One night when I was about eight, I slept over at my girlfriend’s house. (It was the sixties and I was a precocious little nipper.) When we got to her place after school, I was flabbergasted when her mother sat girlfriend and me down in the breakfast nook and placed before each of us a bowl of Alpha-Bits. Cereal? In the afternoon? I was horrified―until I took a mouthful.
I’d never had Alpha-Bits before. My exposure to what I now call kiddyrot cereals had been limited in the extreme. But this… this was a revelation! As good as cereal tasted in the morning, it was a hundred times better at non-breakfast times of the day. And sweet! I decided then and there that I was going to devote my life to a serious study of tooth decay brought on by the over-consumption of sugar.
(Okay, I didn’t, not really. The tooth-decay part is certainly true, though. And my obsession with sugar and breakfast cereal really antedates the story above. It does make a good story, though, doesn’t it?)
Kiddyrot cereals were always in limited supply in our house when I was growing up. For reasons I was never clear on, my mother only bought two kinds of kiddyrot: Honeycomb and Cap’n Crunch. Honeycomb was so boring I often (like Bill Watterson’s Calvin) dumped extra sugar on it in an attempt (unsuccessful, alas) to make it more interesting. Cap’n Crunch was the opposite: to this day it remains one of the most aggressively sugared cereals I’ve ever eaten. Seriously, that shit will cement your teeth together better than Krazy Glue. (Don’t try this at home.)
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. Living in Toronto exposed me to the Buffalo TV market, and to ads for the most bizarre and amazing (and probably disgusting, to most) culinary weaponry I’d ever encountered. At the time I was working for CBC Radio as a movie critic, and I had what I thought at the time was a brilliant Idea: I would review kiddyrot cereals on-air, in the style of a Robert Parker-type wine journalist. I must have been a better salesman in 1992 than I ever was before, or have been since*, because a producer at “Ontario Morning” jumped at it. (I will not identify the producer in question because the statute of limitations has yet to time out.)
Last week, while packing and shifting books and papers in the basement, I came across a couple of the old reviews. I mentioned this to a friend, who begged me to publish them again. So I dug deeper into the trash archives and have transcribed what I found, which I believe is most of what I originally wrote and more than were ever aired (common sense eventually woke up and realized that 6:20 am on a weekday was not really the time for this sort of alleged humour). Over the next weeks I’ll repost the reviews, and might even write some new ones.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
*Of which my fiction-writing career bears ample witness
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