I am re-visiting this post from May because July was the month when Kathy McCullough and I usually embarked on our diet adventures. Re-reading this story always brings a smile to my older, wiser, and thinner, face.
My best friend in 1962 was Kathy McCullough. Kathy had the most outrageous carrot-colored hair that required orange-juice-can rollers to tame. My hair was short and brown and I chewed my nails to the quick. We didn’t look very much alike except for one obvious feature–we were both “chubby”.
On hot summer days we would meet up at my house and plan a diet. We were always planning diets. Most of the other girls in our class weren’t chubby, so unbeknownst to us, we were pre-teen diet pioneers.
If kids wanted to go anywhere in 1962, we had to walk or ride our bikes. Kathy and I were not bikers. But despite our aversion to exercise, we regularly walked across the fields behind my house to the Woolworth’s, where we ensconced ourselves at the lunch counter.
We spent many collective hours at that counter meticulously planning an all-out assault on our weight. The planning day was always the best, because we celebrated “going on a diet” with a Woolworth’s banana split. This pre-diet treat was our last hurrah before diet abstinence. We would sit there, thoughtfully spooning bites of ice cream into our mouths as we chatted in the most sincere fashion about what we were going to eat on our diet beginning the next day.
Forty odd years later Kathy remembers us sitting at the same counter the day after our diet began, somberly sipping glasses of iced tea from straws. I have no recollection of the iced tea days. I think I blocked it out. I only remember banana splits. Lots of them. We went on a new diet almost every week, and of course, we had to make plans.
…er, I’ve been known to make a plan at Cinzetti’s….
Ah, Not the same as the Woolworth counter! Plus, our banana splits were only 39 cents! Can’t beat that!