Dear Mrs. Ellen Rubin Gordon, CEO, Tootsie Roll Pops, All Chocolate Division —
Before I inquire about how your day is going, I must ask, with no malice: “What The Hell Is Wrong With You?”
I’m a lifelong fan of most of your lollipop products, specifically, Grape, Cherry, Orange and Raspberry. When the moon is right, I even enjoy your relatively new flavor of Lemon. (Taking a moment to smack my lips, shake my head in a Three Stooges-esque overreaction then wince as I sympathetically react to the bittersweet aftertaste.) Strawberry/Watermelon and Pomegranate? Throw them into the back of the truck and speed like a lunatic to the nearest toxic/atomic waste landfill (Chiquita in our case), open the tailgate and pop a wheelie the hell out of there. Then, stop for some coffee and road trip beef jerky, speed to your headquarters in Chicago, sign in at the front desk, take the elevator up to the offices of the vice presidents who came up with the idea of Strawberry/Watermelon (and especially Pomegranate), give them an earful and punch them in their pasty, frostbitten midwestern noses.
That leaves us with the missing and offending confection from your lineup, The Chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop. No offense, Ellen? It’s the worst mistake in Candy History since the experimental “Sasquatch Armpit-Flavored Milk Dud.” Remember that one? The advertising campaign that made you squint and think deeply? “Betcha Can’t Eat Just One?” Yup. Couldn’t even eat one, let alone open the box.
I hate like heck to agree with our chimpanzee-like president, Joe “Bonzo” Biden, but he has a point about shrinkage.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Shrinkage. Let’s take a moment to let the inappropriate snickering from our fifth-grade boys demographic to die down …)
Ellen. I remember being a kid in the 19th century. Tootsie Roll Pops cost 3 cents, rested atop a varnished ax handle and were the size of a cantaloupe. It’d take a month to reach the chocolate nougat Tootsie Roll center, and, bonus, I’d waste hours rolling my stained fire engine-red tongue around while making faces in the bathroom mirror. Today? My Tootsie Roll Pop delicately balances atop a toothpick and the sugary orb is the size of a BB, which, with shrinkflation, is now just called a, “B.” No longer have I the finances to actually buy your potty-brown confection. Instead, I just toss an armful of coyote pelts on the grocery store conveyor belt, peel off the paper wrapper, lick once, and the rock-hard dessert has dissolved.
(I make a big show afterward of wiping my mouth on my sleeve and going, “AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”)
American communism being what it is under the Democrats, I stopped buying my monthly Tootsie Roll Pop. Fortunately, Divine Inspiration visited. They sell candy at our local 99-Cent Only Store! It wasn’t that long ago you could buy an entire Baby Ruth bar for 69 cents. Along comes Bidenomics and federal construction crews are permanently employed with changing the big, neon store name outside. This week? It’s the $29.99 ONLY STORE. Still. With the economy in the toilet, I could make a special trip over there and purchase a bag of nine Tootsie Roll Pops for less than $50. Or, 14 coyote pelts.
Of the nine T-Pops in the bag, five — FIVE — were chocolate-flavored. I’m guessing there must be some sort of inbred family Stick Together thing going on there in Chicago and you’re trying to protect a second-cousin who walks around the office in an oversized Eskimo fur hat, scuba shorts, flip-flops and out-of-context smile who came up with the idea to manufacture a chocolate TRP that tastes like the floor of a Russian mud bath.
Because you’re on the nosebleed level of the corporate ladder, even your best friends won’t tell you that consuming a chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop is like licking the inside of a cigar box. We have a local school board member (Linda Storli). She licks cigar boxes during meetings. Her tongue is now the size of a Harbor Freight catalogue and causes her to slur her speech, which caused her to accidentally change the name of my high school mascot from The Mighty Indians to The Fighting Coconut Husk Brassieres. I don’t mean to offend. But, Ellen? You’re selling anti-candy.
Orange? Cherry? Raspberry? Grape? They’re swooningly yummy-licious. I am currently composing a letter to my congressman, Mike Garcia, another Tootsie Roll Pop fan, to order the Department of Agriculture to make Tootsie Roll Pops America’s fifth major food group. Heck. Make it the fourth major food group and take off The Brussel Sprout. Like anyone would notice.
I realize. There’s economics involved. But, if you did the Right & Christian Thing and just 86ed production on these dark brown hardened boogers on a stick, you’d have several billion chocolate TRPs clogging your crime-ridden Chicago warehouses. Do the math with me. Your city has an inordinate number of homeless, droolers, gang bangers, illegal aliens and taste-bud-dead Democrats. Eating your leftover chocolate lollies could be an incentive to either walk the straight and narrow or motivate the influx of 3-foot-tall immigrants with palm frond hats to return to whence they came, which, in our neck of the woods, we like to call, “Palmdale.”
Or, Palmtucky.
They’ll eat anything, including pull-dated senior citizen government cheese.
(And please don’t use this as a suggestion to create Pull-Dated Senior Citizen Government Cheese as a new Tootsie Roll Pop flavor.)
Personally, I don’t think the elderly in the Antelope Valley should be eating cheese by the double fistful as it causes constipation, which causes them to write cranky letters to the editor to this august and historic newspaper.
Ellen. Light a votive candle. Go to confession. Make amends. Throw a grenade into your Chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop war machine.
I remain …
John Boston? The guy is world history’s most prolific satirist. Visit his bookstore at johnbostonbooks.com and look for his latest, “The Illustrated History of The Tootsie Roll Pop.” It’s not there, but, we figure we’d lure some eyeballs for those gullible enough to search.
