'Licious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_Rocks

Urban legends play havoc with an American kids' sugar-addled brain, already heightened by the potently charged atmosphere inherent in our wildly free mix of humans. You never know on any given day what you're gonna get, because the New York City area is the capital of our whole Empire, with a new set of immigrants (refugees from your next civil war or natural disaster) streaming daily into our harbor seeking a respite from their woes. What can we do? It's messed up that your parents don't speak English to you, but that's nothing compared to the horrors we scared each other with on the playground, most of which centered around candy, a crucially important part of any kids' school day. Candy gave us something to look forward to, you know?

Myths abounded in our Gothic towns, like the pet alligator some kid flushed down the toilet that grew to epic horror-movie proportion in the city sewers, or the boa constrictor that bit a kid in the ass, because it crawled up through the sewer pipes to bite him while he sat on the toilet. Like, really scary stuff. If that didn't happen to you in the morning, you might get beat up for your lunch money, forget your homework, then get spanked for that, or you could die from a toxic candy combo that we dared each other to do on days when we were feeling a little braver, because nothing really bad had happened to us.

"Life" cereal was a huge brand back in the day, and in a brilliant counter-espionage move, some company wonk circulated this fake rumor that the child actor who played "Mikey" in the commercial had died from a lethal combination of Pop Rocks and soda, which naturally drove us to dare each other to try it for money. No problem! My mom and her scary sistas were bad enough witches with or without the soda they're all addicted to, anyway. Gimme that! And so me, my middle bro, and the Katt sisters stood at the end of our lane daring each other to try it. We each did it after no one died, taking turns feeling that weird popping sensation of mini candies mixed with fizzy soda. It was odd, like spearmint-flavored Lifesavers sparking in the darkness of a closet while you watched your friend eat one (my mom told me about that particularly fun food fact growing up), but that was about it.

Nonetheless, the madmen who created those classic ad campaigns pushed product over what was basically a childhood dare for many years, by firmly implanting it within each and every American kids' memory. It was sheer marketing genius. After that, the rumor mill cranked into overtime, when Madison Avenue spreadsheets reflected the buying power attached to false rumors. Kentucky Fried Chicken had rat meat in it, so that's bad. Don't eat it! 

Spider eggs were found in Bubbalicious gum, probably because some crazy redneck working in a factory hated city kids, like that fat lazy bitch behind the KFC counter who hates us, too, or the weirdo who injected shit into Tylenol bottles, just like that crazy psycho who put razor blades into kids' Halloween apples one year: it was crazy enough to be true, just like the psychotic people we meet everyday who want to kill us for no good reason other than the fact that they're fuckin' nuts and we felt vulnerable as kids, because that's what our neighborhoods feel like on any random day. You just might die, yo.

Sea Monkeys

http://seamonkeys.wikia.com/wiki/Sea_Monkeys_Wiki

Except for the really expensive stuff we couldn't afford (the kind of stuff you asked for your birthday and Christmas gifts, combined), most of the ads for kid's toys on the back of comic books sucked, like those crappy stick-on tattoos from a Cracker Jack's box, or the cruddy gum packed in with your baseball cards, and those were the good old days of stuff for kids. People are nastier assholes about children nowadays, because so many people do it so poorly. I briefly dated an acquaintance from my school days here, mostly because he was coming back from L.A. and living with his parents in New City (in, like, his old room from high school and everything. I know, sooo bad), so he gave me a good reason to get out of my Mom's small apartment in Rockland and go hiking outdoors, which is taboo to my mom's dysfunctional clan. 

Nature is something to be feared and contained through allergy medications and climate-controlled thermostats, and weather is something so bad and awful for "hobbitses" to bear, that hearing rain outside or seeing clouds in the sky brings on panic shakes so bad, more mood pills must be taken, while cringing indoors behind closed drapes over tightly sealed windows, waiting for it to just pass. All of that is better than me leaving one of their horrible addicts-only "parties" to hike the trails I grew up hiking most of my life as a kid, which is a big part of the allure and beauty that is unique to this area, so much so that I needed some kid I barely knew from high school to bring his adult weight-training, black-belted self into my mom's place as a male presence that easily frightens latently gay fat creatures away, by deterring them from taking further action against me and my plans. 
In other words, I needed this guy for home visits. 

He was horrible, and I knew that, but it didn't matter. He wanted to use me for my affluence (beautiful Park Slope town-home apartment) and success (infamous Art Director in publishing) for his cat and bad family. It's not new to me. He also blamed his parents (I know!) for everything that went wrong in his life, with the exception of his delusional belief that the magical healing powers of Acupuncture would heal his brain of alcoholism and depression, which was practically see-through as excuses, because he comes from a wealthy, highly educated Filipino family. His uncle is a doctor in Manila and his dad designed the house they live in, because he's an architect. In the face of actual achievements, he caved like a bitch white boy to "pressure" by allowing his dad to steer him into the relatively new major at F.I.T. (that welcomed home of many monied Asians) of "Toy Design", which I thought was really cool. Uh, no, Marie. What are you, like, stupid?! 

He wanted to be a much more lauded and highly vauled CAR DESIGNER, which basically means he punked out of failing at that on his own, to do the dysfunctional Rockland kid trick of driving around aimlessly all day whenever he wanted to escape his parents place. 
He chose to combine his spoiled brat behavior with some daffy Southern Californian shit that he picked up on the road and at the local strip mall dojo (black belt+$$$=5 years), like how his bad "energy" made him drink whiskey in the middle of the day when it dawned on him that proposing to me after three months in the parking lot of a Piermont restaurant was perhaps a tad too far in "Crazy". Of course, I said nothing to him at the time, because I actually wanted him to drive me back home safely to my mom's place, and it was one of the most beautiful nights on the river that I can remember in recent times. Grandview was rebuilding from the never-to-be-spoken-of "Hurricane", a force so powerful that we must sacrifice ourselves to it forever, as the moon shone over the water on our way back to Nyack like rarely seen, right before we hit the Tappan Zee bridge and town.

I didn't need this particular old classmate to tell me he that he was a shiny fool's gold of a stone glinting under the surface of the water ("Don't you remember me? We were like, best friends in school!", which we never were), because this New York girl had it all down pat already to unpack right on top of his head, and don't you know he knew that? Like my brother Bernie used to tell me every time my little kid self wanted to see fantastical sea creatures grow in our small fish aquarium (the glass one that we used every summer for years, to keep those tiny orange goldfish we won at the Chestnut Grove Elementary school fairs that always died), because I still believed the ad copy on Bazooka Joe cartoons and Casper the Ghost comics: "Those aren't real 'Sea Monkeys', Marie. There's no such thing as a 'sea monkey'. They're just these tiny brine shrimp that grow a little bit under water, and you can barely see them. It's a total rip-off." Yeah, I guess you're right, Bernard. You can't fool a real Pirate Queen like me. 

For kids who already know about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, click here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-Monkeys