This is a new feature I am starting where I reminisce about old products that I do not want to be forgotten to the tunnels of time. Most of my first submissions will probably be food-related. There is nothing like the empty hole that is left behind in your kitchen when a delicious food product disappears from store shelves.
Do you remember MicroMagic frozen food? Because I do, very fondly.
Behold! The MicroMagic burger!
MicroMagic products first appeared in the frozen food section of stores in the 1980’s. There were MicroMagic hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chicken sandwiches, french fries, and three flavors of milkshakes.
It was a perfect trifecta of 1950’s car hop food: burger, fries, and milkshake. It was something you expected to see on the tray of Richie Cunningham’s car outside of Arnold’s on Happy Days (there were more external scenes during the first season or two of the show).
EXCEPT YOU PUT IT IN YOUR VERY 1980’S MICROWAVE OVEN!
It was like going to McDonald’s, without leaving your home.
There were several years of my life where my main food source was MicroMagic cheeseburgers. I bought them far more than any of the other products. I was a latchkey kid, so I would eat them before my mom got home from work, or for lunch during summer break. Sometimes I ate them for weekend lunches.
FYI–The ones I bought only had English on the packaging.
I liked the fries as well. They were sold in three packs. Two boxes of fries often counted as a meal for me.
I probably only had all three (burger, milkshake, fries) together probably once. The milkshakes were kind of a waste of money. I mean, it was a cup of ice cream that you put in the microwave to partially melt it. And I seem to remember it tasting a bit like ice milk. Although sometimes it was fun to eat the fries and chocolate milkshake together and dip the fries into the ice cream.
Chocolate was the only option for me.
While I remember them fondly and wish I could consume them again, I have to admit that they did not come out of my microwave at the height of quality. If I followed the package instructions, the burger would still be cold in the middle. So I always over-nuked it, which led to a hard top bun and the cheese melted off everywhere. But it tasted like a burger, complete with fake smoke flavor.
The fries came in a cardboard box that was lined with silver coating, so that they would attempt to get crisp. The fries could be soggy or over-crisp, depending on how long you cooked them. They were always kinda greasy.
Seeing as I was a middle school kid who wasn’t old enough to drive and had no fast food place in town to walk to, this was as good as it got.
I haven’t seen them on store shelves in years. I searched the Internet, but cannot seem to find out anything about what company used to make them. Some similar products exist today to give you a sense of how awesome they were. I will talk about that in my next post on Thursday.
I searched all over YouTube and found a few MicroMagic commercials for you. I will appologize now for making you crave a product that is no longer available.
I love the 80’s outfits!
I had a black hat like that girl!
100% Real American Cheese! (Whatever THAT means!)
[TV Trivia: The guy with the girl in the last commercial with the dark hair is probably actor David Kaufman. I remember him most from a show called Dweebs also starring Peter Scolari and Corey Feldman.]
I also found a Micro Magic Facebook fan page. It only has 13 likes, so feel free to hop over their and “like” that page. And while you are on Facebook, like “I’m not staking you“‘s Facebook page as well.
My gramma used to live on the top floor of a 7-story apartment building. I would stand on her balcony and watch the residents and visitors come and go from the parking lot below. I could also see the busy 5-lane road that served as her building’s address.
Across the street was a shopping plaza. It did not contain some of the busier stores in town, but there was lots of traffic that passed by. At the very front of the plaza was a tiny gas station, back when they still made them that way. It had two old-school square pumps out front. I believe it may have even been full service.
But you have to remember, this was probably 25 years ago.
The gas station closed and sat there empty for a long time. And that is when I developed my business plan.
My great consignment store find plate featuring hamburgers and hot dogs
I wanted to someday use that building to open Jennifer’s Wiener Hut. At the time, there were many restaurants along that road. And being at the front of the parking lot right near the street, I would have had great frontage.
I would have put a drive-thru on both sides of the building. This was pretty forward thinking for my age at that time, as I had never seen a Rally’s with that set-up. I would have had my sign be a giant hot dog at the top of the building that said “Jennifer’s Wiener Hut”. It would be drive-thru or walk up only, no indoor seating.
