Contains Phenylalanine

At 17, I wrote a play about a bunch of seemingly unconnected people who happen to find themselves at the Museum of Natural History on the same day. They're all transfixed by the pterodactyl. Naturally. There's a teenager runaway, the concerned father, a love interest, and a janitor. Maybe also a small child. I can't remember now.

They all had these insanely long monologues that were hardly-fictionalized versions of the stories of people I cared about. One of them was color blind, for instance, and was remembering how her sister always helped her to pick outfits that matched and taught her what the colors were by feeding her gummy bears, so that her perception of color was based on taste. That's the true experience of my high school orchestra teacher. She didn't seem to mind that I ripped her life off. She probably knew that now, at 30, I'd spend maybe five minutes looking for that script in my old files and give up when I realized that any document written at that time was "created in an unsupported version of Word." 

But I named that play "Contains Phenylalanine." I'm not sure why, except that I was a bored and overly observant teenager in a rural household of Diet Coke drinkers. Along those same lines, I wrote a play soon after, with characters named Calliope and Tartaras, called "Lights on When Raining." Calliope was supposed to have long dreadlocks and I imagined myself playing that part the whole time I wrote it. I was prematurely very excited about going to get a weave, even called a few salons for pricing.

Which leads me to a discussion of my latest distraction. No, not playwriting. No, not obnoxious titles. No, not fake dreadlocks. It would seem I can't stop pumping one toxic substance into my body without replacing it with another, so I've chosen artificial sweeteners, unidentifiable corn products and carbonated water. Diet soda. Phenylketonurics: Contains Phenylalanine. And it's working like a charm. 

On my budget, I opt for generic. I have recently discovered Safeway's soda brand, Refreshe, and cannot help but pronounce it the way it is written. Refreesh, then, is a delicious imitation of name brand soda and costs about $1.50 for a 12 pack. It also has a wide array of diet flavors available, including diet root beer, diet cola, zero calorie soda and diet orange. Harkening back to my white trash roots while attempting to control the amount of caffeine I consume during any given day, I have naturally gravitated toward the diet orange. It reminds me of redneck lake parties and high cut bikinis. It reminds me of childhood and big bowls of Cheetos. 

I do wish there were a diet grape option, but poor people have to get their diabetes somewhere, so I suppose I understand the industry's insistence on corn syrup in at least one of their artificially flavored fruit sodas. Bottoms up!