I must have watched the "waste milk?" commercial from yesterday's blog post 10 times, mostly because I couldn't believe my eyes. There was so much milk blowing out of so many people in so many places. Here are some things that stood out for me right off the bat: 

1) the empowering milk wind turbine coming out of the little boy -- it's too close to his bottom. 

2) the milk parachute helping the overwhelmed dog walker gain control -- too much whole-body rapture upon its deployment.

3) the milk power boost that jump-starts the basketball player -- why is it issuing from the front of his shorts? 

4) the milk vortex charging up the garage band -- I kind of get that because of the classic garage band/milk connection. But the musicians should be playing inside the garage, otherwise they are classified as a driveway band and that is a dead end for a group like this. However, maybe the mom who owns the house told them to go outside because the family cars and power tools aren't holding up under the routine milk dousing, so I understand the band's predicament. And I feel sorry for the actor who portrays the guitar player on the left, the one with the hair. He's never going to live this down.

5) the staircase in the final scene -- it's exquisite. They really nailed that!

MilkPEP -- Milk Life Anthem

After 20 years, The Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP) is shelving its "got milk?" advertising program. It's being replaced by a fascinating new campaign entitled "waste milk?"               

   

This new commercial has made us all feel really weird,

but there's no sense crying over it.

The following is the transcription 
of an actual Facebook message from Swiss Miss 
to the Hot Chocolate Unibrow (HCU) Team:

"Hi Connie - Thanks for reaching out to us here and via email. What a super fun concept! We will most certainly pass this on to our marketing team for their review.  Thank you and thanks for loving our cocoa!"

First of all, you can tell that the above message from Swiss Miss is real, that I'm not making it up, because I typed it out in italics. 

Secondly, because the Hot Chocolate Unibrow is obviously now a thing, I've decided that it should be treated as a proper noun. Proper nouns are words that designate very special items (i.e. Doritos) and, out of respect, need to be capitalized. So from now on, if you write about Hot Chocolate Unibrows, please show us that courtesy.

Also secondly, we are extraordinarily excited about the prospect of sharing our concept with a company like Swiss Miss. They are enormously proud of the way their products taste. The Hot Chocolate Unibrow perfectly supports a great taste message, because HCUs only happen when one is trying to rid one's mug of every last ambrosial liquid globule (Swiss Miss: You may want to write that last sentence down to use as copy in a print ad).

I'm quite certain that we are on the cusp of secret talks with Swiss Miss and I will keep you fully informed of all the details.

When we were growing up, my sisters, my brother and I often burned our mouths on stuff, especially hot chocolate, but also pizza cheese. Time after time, due to our own impatience (I'm not blaming the food items or our mom), we scalded our tongues and then let them cool down and heal over, like igneous rocks do, only with sobbing.

And there were other food related injuries. For instance, we were prone to mistaking our small, kiddie fingers for the fast food french fries we were eating with reckless abandon. This appallingly painful phenomenon -- tender fingers nearly severed by razor sharp incisors -- ended when my mother decided that fast food was bad for us, not for nutritional reasons, but because of our self-mutilation. Either way, she was ahead of the curve.

Now though, when I hear a child cry out suddenly at a restaurant, I wonder aloud if he or she is experiencing french fry/finger confusion and its resulting pain. It's at this point that my husband puts his head on the table and says, in an unduly emphatic way, that no one else has ever had the problem, and p.s. if he had known about it, he would have declined to start a family with me. "Don't be silly," I say, showing him my right index finger with little bite scars running up it like bird tracks in the snow. 

"And don't get me started on you guys biting your fingers when you eat open faced sandwiches," he likes to add. "You're still doing that."

Anyway, let's move on to something else. As kids, we often found ourselves in an eating, then laughing, then choking situation, especially with our littlest sister, Muffie, and especially when our parents were out. We'd all be screaming laughing at the table and suddenly someone would say, "Not It!" Then all eyes went to Muffie who would be bugged-eyed and not breathing. Usually it was our oldest sister, Barb, who would get up, walk around the table, stand behind Muffie, move the hood of her sweatshirt out of the way, and pound her on the back until whatever it was, sometimes popcorn, dislodged itself, allowing her to breathe. Then one of us said, "Now, where were we?" You can't tell me that didn't happen to other families all the time.

Great news! I emailed the people who make Swiss Miss to pitch our idea for the hot chocolate unibrow. Within seconds, a really nice man named DON OTREPLY emailed me back with this promising message:

We have received your submission and will make every effort to respond to your email in the most timely manner possible. Thank you for taking the time to contact us.

Picking up on his sense of urgency, I quickly sent Mr. Otreply another email to express my gratitude but he didn't respond. That's okay though, because he must be busy. I'm sure there are some charts in their business offices showing that winter is the high season for instant cocoa guys. 

I'm quite certain that once Don drills down

on the hot chocolate unibrow, 

he will circle back with me!

I'm freakishly busy trying to pull off this hot chocolate unibrow deal. At the same time I'm pretending that I still have a shred of interest in the rest of my life. Like, right now, while I'm typing this, my husband is trying to teach me how to play darts.