Hot Dog Salt & Pepper Shakers
I would have served hot dogs and sausages. I would have offered chips as sides. I figured I could offer almost anything on the menu as long as it didn’t require a fryer. (I’m scared of bubbling hot oil.)
My restaurant would be known for getting the cars in and out fast. (This would be an advantage of having a limited menu.) People with only a half hour for their lunch would think of my restaurant first. People who were in a hurry would be my target customer. Unfortunately, that would make for a rather crabby customer base.
It’s not that I think hot dogs are the greatest food of all-time. They are not. Although they are a great food choice for picky eaters at a fair or festival. And sometimes a hot dog just hits the spot.
Although, according to the book “Never Put Ketchup On A Hot Dog” (I used to send copies of this book out to stores at my old job), I am sacrilegious because I usually only eat ketchup on my hot dog (and sometimes onions). But, as my mom would say, “Hot dogs are just made of the leftover parts the meat companies can’t use for anything else”. So why should it matter what way I choose to consume it?
I love hot dogs the most because of the kitsch/camp factor. Hot dog advertising over the years is so cute and happy. Just picture the smiling, dancing hot dog with his friends popcorn and fountain pop on the drive-in movie screen. And think of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. (But that is a whole post of it’s own. Someday.)
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile at Ned Skeldon Stadium (now torn down)
Over the years I have purchased items with hot dogs on them, and in the back of my mind I always thought maybe I would use them someday in my hot dog stand or as a decoration on the shelf that would go around inside my stand, up by the ceiling.
Hot Dog Towel
On Mackinac Island, there is a yellow hotel across the street from the Straits of Mackinac. It has a little hot dog stand in front of it between the street and the water painted up yellow and white, just like the hotel. I took a picture of it so that I could remember it as a model for Jennifer’s Wiener Hut.
Hotel and Hot Dog Stand on Mackinac Island
The gas station I dreamed of converting is long since torn down. But I still think it is a good idea. And because I would be the owner, I would hire other people to actually work in the hot, steamy, tiny kitchen. I would just beam with pride that I own a business with my name on it and am making money from it.
And if the hot dog stand didn’t work out, I could use the same name for a male strip club 😉
Some pictures from my very brief painting phase in high school art class. I never liked paint much. Even though you hold the brush, it still sorta goes anywhere it wants to. I have always preferred pencils and markers and stuff. Things that are a more controlled extension of my hand.
Ya, I have control issues.
With no further ado, I present to you my crappy collection of high school art.
Mother Nature is weeping at the destruction we have done to our earth. She is a part of ground, the trees, the clouds.
This was from my “Save the Earth” phase.
I had T-shirt that said it.
I got it on my class ring.
I did reports on it for school.
I took Environmental Science (and I hate science).
I watched Captain Planet.
Not that I still don’t want it saved, but now I have other priorities. Actually, after 20 years, there is now actually a convenient location for me to recycle at! Imagine that!
A wolf who is so cool, he howls at his own moon.
This was sort of supposed to be like “Live Your Own Life”, “Do Your Own Thing”, etc.
It was me as a teenager trying to embrace that I would never be in the popular crowd. I would never wear turtlenecks under my sweatshirts or have expensive jeans or my own car to drive to school.
If you take it literally, then you will realize that the Earth only has one moon, and then, well, it just loses all meaning then…
*NOTE: This blog post is going to suck. I am using my blog to do a little deep psychological cleansing. If you have a weak stomach (or just don’t give a sh*t about things that happened to me over 25 years ago), skip this one. I will understand. Actually, I won’t know the difference. This is just some sh*t I had to get off my chest. It has been weighing me down for a while.
A long while…
I am working on it…
I can hold a grudge. I was bullied in school, and I am still bitter about it. It is something I still can’t let go of.
