“Over the years I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. Though my personal preference was for Lux, I found that Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor – heavy, but with a touch of mellow smoothness. Life Buoy, on the other hand… YECCHH!”
-Ralphie Parker, A Christmas Story
One of my favorite holiday movies is A Christmas Story. One of my cousin’s children didn’t think that it was very credible, as who would wash someone’s mouth out with soap? Of course, I was more than happy to inform them that I am quite knowledge about the subject, and it was known to exist into at least the late 70s and early 80s. It is nothing that you want to write in to the food column, that is for sure. Indeed, I think I said the “F” word and I think I would have been about five years old. My aunt cleaned out my mouth with Dial.
The taste doesn’t quite linger in my mind, but then that would probably be a good thing. Of course, the act was merely symbolic, and the cruel concrete solution to a figure of speech. It was like someone going to a chiropractor to look at their neck when their neighbor was being an idiot. Dirty words didn’t hang out in one’s mouth, just waiting to come out, and in the meantime causing the mouth’s owner to have a very dirty one. Soap was the sorbet of the mind, as the experience was supposed to be a palate cleanser giving you a clean slate. On the contrary, dirty words hang out in the brain waiting for dispatch. If you think about it, it would be technically more effective to send a little suds up one’s nose in hoping it would reach the brain.
After that, I don’t think I dared say it ever again, at least in front of my aunt. In fact, I think that this particular incident was what made me into a little bit of a language prude. I was the type of person that didn’t care what you said, but sure as heck didn’t swear. That lasted until the second year in college when I just started letting it rip loose again. Well, I was just using the language of the natives. I was fitting in with my surroundings!
Perhaps the incident is why I gravitated towards the most bland and unadventurous diet during my childhood and early teen years. Maybe it is not because I wasn’t exposed to many kinds of foods, but it was because my taste buds had been completely scrubbed off or damaged in some way by the soap incident. Maybe I never ate sushi back then, not because it didn’t exist, but because I thought it all looked like little decorative soaps? Just maybe, like people can get clogged pores on their face, my tastebuds just got clogged with Dial. Because my aunt had the sense to use white Dial soap because it went with more of the decor of her bathroom and didn’t leave a yellow mess like gold Dial soap, people thought the clogs were just spots of saliva or that I had frothed at the mouth versus looking like I had eaten crayons.
Maybe I should stop trying to pinpoint my strange childhood eating habits on a trauma and just admit that some foods are not particularly tasty to young kids, or that our family just wasn’t on the international culinary scene, but the working class midwestern cuisine scene. I recall going to Denny’s and ordering toast with butter on the side, or ordering plain spaghetti with parmesan cheese, while the rest of the family ate all sorts of things that were colors other than white or beige or slightly yellow.
By the way, I didn’t like bananas except in banana bread. The shade of yellow was just too colorful I guess. I should have clarified and classified my food as “various shades of off-white unless it came to KoolAid, popsicles, oranges, or chocolate.” I ate apples a lot, too, which you may argue are a definite hue (usually red, but green for Granny Smith), but you cannot argue that once sliced open the inside is….off-white! You may say, depending on the species, it has a slightly green, pink, or yellow cast, but the story remains the same!
To wrap it up, I am glad that most people don’t seem to consider washing one’s mouth out with soap a reasonable nor effective means of punishment these days. Perhaps that is why that when you go to the store today, you do not see bar soaps, dishwashing liquid, and then the other option being “soap on a rope.” Now, the bars are still there, but many of them have been replaced by all sorts of pumps, bottles, and squeeze bottles of liquid soap. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS DISHWASHING LIQUID. Now, that is in another aisle altogether. My point being, it is not just the marketing geniuses convincing you that you must have various kinds of soap in the same bathroom or kitchen for the discerning guest, but that the need for soaps and soaps on a rope for cleaning peoples mouths out have dwindled. If you had to use it for mouths too, the soap would be used twice as quickly, but is now going the way of the DoDo bird.Well, I was just thinking….maybe there is something to this afterall that affects not just the soap industry.
I have noticed since the soap incident that I have heard more F bombs on cable OR on live news shows where they only have a three second lag to bleep it out, and more of the lesser of the 7 Forbidden Words, and more peoples rear ends on Network TV than ever. Well, maybe not “ever.” Things are tamer than they were in the past. In fact, remember NYPD Blue? The real name of the show was “Whose Butt are we Going to See Naked This Week?” until that got old and they started getting back to business, except poor David Caruso who totally miscalculated his career just like the gal who played Tasha Yar for only one year on Star Trek. But now he has had his own show, but he was hurting for more than a decade. Alas, I digress.
But what if ceasing cleaning mouths out with soap really caused this whole thing, and the world would have never seen Dennis Franz’ butt, or no one would have seen Gordon Ramsey have his words bleeped out, but you could CLEARLY know what he said as he mouthed it very clearly. I wonder what people who are deaf or partially deaf and read lips think about him…because to them nothing is bleeped out, unless you have something on a more family oriented show like Funniest Home Videos where they also put a black box in front of their mouth or blur the screen around their mouth so people who read lips wouldn’t know what the swear word was either, unless the context was so obvious.
I guess I have no point. But, oh I do. There is no way to know what the world would be like if parents were encouraged to clean children’s mouths out with soap. Would the world be a cleaner place, or would be in the same boat we are now in polite society, but have a lot of people saying that there really is soap poisoning, and it causes birth defects. Isn’t that what Ralphie Parker daydreamed about, that he went blind from soap poisioning as he grew up? I guess that is one for the people who believe in alternative realities to figure out. Maybe in a parallel time, where Bizarro Superman lives, it actually happens….
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