True Confections (31 page)

Julie brought Kelly along, with a Zip’s employee badge for her, which was slightly awkward because she was overwhelmed by all the candy and wasn’t as helpful with our setting up as she could have been. Most people go into a Stendhal candy swoon the first time they attend a big trade show. It’s understandable, but we needed all hands on deck, and I was annoyed that Julie didn’t even try to reel her in, but seemed charmed every time Kelly staggered back into the booth with more booty from around the floor, giddy as a child having an ultra Halloween experience. I felt myself being quite irritated with the two of them giggling together and littering our booth with wrappers of other candy brands, which I kept picking up with exaggerated efficiency, but they were too entranced with each other to take my irritable tidying as personally as they should have. Kelly watches me closely when I am speaking to Julie, and I often feel that she is observing me in order to give Julie advice about how to handle her problematic mother.

Jacob has made the point to me that I would probably be more welcoming and flexible if he brought a girlfriend along as often as Julie brings Kelly. I know he’s right, but it isn’t likely that he would have a girlfriend with such a passive-aggressive vibe. Anyway, Jacob doesn’t let me meet his girlfriends, a regrettable and unfair policy based on his erroneous belief that I am “intrusive” and “controlling” and “don’t respect boundaries,” which was perhaps somewhat true when he was younger and less mature, but it is not a fair characterization. I don’t press him. I am optimistic that one day soon, when Jacob is ready, I will meet Becky, the girl he has been seeing for a while now. (A law
student at Yale, a runner and a devotee of early music, she is very articulate and intelligent, and quite devoted to Jacob, based on the emails I read over a few months’ time, before Jacob changed his password. He uses “jakezip” for so many of his passwords, though I have advised him repeatedly that diverse passwords are far more secure.)

C
ANDY
C
ON WAS LIKE
any candy show; it was hectic and crowded, and there were problems with the electrical supply and confusion over the rental delivery, but we got set up. Jacob had burned a CD from Howard’s old Everly Brothers album, so we had “Wake Up, Little Susie” playing, we had organized our space according to our usual show planagram, and Jacob and Julie had done a great job with the displays. We had order sheets with our usual lines and a new space for Little Susies orders, with some special show discounts and deals for orders placed at the booth.

There was some Little Susies buzz even before the show doors officially opened; lots of nearby vendors had checked us out, drawn by our music, plus we had better real estate on the floor than ever before. Instead of being shunted off among the start-ups and really small companies like the nice Glee Gum people from Providence, or those ambitious Sweetriot women from New York, for once our space was in the middle of the action, across from Tootsie Roll, which may have suited us a little more than it suited them, since there is that slightly uneasy kinship between Little Sammies and that primal Ellis Island Tootsie Roll of Eli’s. Call it the anxiety of influence. But they’re enormous and we’re small, and they’ve been in business since 1896 and we started in 1924, and they can afford to tolerate our existence.

The morning went well. There was a good, upbeat atmosphere at the show, and everyone was psyched for what felt like a strong back-to-school and Halloween season. A number of vendors greeted me with real warmth, and a few told me it was good to see me at this show, because they had heard that things were up in the air at Zip’s. I knew they were speaking of Howard’s departure from our marriage, which had fueled the inevitable speculation about the future of the business. All the more reason to have a strong presence, with a new product to showcase, to make it clear to everyone across the industry that Zip’s Candies was doing just fine, better than ever.

In a momentary lull, I had an intriguing conversation with a reporter who was interested in the Little Susies, though she admitted she wasn’t really there to cover the show, and was actually writing a novel about a candy company. She quizzed me rather insistently on my thoughts about Jewish family-owned candy companies. Why did I think so many had been founded by Jewish immigrants: Sam Born, who came to America in 1910; Sam Altshuler, who arrived in 1917; Eli Ziplinsky, who landed in 1920; Nathan Radutsky, who started Joyva halvah, who arrived in 1907; David Goldenberg, who invented Peanut Chews, who came in 1880; and so on.

I thought about what she was asking. Perhaps the candy business was one that offered opportunity to immigrants with few resources. What other product could be developed for a few pennies and made in a pot on a stove, or at a kitchen table, with everyone in the family helping to do something, stir the pot or wrap the finished pieces? They might have recipes from the old country that would appeal to people from the same background living in their neighborhood, and they could sell their product on the street with no overhead. I had never considered the pattern in quite this way before.

After lunch there was a flurry at our booth, with a lot of people specifically coming over to grab a Little Sammies/Little Susies pack. Because we didn’t want to run out of stock on the first day, we had to be selective about giving them out. At any show you waste a certain amount of product on giveaways to other vendors, or to people with press passes who aren’t going to be writing about your product, or to bloggers who might be planning to rave about your product or diss your product but who are also cruising for free samples they can then offer up in giveaway contests on their blogs. A certain amount of that is fine, and all of it is ordinary and expectable at a trade show like this. We tried to get selective and target the buyers without being rude to anyone who really wanted a Little Sammies/Little Susies pack. The booth was now weirdly mobbed, with a lot of younger people, a lot of journalists with blog and website credentials. Julie was looking unhappy and overwhelmed, trying to deal with people. Two of our new, young workers had not come back from lunch on time, and we were shorthanded, struggling to keep up with samples and questions. The hundredth repetition of the Everly Brothers singing “Wake Up, Little Susie” was getting on my nerves, and it was making me miss Howard, too, which also got on my nerves. I turned down the sound a little. Why were we getting slammed all of a sudden?

