Gubber Snack Foods was supposed to be the perfect organic alternative to the overprocessed, oversugared foods for kids that lined the supermarket shelves. And a new generation of moms, working harder all the time both in and out of the home, had gratefully reached for it.
My big line, the one I intoned at the end of each commercial, having made sixteen commercials for various products in the line from the time I started until the time I turned seven, the words bubbling out of my organic chocolate-smeared mouth?
“It’s Gubberlicious!”
Four years later, at age seven, despite the fact that I was small for my age, I was deemed too old to hawk the product. Personally, I think it was because I stopped being cute. But whatever the reason, I counted myself lucky. Unlike other child stars who had difficulty adjusting to a life where they were no longer treated as special I had never been allowed by Aunt Bea to be treated as special in the first place and so I had no overinflated ego to recover from.
The commercials were still aired occasionally, appealing to audiences in a nostalgic way, and I still received the odd residual check.
As I say, people still sometimes recognized me, based on the hair and curvy smile. It by no means happened often, but at least a couple of times a year, some stranger would say, “I know I’ve seen that smile before! But where…?”
As far-fetched as it might sound, that people could recognize you just from a smile, I understood it from firsthand experience. Home sick with mono for a month in high school, I’d watched more old movies than I’d ever watched in my life or would ever watch again. On my first day of freedom, I’d been walking down Broadway when I caught the eye of an older woman, meaning someone lots older than me, traveling in the other direction, and she smiled.
“I know you!” I’d shouted, unable to come up with a name.
If she’d been someone truly recognizable, like Meryl Streep, I would never have stopped her. I mean, how mortifying!
She stopped on the street, smiling indulgently.
I racked my brain, trying to place that familiar face.
“Toothpaste commercial?” I tried.
She shook her head, smiled wider.
It was that last smile that nailed it.
“Animal House!” The way I jumped up and down, clapped my hands, you’d think I’d just beat Ken Jennings on Final Jeopardy. “You were the girl who was twelve but looked eighteen!” I shouted, talking to her like I was telling her something she didn’t know. “You passed out at the frat house!”
She smiled again, nodded.
“Well,” I said, winding down now that the glitch-in-my-memory itch had been scratched, “that’s just great. Thanks. And, hey, you really do have the best smile.”
I’d continued on my way, never even learning her real name. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me to wonder how often that happened to her.
I have to confess, I wasn’t as consistently gracious as she was with me when confronted with the whole “I know I’ve seen that smile before! But where…?” situation. If I was in a good mood, I shyly answered, “Gubber Snack Foods.” If I was in a bad mood, I said, “It must have been when I body-doubled for Julia Roberts.”
They’d look at my non-tall, non-lithe body in confusion and say, “No, I don’t think that was it…”
The reason I plucked Julia Roberts’s name out of the air was no accident. It was because she had that same kind of smile: you could block out the rest of her face and with no other clue guess, “That’s Julia Roberts!” Julia Roberts and I shared nothing else in common, but we did share that one thing: block-out-the-rest-of-your-face smiles.
Indeed, even Mrs. Fairly had recognized me, once she’d seen the Gubber Snack Foods gig on my résumé.
“I used to buy Gubber Snack Foods,” she’d said, just like everybody always says it, like they’ve performed some kind of accomplishment you should be impressed by and not the reverse. “Oh, not for myself,” she’d gone on, “but in a previous post, I’d had more direct responsibility for the children of the household. I tasted one of those Gubber Snacks once…” She leaned across conspiratorially. “Revolting.”
Indeed. But the checks had been good at least.
Now the man in the seat next to me, George Cranston from Staten Island, was saying pretty much the same thing, all of which I’d heard a thousand times before, or at least fifty.
“I can’t wait to get home after my trip and tell my grandkids I sat for seven hours next to a beautiful somebody who used to be on television.”
And, for some reason, I was not in the mood to spend seven hours reminiscing about my years as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid. With my luck, he’d make me say my famous line, the line that other kids had teased me about at every phase of my schooling, once they’d figured out who I was.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I said impulsively.
“No?” He looked crestfallen. “Are you sure?”
“Quite.”
“Come on,” he said. “Say, ‘It’s Gubberlicious!’ for me just one time. I’ll bet you’re her.”
“No, I’m not,” I said firmly. “I’m…I’m…I’m her doppelgänger. People just confuse me with her all the time, but I’m really not her. Hell, people probably confuse her with me all the time, for all I know.”
George Cranston from Staten Island pulled back at my use of “hell,” but he was curious enough that it didn’t stop him for long.
“So,” he said, arms crossed, “who are you that people should confuse you with her?” He said “her” like the Gubber Foods Kid was Madeleine Albright or something.
“I’m a writer,” I countered the challenge without thinking.
Shit, where did that come from? I asked myself timidly as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
Actually, I kind of knew where that had come from. Back when I’d been interviewed by Mrs. Fairly, I’d even intimated as much, shyly confessing a newfound ambition to one day write.
Well, I had to do something with my life, didn’t I?
“Why would you want to do that?” she’d asked, stunned.
It’s amazing how, if a person has no inclination to do a thing themselves, they have trouble understanding the attraction/fascination it might hold for others.
I recalled for her an article I’d read once in the New York Times—it’s amazing how much trouble being an avid devotee of the Times has gotten me into—that said that eighty-one percent of people polled said they thought they had a book in them. What other career could boast that kind of attraction? Surely lots of people might say they want to be doctors, but it was more for the BMW and the nebulous help-humanity aspect of it than the desire to be up to their elbows in O.R. blood, I was sure of it. And surely eighty-one percent of people were not lining up to be systems analysts. I’ll bet not even that many people wanted to be actors, despite the glamour, what with public speaking being the number-one phobia, up there ahead of death and spiders.
And yet so many people wanted to write, and not necessarily because they saw it as an easy path to fame and fortune, although surely there were those who thought that.
So why the high statistics?
It was, I thought, because of the almost universal desire to be heard.
I wanted to be heard, too.
But since I couldn’t even hold my own interest with the scribblings in my diary, I knew I had my work cut out for