Today I noticed that the documentary “Bully” was available to watch on streaming Netflix. I told my husband, “Oh, throw that in the cue. I want to watch it.”
One beat of time passed.
“You know what, nevermind. I lived that. I don’t want to watch it again.”
Bully is the documentary that the Weinstein Company argued with the MPAA over the final rating of the film. The MPAA originally rated it “R” for language. You know, the language kids hear and use every day at school. You know, the whole point of the documentary. (The film was slightly altered to eventually earn a PG-13 rating.)
And that is about all I know about the documentary.
Once I hit middle school, my life was hell.
Sixth grade. All of these cliques formed. I didn’t even know that that word existed until that year. I never had many friends in school. But suddenly that became a terrible curse, instead of just an inconvenience.
I was teased. That is how it was referred to around 25 years ago.
Yes, I can hold a grudge.
I will not discuss what I was teased about, because, well, I am not there yet. It wasn’t anything that deserved all the attention that it got.
I had my own nickname.
The other assholes kids would say it to me in class. In the halls. On the bus.
Oh, don’t get me started on the bus. It was its own particular brand of HELL.
There are several openings in my county for school bus drivers. Why are they not being filled? Maybe everyone has memories of bad experiences on the bus like I had.
Imagine getting on the bus in the morning, and all the kids visibly slide to the edges of the seats, closest to the aisle. Most of the seats have just one student in them. You walk toward the back of the bus. When you are brave enough to ask if you can sit by someone, they all respond with “This seat is saved”. By this time, the bus driver has already put the bus into motion again. You have to hold on to the edges of the seats to not be dumped on the floor by the sway of the bus. The bus driver starts barking at you to “Sit down”. But you can’t. You can only stand there, holding on to the seats. You can’t even manage to be thankful that there is only one more stop before you get to school.
In that moment, you just want to die.
There is one particular girl I always thought was the ring leader of that. Although, she wasn’t really smart enough for that. Maybe I just blamed her because she had an ugly f*cking face.
I broke down every morning before school and begged my mom to not make me go to school. She always made me go. There are several photos she took during that time, of me before school in some outfit she wanted a picture of. In all of them I had red rings around my eyes from crying.
I won’t scan them in and display them here. Too depressing to display how much they all got to me visually, even though I am writing about it.
If only they had had Internet home school then. I would have been an ideal candidate.
My nickname, in part (the part that didn’t specifically include my name) was published in the school newspaper. No one seemed to find this disturbing. Except for me.
Two boys in my class had to do a skit in English class. They did it as Hans and Franz from Saturday Night Live (yes, that was popular then). They used my nickname in the skit. To her credit, the teacher did actually ask me if that one bothered me. But that was actually so funny that I couldn’t complain. And they were two guys who usually didn’t bother me too much.
Others’ were worse.
There were more events in middle school. So traumatic that I have blocked them from memory. The few above are the ones that stick with me.
Once I got to high school, almost everyone had given up that sh*t, unless they were particularly juvenile.
And there was one boy, who never gave up teasing me. I hated him. I wanted him dead. It’s a good thing at the time that I didn’t realize that high school kids actually could do such things to each other. He said terrible things to me in class. Obscene things. It wasn’t fair.
Why couldn’t one of the cute boys I ACTUALLY LIKED say obscene things to me in class!
When I found out years later that he had died in a car accident, I shed no tears for him. I was actually a little happy about it.
I know. That makes me a truly terrible person. But in his death, I knew I would never have to look upon his evil face again.
Now he has a skateboard park named after him.
If I had killed my self due to all his tormenting, I am sure I would not have received such an honor.
And sometimes I did contemplate that.
And my mom will remind me of things I said or did at that time, things I have blocked out. Like one time when she was doing the dishes and I apparently threatened to cut my wrist with a knife.
Which begs the next question: If your kid does that, why wouldn’t you get them some help?
