frosting squiggling across its diameter. And in its interior, there lurked that secret splotch, that small blob of The Sweet White Wicked, a moist little money shot from Cthulu himself, a small reward that somehow increased the awesome reptilian pleasure of cupcake consumption by an exponential factor.
Thus, to this day, I can still have a pretty good time just standing next to the Hostess rack in the supermarket. I don’t know, there’s just something fun, happy, re-assuring, hell, even sexy, about standing next to a box of Twinkies. And still I dare to wonder—how did they get that goo in there?
I lie down on my couch, close my eyes, go deeper. This Hostess connection needs to be probed. I see myself moving beyond grade school, beyond high school. The cupcakes and Twinkies I favored as an adolescent have become square. Lame. Unhip. I’ve moved on in the Hostess Galaxy, searching for a more complex, more sophisticated interaction with my goo-cakes. I’m a 20-year-old student sitting in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven at midnight, hangin’ with a couple of fellow wastrels, enjoying the eye-reddening pursuits of the evening. “Hey, man,” I say with leaden lips to a comrade in the back seat, “are there any more Suzie Q’s?” “No, man. Only Ding Dongs.” “Cool. Whip one on me.”
The Suzie Q! The lumbering zeppelin of the Hostess Gooniverse! The one Hostess treat that had … heft. And then, the Ho-Ho. The one Hostess goodie that begged to be slowly, fetishistically … unrolled! Chocodiles? Well, what can you say about Chocodiles, besides—good riddance!
The nice thing is, you can buy a box of Hostess Whatevers on Ebay and they’ll keep for a while. Expiration date? Not really applicable, pilgrim!
