Candy Frappe

Why is it that a milkshake becomes trendy when the ambience
is right? I went to the bookstore
looking for inspiration yesterday. I
was greeted at the front door by a sign that read, “Try our new Candy
Frappes.” It featured clear plastic
cups, filled to the brim with frozen coffee-flavored
goodness intermixed with
ground up pieces of my favorite candies. “Yum,” I thought, “I could peruse the writing section and sip my
delicious coffee flavored treat.” Normally, I would deny myself a milkshake in favor of an unsweet tea but
something about the new book smell and the fact that it was called a “Frozen
Frappe” and not a “Blizzard” made it OK, even a little sophisticated.

The nutrition information is about the same but the people
who sit in coffee shops and bookstores and sip Frappes are quite different from
the folks over at the Dairy Queen spooning cookie dough infused ice cream into
their mouths. The latter is a clear,
sometimes sickening, snapshot of American indulgence. The former is a respectable, often even sophisticated, photograph
of pretentious intellectuals at work and play. It’s a scam. Just because the
lady at the Dairy Queen is wearing sweatpants and a banana clip doesn’t make
her any more indulgent than the woman in a business suit with the trendy
haircut at Starbucks. They’re all the
same. American indulgence crosses all
financial, educational and cultural lines. This is what I thought, at least, driving out of the parking lot of the
bookstore, voraciously slurping up the last of my M & M Frappe.