Popping Cherries

I’m working on Spark.  I can’t help it – it’s so much fun.

Tonight I had reason to recall another dopey thing we did as kids.

Take a piece of Glad Wrap smooth it over your open mouth and suck back until the film splits and it pops.  I had to turn to Twitter to recall what doing this was called – Popping Cherries.

Thank you @fangbooks and @1girl2manybooks.  You’d wonder how I could forget that.

It was also Twitter that told me you can still buy Whizz Fizz and it still has the little druggie plastic spoon.  And reminded me about the two ways to eat a Sunnyboy – crush or suck.  But that is for another day.

Back to popping cherries.

You could do it with the rubber of a busted balloon as well as cling-film, but you had to suck much, much hard to get it to pop.  And while the plastic wrap tasted like the inside of a fridge without being cold, the balloon bit squeaked against your teeth and was infinitely chew-able.   It tasted like overcooked chicken and smelled like burnt talcum powder.

So- choking hazard!

What were our parents thinking?

We used to do this en-mass like a cherry popping orchestra.

Reminded me of a scene in season one of Mad Men where Sally plays inside an adult sized plastic dry cleaners bag, sucking it into her mouth, while Betty tells her to go away so she can enjoy her cigarette.

It’s a wonder so many of us grew up, the amount of plastic sucking that went on.

Now having managed to slice cherry popping into a chapter I just have to work out how to get shrinkees in there – remember them?

A shrinkee was what you got if you held a Twisties packet over the naked flame of a school gas heater.  It was a perfectly tiny, weeny Twisties pack.  Apparently you could do this in the open quite safely by baking them, but what was the fun in that?

I remember the classroom smelled kind of toxic while shrinkee manufacture was talking place, and when you consider we had asbestos ceiling insulation that was perfect for making footprints on, (shoe on broom handle) it really is a wonder I’m still alive to even think about trying to get this stuff into a book.

And I was a nice girl.  You should see what the really bad kids got up to.