The reporter who was really a novelist was back. She semaphored urgently to me over the heads of the buyers and journalists thronging our little counter area, and I waved her to come around the side into the booth and talk to me. Did I know about the live blogging, she wanted to know. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but I thought Julie might, so I asked her to repeat her question to Julie, and a moment later Julie was sprinting off to the exhibitors’ break room, where she could go online. When she returned, she looked stricken.

T
O PUT IT
bluntly, the white Little Susie snuggled in between the two brown Little Sammies apparently struck a certain snarky culture blogger with a devoted following as a representation not only of tawdry, three-way sex, but also of tawdry, three-way, mixed-race sex. Candy miscegenation. I pushed my way through the people standing expectantly around the Zip’s Candies booth and reached into one of the open boxes under the counter for a pack of Little Sammies/Little Susies. I turned away and opened it, trying to look with the eyes of a stranger, to see how it would strike me if I had never laid eyes on them before. I was startled.

They were wedged together shoulder to shoulder, Little Sammie/Little Susie/Little Sammie. It did sort of look as if they were three in a bed. I tried to see it the way the blogger had apparently seen it, the innocent, creamy white Little Susie, lying there, flanked by glistening black savages. Was it obscene? Did it really seem like an erotic representation of what he was calling a “chocolate sandwich”? Another blogger was apparently analyzing the “Wake Up, Little Susie” lyrics line by line, to demonstrate our intentional erotic message.

I know I made a terrible mistake, not anticipating the error in our packaging presentation, but none of us had seen it. When you are overly focused on your product, you lose the ability to view it with fresh eyes, the way the public might see it. Two years ago, Mill Farm Gummi Lighthouses got a lot of unwanted candy blog attention because somebody noticed that if you turn them on their sides, each one looks like a colorful penis and testicles, which was presumably not something the Mill Farm people had ever considered or aspired to. But when you look at
them now (on the Web), you can hardly believe they shipped them.

I realize our packaging decision seems utterly foolish in retrospect, but I can only say again that not one person who handled the packaging as we made those prototype handouts for CandyCon anticipated how a white Little Susie would look nestle between two brown Little Sammies. Let me be really clear about this: nobody who was aware of the time and energy and money that were poured into the Little Susies development could possibly think that I had anything but the best interests of the company at heart. I know it was a good brand extension. I know what my state of mind was, and it is deeply insulting to suggest that any action of mine was deliberately calculated to drive down the value of Zip’s Candies just as it was under consideration by a serious buyer in ongoing negotiations with Howard’s duplicitous lawyer. Since this possibility, the potential takeover of Zip’s Candies, had been actively concealed from me, it is an outrageous suggestion, accusing me of having acted with that knowledge to sabotage a potential sale of the business. I am the betrayed, not the betrayer. I know what Sam would have said: your best teacher is your last mistake.

I
TRIED TO
remain calm. Surely this blog thing was not a major problem? Anyone who thought the sight of these candies lined up together was suggestive would presumably go into spasm over the incipient orgy in a tin of sardines. Was it possible the bloggers weren’t serious at all, they were just having fun, doing what they do, riffing on the material? Candy bloggers can have a certain sardonic tone, as we well know. (I think Mumbo Jumbos deserve more than a 2.5 on the AndyCandy scale, for example.
And I think Sugarbomb was unnecessarily harsh about the occasional summer leakage problem in Tigermelts.)

Julie couldn’t be calm with me. She was convinced that once something like this gets onto the Web, it is linked and repeated everywhere, and you don’t know who is going to take it seriously as a deliberate statement on our part. After all, think of all the people who fall for stories in
The Onion
. Kelly, who had now rematerialized breathlessly, amped up on sugar and toting a bag spilling over with samples from all over the show, reported that Little Susies were being talked about everywhere she went on the floor. In a good way? I asked optimistically. She said she thought we were in deep shit. She’s immensely irritating, but she was right.

Within the hour Julie reported that there were more than three hundred new posts on the Little Sammies forum, and her mailbox was flooded with questions and comments of one kind or another from our website form. Our website server crashed at some point later that day, the traffic was so intense. And we hadn’t even had time to update the site with an image of Little Susies, though we had intended to, so the only mention was the teaser Julie had added a few weeks earlier, about how anyone attending CandyCon in New York would meet the newest member of the Ziplinsky Candy Family, come see us at the show! So people hoping to find a picture of this controversial candy artifact were frustrated, and they left a lot of angry and obscene comments.

It took only a few hours for the viral tsunami to hit. Of course it jumped from the blogosphere to television and print media, especially since everyone is always looking to cover a trade show like this with a new angle. They had found their story. What followed with the wire stories, all the press coverage, was a terrible déjà vu of the Blessed Chocolate Virgin coverage,
which was of course among the first items anyone searching for references to Zip’s Candies would find, which in turn led to yet another airing of the fire story from 1975, and how I was once known as Arson Girl (the way it might be said of someone that she was the Munger Potato Festival Queen of 1975). Add to that an endless exponential web of interconnected blog and Internet mentions that persist to this day.

You can find references to Little Susies and Little Sammies on websites devoted to preserving the purity of the white race; you can find references on numerous sites that also use the keyword
kike
(given the Ziplinsky heritage, I suppose that was inevitable). There is a website with lyrics for a version of the Little Sammies jingle that begin “Little Sammies are for you / If you are a hook-nosed Jew.” Some of the white supremacy websites have put us on a list of companies whose products should be boycotted permanently. (Did anyone seriously believe that Zip’s Candies was using this product launch to subversively put forward a positive image of mixed-race threesomes?)