Not A Pink Girl
Man on the moon, uh-huh, uh-huh, but what’s there to EAT?
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What did you munch on while waiting for & watching the moon landing? We had a big party in our house. My dad worked on the Apollo missions (he worked for NASA) so it was time to blow off some steam.
One of the most important things was that we got to drink Coca-Cola with impunity. I mean, my mother usually doled that stuff out like it was a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux. We would get a little juice glass of it when we were watching Batman or The Flintstones (keep in mind, those shows were on only once a week, at night during prime time). But on the night of the moon landing, we were guzzling the stuff like water.
We had the dining room table covered with food: bowls of pedestrian snacks like potato chips, pretzels, corn chips (remember the Frito Bandito erasers in the packages of school-lunch-sized bags? we fought over them) & crackers, but also more esoteric ones that you don’t hear of anymore like Bugles, Doo-Dads, & Flings.
I particularly remember the Flings in a bittersweet way. The Flings were by Nabisco & came in different flavors. The flavor we had on the night of July 20, 1969 was ham & cheddar. Man I loved those things! I stuffed them in my greedy little mouth with abandon. They were a weird orange-pink color & tasted so… so… close to a ham & cheese sandwich!
But you know the old saying, what goes up must come down. I’m not referring to the Lunar Module; I mean the Flings. Or should I say, What goes down must come up. Oh yes. I urped those Flings up all night in glorious Technicolor against the basic white of the porcelain toilet bowl. So let’s say I flung them all over the bathroom. Or that my Fling was short-lived. So I guess it’s good that Nabisco discontinued them or I would have been in serious gastrointestinal trouble.
I remember that when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, my father said, “Wouldn’t it have been something if he’d put his foot down in the moon dust & then yelled, ‘COCA-COLA!’? He would’ve been a rich man for the rest of his life!”
In many ways, my father was way ahead of his time.
40 years ago today, I held my breath…
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My father worked on all the Apollo missions & he was a nervous wreck for weeks before a launch. But on July 16, 1969, us kids literally tiptoed around our house & uttered not a word. One false move & we’d have had hell to pay. Why? Because Apollo 11 launched the first men to walk on the moon.
All this week I’ll be looking back at those days when, as a little kid who grew up with an unusually close connection to space travel, I tried to get my young brain around the enormity of NASA’s space program. Oh, & also reminiscing about all the great junk food snacks we wolfed down lying on the avocado-green sculpted carpet in our living room in front of the TV as we watched the fuzzy images of the big payoff of my dad’s day job.
About the photo: The American flag heralded the launch of Apollo 11, the first Lunar landing mission, on July 16, 1969. The massive Saturn V rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin at 9:32 a.m. EDT. Four days later, on July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon’s surface while Collins orbited overhead in the Command Module. Armstrong and Aldrin gathered samples of lunar material and deployed scientific experiments that transmitted data about the lunar environment.
