She was my sister’s age, five years older then me. All went well until that fateful night when I dashed these unsuspecting brine shrimp into the fibers of my cheap Kmart carpet in a fit of shrimp-icide.ĭoes “growing up” reconcile an unrealized promise with reality and the ensuing tension between satisfaction and disappointment? We were supposed to decorate Easter Eggs with our neighbor, Lynn. I don’t think I ever had any friends with Sea Monkeys. You want to control a lesser, smaller being by exercising a sovereignty you do not know…but believe is there for the asking (or taking). The desire to own a pet has little to do with caring for another. While playing toys are bade to do things. All children wish to dominate, and exercise some sort of master/servant relation, don’t they? The child is in charge. This desire to command living creatures lies at the grubby, snotty center of every child’s wish to possess a pet. I wanted to hatch a smiling family of Sea Monkeys, grow my own friends and teach them tricks. I wanted to build a hovercraft with a vacuum cleaner motor and float down the street, over the heads of my adoring friends and neighbors. The Sea Monkey advertisement, often a quarter or half-page, immediately garnered your attention with its 4 color glory. The potential of learning magic, ventriloquism, getting rich (quick) and growing a real, live Venus fly-trap was the kind of future I saw for myself. I’m still searching for these unrequited promises. The ads for Johnson Smith on the back of comic books and within the pages of Boys Life lured me, promising fun, amusement, novelty and the adulation of friends and family. ![]() Johnson-Smith was the fine purveyor of the novel and exotic: chattering teeth, whoopee cushions, x-ray specs, get rich quick schemes, ancient coins, space ice-cream, space pens, space alien exposés. Do you remember Sea Monkeys? I’m buying more Sea Monkeys, making up for a transgression almost 25 years past. You could see them ‘swimming’ around, maybe 3/4” or a full inch. My first, and only Sea Monkeys (gasping?) as they’re absorbed into my unwanted rug. I shook out my maroon dorm room rug (a perfunctory pre-Freshman year purchase that I really didn’t like) and knocked the home of my Sea Monkeys to the floor. The Latter Day Johnson-Smith: Archie McPhee, purveyor of Funny Gifts, Toys, Novelties and Weird Stuff photo:M.
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