Over the long weekend, I spent hours selecting just the right megastars to wear hot chocolate unibrows in an advertising program for the lucky, progressive, and shrewd instant cocoa company that decides to pay us hundreds of dollars for our idea. I don't want to jinx the process by putting the names of all this talent in writing, but when you see who I've handpicked, the light will go on, and you'll understand the thread that ties this whole thing together (wait, okay scroll down if you want to see).

If you read the last blog post, you know that my nine-year-old niece, Ellie, would like to sell the idea of the hot chocolate unibrow to earn money for some items and activities she'd like to get on with, as she's not getting a whole lot of support from her mother. I told her that the best way to proceed with a big mission like this is to write a business plan so everyone agrees on the direction we are taking. 

Ellie agreed and asked me if I could write one. I frowned and explained to her that, because it's a business plan and not a plan for say a birthday party or something of that nature, I would need for her to ask me to "drill down" on it. I also cautioned her that I expected relaxed but professional on Casual Fridays.

Strategic Business Plan
for the selling of
Hot Chocolate Unibrow Idea

Objective:

Earn money to:  

• Redo Ellie's bedroom
• Acquire several iTunes gift cards 
• Set aside funds for a charity for earmarks

Strategy:

Sell idea for hot chocolate unibrow (HCU) to a manufacturer of instant cocoa products for use in its marketing programs, á la the milk mustache device used in the California Milk Processor Board's "got milk" campaign. 

Tactics:

Connie will write blogs and use facebook to promote the HCU concept, building awareness that will lead to traction that will lead to trending that will lead to thing-ness. 

See if Margot and Greta will do hot chocolate unibrows at their college dining halls over the next few weeks. Institutions of higher learning are hot beds for cultivating exciting new ideas.

If she can find rides, Ellie will hang out at various ice rink concession stands wearing hot chocolate unibrows, casually. When people point to it, she will laugh and say, "I know, right?" 

Once the HCU concept emerges as a popular trend, our team will meet with hot chocolate companies in their boardrooms. We will get dressed up and present our idea of increasing market share by using HCUs in their advertising. We will then ask for a compensation package worth hundreds of dollars. 

• Use charts and other things like that to show instant cocoa executives how the "got milk" campaign changed attitudes and increased consumer awareness that it's okay to drink liquid secreted by the mammary glands of another species. Use eye rolls and other eye movements to imply that the HCU idea will be even more successful, as they are about to see. 

• Through role play, float the idea that milk mustaches are super gross, even on Giselle Bundchen. Make a case that HCUs are only kind of gross; hence consumers will be even more likely to put hot chocolate in their cocoa holes.

• Show time-lapse photography demonstrating that hot chocolate unibrows provide a higher level of on-face staying power than milk mustaches, which are closer to people's mouths where licking can happen. 

• Break into small groups. Serve piping hot cocoa and demonstrate that HCUs are a perfectly safe thing for kids and young adults. This is because a face's unsung hero called the human tongue would be forced to suffer hot chocolate's unyielding heat before the forehead could ever be scalded. Conduct trust falls to reinforce the idea of security.

• Reunite the group. Use weather map technology to show areas of the world where unibrows are considered attractive. Suggest 2015 Azerbaijan roll out. 

From my niece Ellie, a representative of the age group that brought us the the milk mustache, comes another creamy drink/pretend facial hair combination, the hot chocolate unibrow:

Ellie executed a perfect, albeit inadvertent, hot chocolate unibrow last weekend and we've decided to make it a thing. Our goal is for a company like Swiss Miss or Hershey to buy our idea and start using the hot chocolate unibrow in a "got milk" kind of way in its advertising. The company will pay us hundreds of dollars that Ellie will put toward redoing her room (it's been like two years since it was last updated, and her mom is being super unreasonable about helping her out with this). Also, she'll use some of the money to buy herself some iTunes gift cards. The rest of the money she has earmarked for charity -- perhaps helping people with ear marks find employment, housing and cosmetic surgery.

In my last blogpost, I wrote about the time my family put our heads together to come up with a funny question to ask Jon Stewart when we were at a taping of his show. That reminded me of another time when we found ourselves in a comedy writing pressure cooker.

It was seven years ago and my friend Jan Gladstone's daughter Randi was getting married in Florida. They invited our family to come down for a pre-wedding visit, and Margot and Greta spent a lot of time with Randi and her fiance, Timo. A day or two before she walked down the aisle, the bride-to-be asked Margot, who was 13 at the time, if she would stand up and talk at the reception. Randi knew that Margot had been doing stand up comedy ever since she won $100 at a talent show in our town when she was in fourth grade.

Margot accepted the invitation, but didn't have any good material for the occasion. So the four of us went to a hot dog restaurant and started throwing around ideas. We bought Margot some index cards and she wrote the jokes down and ran through it a couple of times. When the time came, she stood on a chair and delivered it while Greta filmed it sideways, which is another family tradition.