Fruits and Veggies Please

Is there a radio commercial that drives you crazy? There is for me. Its a product called Balance of Nature and it’s on every station I listen to. I can’t escape it. The so-called real users giving testimonials sound like the cast of Seinfeld. There is The Costanzas and the Sienfields arguing about how good they feel and who feels better than the other, and who is going to live longer when they move to Florida. It’s maddening. The doctor that invented this pill sounds Scottish, or possibly British, but is probably from New Jersey.  I wonder if he has a secret lab hidden on the moors. Does he test this product on his sheep? Is he healthy? How did he get the Sienfield actors to push his pills?

A hundred or so years ago, Texas was awash with traveling medicine shows that hawked “cure-alls” for any malady. I suspect this is a more modern and polished version using the airwaves instead of a wagon and a banjo player.

I’m a hardcore skeptic by nature. When my oncologist prescribed my cancer treatment, asked him if he had tried it himself. He hadn’t but said it worked well on his relatives back in Pakistan. They are still up and running. I gave it a shot.

I ran into an old-old friend yesterday at HEB. Fidor is pushing 90 and his wife Elma Ruth is about the same age. I didn’t recognize them. Who are these people? Had replicants been grown in pods?

Fidor now has a full head of black hair, a big mustache, and muscles like Charles Atlas. His teeth are as white as Chicklets. Elma Ruth’s once thin white hair is now blond and flows to her waist. Her ample bosom would make Jane Mansfield envious and she looks like Elke Sommer on vacation. These people are old as dirt and are not suppose to look this way. What the hell I asked, ” what are you people eating and who is your plastic surgeon?”

Fidor, smiling, his white Chicklet teeth casting a glare on the wall, said, ” Elma Ruth and I have been taking Balance of Nature for three weeks now and we feel fifty years younger. She wants to start another family.”

I bid them goodbye, hobbled home, got on my laptop and placed my order.