Recently, I went to the movies and saw one of the worst movies ever. But I had a great time, for one reason:
Movie candy.
I used to think that I loved the movies, but I realized what I love is movie candy.
What’s so great about movie candy is that I allow myself to have it at all. I’m in carb rehab, so I’d never eat popcorn at home. Nor would I ever eat candy, normally. But at a movie, I’m allowed to get popcorn and candy, both. In fact, I’m entitled. A movie theater is Switzerland of the diet world.
The same goes for portion control. I’m careful about my portions, but not at the movies. All movie candy has one portion size. Two hours.
Movie popcorn isn’t food, it’s gambling. You never know if you’ll win or lose. Most often, you lose, because movie popcorn can taste like blown-in fiberglass insulation or paper, salted. Sometimes you win, and get a bag like I had the other night-a lovely canary gold, freshly popped, tasting of real Jersey corn. That’s one win in forty-odd years of movie popcorn. Yet, gambler that I am, I know that I’ll hit the jackpot again someday. That’s why I keep playing movie popcorn.
In contrast, the appeal of movie candy is its very predictability. If movie popcorn is a date, movie candy is a marriage. It always tastes the same, so much so that you can have a certain go-to movie candy for years. Raisinets has been my favorite movie candy for the past decade. It never disappoints. It always tastes chewy, soft, chocolaty, and vaguely healthy. My relationship to Raisinets has lasted longer than both my marriages, and cost me far less.
Before Raisinets, for me there was only Goobers, again for almost ten years. It wasn’t cheating to switch from Goobers to Raisinets, because both are in the same movie candy food group, namely Chocolate Contaminated by Natural Foods.
The decade before that, I always went with Whoppers, which were from a related food group, Chocolate Contaminated by Unnatural Foods.
I used to love Whoppers, chocolate-covered malted milk balls that come in a faux milk carton, a reminder of their fauxdairy origins. I stopped eating Whoppers only when I kept encountering what daughter Francesca calls the Dead Whopper.
The Dead Whopper looks alive on the outside-smooth, round, shiny, and almost brown. But as soon as you bite down, you know. The Dead Whopper collapses instead of crunching, and flattens to a gummy rock. It doesn’t taste like chocolate, it just tastes brown. And there you are, stuck with a cheekful of Dead Whopper and no napkin. It takes trust to eat candy in pitch darkness, and the Dead Whopper breaks its vows.
So I divorced Whoppers. I aim for quality control in my candy marriages.
Back in my youth, my movie candy came only from the High Maintenance Group, composed of Jujyfruits, Dots, and the immortal Jujubes. This group contains fruit plastic pressed into unrecognizable shapes and tinted the color of unpopular crayons. I used to love candy from this group because I was younger and had more time to deal with their candy drama.
The High Maintenance Group required a do-it-yourself dental scaling, right there in the movie seat, with your fingernail. It was labor intensive, not to mention disgusting. Picking your teeth and eating what you retrieve is acceptable only for eight-year-olds and under.
The High Maintenance Group also required you to hold the candy up to the movie screen to determine its color/flavor. I can’t tell you how many movies I saw through a Lysol-yellow Jujyfruits filter. I liked only the red and black Jujyfruits, so I had to perform the ritual of finding them by the light of the screen, then dumping the orange, green, and yellows back into the box. In no time, only the colors I hated were left, so I had to rank them, then eat them in descending order of hate.
It required a lot of decision-making, for a candy.
No candy was more high maintenance than Jujubes, the founding candy of the group. I think they may be defunct now, because I never see Jujubes at the movies anymore. I admired Jujubes for their moxie, not to mention their enigmatic name. They weren’t people-pleasers, like Raisinets. Jujubes dared you to like them. They made too much noise, as if they wanted out of their narrow box. They could crack a molar. Their colors were profoundly ugly. They tasted like drill bits.
And you know what?
I miss them.