Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: They are smaller than they used to be. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what the current purveyors of the legacy say. They are smaller. Full stop. I am an expert, I should know. Based on my consumption of these chocolate and cream delicacies in college alone, there should have been enough revenue and profit to endow the brand for millennia. I don’t know what they did with the money.
There is a bit of betrayal here as well. You see my family worked for Drakes Bakeries. A lot of my family. Their coworkers became godmothers and godfathers, husbands and wives and life long friends. In the Northeast they were bigger than Hostess and had their own, better, treats. Hostess used a spongy type of recipe for its cakes. Drakes used a heavy Devils Food. If you ate a Devil Dog or Yankee Doodle for example, the cake would stick to the roof of your mouth. You needed to drink milk with Drakes Cakes. They were better. Me extolling Suzy Qs is like a Pepsi family admitting that Coke ain’t so bad. Treachery.
Naturally there are stories in my life that revolve around Devil Dogs or Ring Dings or Yankee Doodles. But this is about Suzy Qs. And I gotta tell you they’re pretty damned good. And like the Drakes Cakes, there are stories.
Suzy Qs and Mountain Dews got me through my first Computer Science class. I spent a lot of time in the lab, half programming and half eyeballing the lab assistant. Either way i needed constant sugar and caffeine infusions and right down the hall were the vending machines. It was just too easy.
One day I ran across this girl out by the vending machine area. Turns out she was one of those vitamin chicks. But, she was hot for days and so normally I’m gonna listen to whatever the hell she’s saying. So she starts going on about her concern for my health. Now if I thought she actually gave two shits about my health or if there were any possibility of exploiting her professed concern that would have been different. But this was one of those bullshit pyramid schemes and she doubled down “If only you used (insert bullshit vitamin product name here) you wouldn’t have to eat those awful things.” She waited. She was pretty. She was used to guys agreeing with her just on the main chance. I stared back. And then I went full John Belushi on her. I stuffed the entire (original larger size) Suzy Q in my mouth and begin chewing, noting with satisfaction that a good portion was escaping out the sides of my mouth. She looked at me in disgust, turned on her heel and stalked off. Was it as good as sex? No, but that wasn’t going to happen anyway. But I’ll tell you, as I walked away, wiping the mushed chocolate and cream from my cheeks I was walking away with my dignity intact.
And that wasn’t the last incident. But if I told you about it you’d never believe me. Except that there was a witness…
© Glenn R Keller 2021, All Rights Reserved
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