It's Pieces of Wisdom Wednesday here at Bye Bye, Pie, and yesterday I asked you to tell me about toys from your childhood that now that you look back on them, you're all Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
For example, I had a monster-making machine that heated up to the temperature of Mars, and it had all sorts of nooks and crannies to pop your vulnerable child hand into and pull out a crispy stump.
My father emailed me about the toy, by the way, because he always emails me about my blog but never leaves a comment on here, so you probably think my father is Snufalupagus, which by the way, there is another Whiskey Tango Foxtrot from our childhood.
An elephant? That no one can see? Except Big Bird? Why?
Anyway, attached please find the monster maker from my childhood, which my father went out and located online after yesterday's post:
That delightfully colored orange and green oven is where you put a cube of inevitably toxic plastic, and then somehow it melted into a bug or a lizard or whatever. So, the part where I thought it was a monster? Yeah. But I really do not enjoy bugs and crawly things, so they are included in the "monster" category for me.
While I was looking for a bigger image of the Creepy Crawlers, I found this:
HELLO! HELLO, KITTY! You can make your own molds of Hello Kitty!?!? Dad, will you come over and help me?
Also too, I found this not-at-all-sexist ad:
What is she wearing on her head? Did she mold her own gaudy headband? Is she Mother Nature? Or posing for the Green Goddess salad dressing bottle? Otherwise, her loved ones need to tell her to ix-nay on the over-the-top eadbands-hay.
Anyway.
So many of you mentioned the Lemon Drop, which you saw as ludicrous, but at least it made us active.
You put it around your ankle like you're Lindsay Lohan or some similarly tethered person, and them you WHIP that lemon around and around and jump over it.
Okay, it was on odd toy. Who THOUGHT of it? Did they accidentally drop one of those plastic lemons one day and have a eureka?
And of course, what trip down odd toy memory lane would be complete without a mention of those safe Jarts? Nothing is better for kids than sharp pointy objects that you throw. Yay!
Someone has invented a "Jarts Survivor" shirt, and this is why I love people.
Clack on! Clack off!
I totally had these. So did many of you. So the glass could have broken and gotten shards in someone's eye. DID IT? Did it happen to you? No. You clacked, you hit your brother, no one got hurt, end of story.
Clack on, clack off. The Clacker.
So if you didn't get impaled by a Jart, or burned to death with the monster maker, or get the shards from your Clacker, how about you inhale some mysterious chemical-y plastic?
I had some SuperElastic Bubble Plastic, and if you watch this TV commercial, you know you bought it thinking you'd get balls this big. So to speak. But you did not. You did not get big balls. You got maybe a peach-size ball, made from some chemical that we are all going to die from inhaling, eventually.
A slow, mysterious chemical death. From Hasbro!
Someone in my comments yesterday said they loved the smell of Play-Doh and Colorforms, and as someone who loves to open new three-ring notebooks because they smell like a new doll, let me tell you a story.
They ("they." I love it when people say that) did a survey of people who were kids in the '40s and '50s, and asked them what smells reminded them of childhood. The majority said hay or new-mown grass (is "mown" a word?) or the sidewalk after it rains.
Kids who grew up in the '60s and '70s? Play-Doh. Crayola Crayons. New dolls. ALL OUR MEMORIES ARE FROM SYNTHETIC MATERIAL!
Depressing. Let me find Kitty Carryall and tell her my woes.
And speaking of my woes, so many of you RUBBED SALT in my WOUND, mentioning toys I was not allowed to have.
Like the Barbie head. Who you could make up and do her hair. Look, she was the first person to have extensions. Anyway, MOM said I'd get the pieces everywhere.
I also could not have a Lite-Brite. Because MOM said I'd get the pieces everywhere.
My cousins had Operation. I never did. Guess why. Pieces. Whenever I went to their house, I was not good at getting the wish bone out or whatever because I had no practice.
Had you not been so CONCERNED about getting your zigzag carpet messy, MOM, I'd be a top surgeon now! Do you hear me?
For a hippie, you were awfully tidy.
And yes, we really did have zigzag carpet. Black and white zigzag. Some day I will find you a photo.
Oddly, I was allowed to have Barbies and Skippers and Malibu Melanoma Barbie and so on. I say "oddly" because you'd think Free-to-Be-You-and-Me-Unless-Being-You-Involves-Toys-with-Lots-of-Parts mom would have objected to objectified Barbie. I wish I could have had bustin' out Skipper. Maybe mom was worried I'd leave her little white platforms everywhere.
But I'm not bitter.
At any rate, it's been a fun week of Pieces (but don't get the pieces everywhere) of Wisdom Wednesdays.
I have to go, because the timer just dinged and my Shrinky-Dinks are ready.