And another question: Teacher, if a kid in your class choses to do a report for your class on suicide, shouldn’t you take them aside and make sure they are OK? (It may have been for Psychology class, but still…)
Have you ever seen the movie “Never Been Kissed”? I find the high school flashbacks in that movie really relatable. My not-so-secret crush never invited me to prom and threw eggs at me, as happens in the movie. But when it was time to vote for who would ride on the Homecoming float, sometimes they would vote for unpopular people, just so they could ride it and be laughed at. Obviously it was meant to be an honor for the most popular girls. One year they did vote two sisters in who were not popular. They wisely declined from riding. One year I heard that I ranked quite high in votes as well. Thank you, assholes.
We were all stuck inside those walls together, sharing experiences. We all knew so much about each other. Why couldn’t we have embraced that? Why did we have to use that to cut each other down?
I had a dream, years after I was out of college. I dreamed I was in the Waldenbooks store at my local mall. (FYI—at the time I worked for a company connected to Waldenbooks.) In the dream, there were lots of people in there from high school. Some of the people I hated the most.
I began yelling at them, and telling them off. Telling them what I thought of them. I pushed bookshelves over on top of them, to hurt them physically as they had hurt me emotionally. And when I woke up…
I felt good. I felt like a little of the weight had lifted.
A little while later, I had a similar dream, where I was in the local grocery store. I was face-to-face with one of the guys I hated the most. A guy that my asbestos friend did hate the most. I yelled at him and told him off.
I also felt better after that dream. But, eventually, that relief passed. And now I write this post. To try and achieve some of that relief. To try to wash away some of the extreme hatred I have had for these people for decades. People who, I am sure, don’t remember me at all. They don’t remember they teased me. They don’t remember that I existed.
Some of these people have tried to be my friend on Facebook. I laugh at them and ignore their friend requests.
I will admit that I am not even sure I remember all of these events accurately, because time and hate have most likely warped them in my head.
I have SO MUCH HATE for these people. The ones who were the worst.
I still struggle with self-esteem issues to this day because of their name calling. Because of them snatching my stuff because it seemed amusing to them.
Will I be going to my 20 year reunion next year?
I not be thinkin’ so.
I definitely need to still work on it…
And all the bullying laws around today aren’t going to keep these things from happening. I was a quiet person (Oh, don’t ever call me “shy”. UGH! What is with adults and their mother f*cking labels!). I would never have reported that stuff to anyone.
Hell, at my job I had a girl make fun of a physical attribute I have, and I didn’t report her to Human Resources. But I totally wish I had. To this day. Ten years later.
God, I can’t imagine what kids today go through…
With cell phones and social media, they can’t even get away from bullying when they get home! At least after school I could nap on my couch to Ducktales and hide from it all.
I have always written stories or poems, almost all my life. I didn’t realize that not everyone does this. Only recently did it dawn on me.
Does that mean my career calling should be to be a writer? I have been spending 37 years trying to figure out what I should be when I grow up.
Is writing the answer?
“The Worst Snow Storm!” Commentary: My first book.
I made my first book a long, long time ago (but in this galaxy). It had a cohesive plot, but questionable spelling choices. You’ll have to excuse that fact–I had no editor, and was only in elementary school myself. It even had characters of varying ethnicities–one family was white, the other was black. That must have been the influence of 1970’s and 1980’s cartoons, which all had a token black character on the cast, because I didn’t even know any African-Americans at that age. The story wasn’t a school project or anything. I just made it all on my own, at home. I was very proud of it, because my mom put it in the scrapbook.
“Bobby Jones and Marty Cargo one day planned to play on that day. But they had a snow storm.” Wow. Snow’s so thick, I can’t see a thing!
All through school, I would write stories every chance I could for class assignments. It made an assignment easy for me to complete. I would also write at home, just for myself. I would skip lunch during high school to write in the computer lab (much less chance of getting picked on or having food thrown at you). When I had a big depression my senior year, I became a prolific poet. I took lots of English classes as electives. I took the AP English class, but not the placement exam. I even took a one week summer writing workshop held at a local college.
“They asked their moms’. Their moms’ said, “No! You cannot go out.” Smart moms.
