Hostess. The name conjures childhood, whether happy or not. Their
artificially made Twinkies, Cupcakes and Snowballs desirable and like Tang, and
later, Pop Rocks, had the added cache of edible technology. It was the proper
food for the children of Flatbush refugees, made all that much better because
it wasn’t from home and had to be bought. Everyone wanted Hostess goodies in
their metal batman-with-matching-thermos lunchbox. You could eat the
cellophane-wrapped sweetness, share it, or use it as the highest form of
currency for lunchroom trades.
Recently, overcome with nostalgia, I bought a package of Snowballs just
to peel the marshmallow topping from the cake.
As an adult, you knew that Twinkies were bad for you, but
now we know that they’re bad for 18,000 American workers. Hostess has entered
into liquidation, which involves the immediate dismissal of nearly 15,000
employees while corporate executives will reap the rewards of running a
business into the ground: they stand to receive $1.8 million in bonuses, in
addition to salary, for liquidating the company. This is on top of the 300%
raise the CEO gave himself after filing bankruptcy in January, the second in
ten years.
The failure of Hostess may have been about antiquated equipment
or an inability to update and diversify product offerings or even the fact that
all Hostess products have the names of either low-rent strippers or third-rate
clowns. It may be that, like a stolen car, Hostess is worth more chopped and
sold than as a whole entity; corporate assets are expected to be worth
around $1 billion, more than twice the assessed value in 2011. It’s a variant
of The Producers as acted by corporate bakery, and Ho-Hos will still roll off
some assembly line, despite the gutting of a company and the loss of many jobs.
But this isn’t about politics, or even my predictable pink
diaper baby pro-worker position. It’s about a party I attended in 1986, when I
was young and wild and fearless. Back then, I went to after-hours clubs and to
bars where people dressed in rabbit costumes or like rock stars. I went to
gallery openings and readings given by pretentious writers who probably weren’t
any good. And I went to a party given by my friend Jack Womack.
Always an excellent host, Jack had prepared for this event
by trying various recipes from Jane and Michael Stern’s excellent Square Meals
cookbook, including a dessert that consisted of Twinkies embedded in green
Jell-O. Honestly, it was worse than it sounds, since the green goo was absorbed
into the moist cake, and it’s no wonder that party guests were reluctant to
give it a try. But I was young and wild and fearless, and hell, it was
TWINKIES! So I ate one, the only guest to do so. It was gross, but it remains
my fondest Twinkie memory.
The next year, Jack gave me the copy of Square Meals that he had used and you can see his inscription here:
Twinkies, I’ll always love you. I’ll love your memory in the
same way I love the memory of training wheels, roller skates with keys, Jell-O
salad with canned fruit and the long, dull afternoons of suburban childhood.
