Anti-Preppy Kit from the Eighties!

Ah, yes, the early Eighties. The beginning of the "Me Decade". An innocent time, when innocent, gentle jokes saturated the media and got flogged to death through overexposure, instead of the stuff nowadays that you actively *wish* would get flogged to death in a more literal sense. Mean, nasty, cynical things like the Craptacular was the last thing on the mind of a substantially younger Mojo, so chock full of promise, as she kissed public school goodbye forever and entered the hallowed halls of a private college, complete with hidden dorm fees and "Whaddaya mean, 'that'll be seven hundred dollars'? They're only textbooks!" at the campus store.

Although a thousand miles away from family and friends, Mojo kept an active correspondence with a variety of people. Sadly, many of these are now lost to posterity, or perhaps used on someone else's posterity when there was no toilet paper to be had. The point I am trying to make here is, there was a running joke between myself and my Favorite Older Sister. I called her "Muffy" and she called me "Tiff" and letters from her would begin "Dearest Tiff" and proceed to tell me how mean Mummy and Daddy were when they fired the gardener. It was all part and parcel of beating every conceivable bit of humor one could glean from the one-joke wonder that was The Preppy Handbook.

Prep-bashing was all the rage back then, and even though my family regularly shopped at Bean's and summered on Mount Desert (okay, it was camping, not some splendid palatial second home, but "summered" makes Mojo sound like one of them classy-type broads), we were not wealthy enough or socially connected enough to bother with private school, so we considered it okay for us to mock our social betters. (Mojo has since learned the self-control and decorum necessary to move in such circles, as maturity took its deadly toll. I mean, let's face it: mocking things is SO juvenile. Only a BEAST would do it. But even as she floats among today's patricians--and charms them with an occasional refined, throaty laugh--deep down Mojo knows the joke is on them. For under her polished exterior lurks the scrappy little street fighter of her youth. Well, okay, maybe not really a street fighter, but like, someone who might accidentally tease a really sensitive person until they burst into tears, and then feel obligated to buy them ice cream until the snivelling stops.)

Ummmm, ice cream. Hey, how come you can only get green tea ice cream at Asian food restaurants? I suppose I should be grateful, 'cuz if I could buy it by the half gallon I would soon be in physical and financial trouble. But it's so utterly delicious I don't know why all the ultra-rich premium ice cream pint people haven't JUMPED on it. Maybe it's not sweet enough for them, but that's what I like best about green tea ice cream--it's not so disgustingly sweet. If I were a wealthy preppy sort I would make Daddy buy the ice cream factory and switch it over so it would only make green tea ice cream. Until I got sick of it, I guess.

(You see, this is the sort of hare-brained thinking that has made Mojo the success she is today. But even Mojo's utter genius cannot make green tea ice cream appear out of nowhere, as if by magic. I bought an ice cream maker and downloaded some recipes off the internet, but it's not like I have a pint of whipping cream just sitting around the house all the time. So even the most perfect of us have our private failings. So think about that, the next time you see Mojo's smiling face, and know that even she, despite her seemingly perfect life, harbors these private sorrows deep in her heart.)

The Preppy Handbook deftly skewered such seemingly perfect lifestyles, but its success launched a bunch of copycats and bandwagon jumpers and dead-horse floggers. (Unlike TODAY, when today's more sophisticated audience demands so much more for their entertainment, and entertainment providers work so incredibly hard to bring fresh, original NEW programming instead of rehashing the successful-but-now-tired formulae of their competitors.) One such bandwagon-jumping dead-horse-flogger is this item, which I include in this exciting kit. "Prep-Away" aerosol preppy deterrent