One of my favorite teachers was my English teacher. We will call him Mr. C. He also happened to be the adviser for the newly formed school newspaper. I wrote a story or two for it. The next year, I ended up as the Co-Editor, which I actually really enjoyed. It was just kind of a happy accident that I ended up with that position (and because no one else wanted it). It helped to make my college applications not look so naked.
“But they went out anyway far, far away. And they built a snowman. While they were building a snowman it started to snow.”
In college I was busy, but I still wrote. During that time, I wrote one of my favorite stories. It is kind of goth. I used poetry at that time to once again get me through depression. I was a Communications major, with an emphasis on Radio and TV Broadcasting. I filled in the gaps between classes for my major and prerequisites with English and Psychology classes. I took so many English classes that the head of the department told me to make it my minor. He let me do an independent study to work on some stories and get a 400-level class on my transcript. (That would be an unfinished story that wasn’t good, and I wish I wouldn’t have wasted time on it.) (I could have minored in Psychology as well, but I didn’t want to have to take a statistics class, which was required to have it be an actual official minor.)
“After they were done with the snowman, they were very, very cold. They would go home, but it was too far away.” Damn, look at those goosebumps. They were REALLY cold.
My first full-time job, I found other creative-minded types. We read each other’s old stories. We wrote and emailed poems to each other throughout the day. They also were interested in dream interpretation, as I had been for years.
“When Bobby’s dad woke up, Bobby’s mom told him that Bobby was gone. And when Marty’s dad came home from work Marty’s mom told him that Marty was gone.” The mom’s sure look happy about that.
Really, the only time I can remember not writing was while my mom was sick. I spent one evening a week doing her grocery shopping for her, two nights doing her laundry, and usually taking her to a doctor’s appointment as well. And I worked 40hrs a week, plus a 2hr daily commute. She about killed me. I didn’t have time to write at that time. I didn’t even have time to think. Even though she got a clean bill of health a few years after she was diagnosed, I was still doing all those errands for her. I had to put an end to it when my son was born. Literally, like 10 minutes after I walked into my house from the hospital.
“So they went out and looked and looked for their boys.” Sorry. Too lazy to re-scan.
I went back to work after my maternity leave on the exact same day my company filed for bankruptcy. I also went back in a new position (my former lateral position that I had interviewed to get back into had been eliminated while I was off, so I was starting a new lateral position. Got all that?) where I got to work on one of the company’s blogs. It was fun. I found out a co-worker had a personal blog. This peaked my interest. Plus, I could read the writing on the wall. I knew I needed to add some new mad skills to my resume. So, I started this blog, got on Facebook and LinkedIn, and figured out how to actually use my Twitter account.
“They found their boys and picked them up and took them home.” Wow, frozen solid.
While hanging out at home with my son, I found more time to blog regularly than I would have anticipated having. Regularly publishing posts got me followers. Followers made me try to think up more content. This made me dig out an old story from high school, my only intent being to jazz it up a little, then post it on my blog.
That led to me deciding that I might be able to combine it with more short stories, and do one of those self-publishing dealios.
In 6 months time, that has led to me finishing 2 young-adult (short) novels, and starting a third in the trilogy, with plans for 2 bonus books.
My original goal is to have one self-published by year’s end. I am thinking the writing may be the easiest part of the equation. I don’t know anything about royalties or percentages or designing book covers, etc. And at first, well, I thought an e-book would be good enough to fulfill a dream.
But, well, a physical book with a cover with my name on it, filled with words spilled forth from my brain, is so tempting I can taste it. That was my first vision when I made that book out of crayons and pencil.
Trust me, when I get to that point, you will all know. imnotstalkingyou.com will be book-hawking central.
You know, I have also always had a love to art (drawing, painting, photography). Hmmm, maybe that is my real calling…
“They got home and laid their boys down, covered them up, and gave them some soup.” This story has been sponsored by Campbell’s Soup. Mmm-Mmm Good.
I'm not stalking you. 