4:03 pm | 04 February 2003 | Hershey goes, Hershey goes again...

Agent Summers: "I was never into Hershey bars and then one summer a friend forced Dave and me to climb this mountain in Tennessee with him with the promise of a huge spaghetti dinner at the camp when we arrived. Like 6 vertical hours later we got to the top and found out we missed dinner and the only thing to eat were Hershey bars. And ever since then i have LOVED them. Isn't that a fabulously interesting story? No, it isn't. But i am so so so bored."

When I was a kid we would visit Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is where the Hershey Foods Corporation is. The entire town has weird chocolate allusions and thematics--street lights are shaped like Hershey's kisses with the light coming from their bases--some foil-wrapped, some nude--and the streets are named, like, COCOA and ALMOND. Then there's Hershey Park, simulatanously lovable and really, really satanic.

The park has two parts--there's HERSHEY'S CHOCOLATE WORLD, which is the visitor's centre where one can take the Chocolate Tour Ride and actually see the freaky, rows-of-metal-nipples-having machines plopping out Kisses, inexorably, for all eternity, at an astounding rate. (Here's where I really wish they had a 1950s-era man's voice going "THESE ARE TIMES OF PROGRESS AND INDUSTRY!") At the end, you get some chocolate, and then you get to beg your mom to buy the twenty-pound bar that is controlling your entire 60-pound body from across the entire gift shop, but she will say no.

The other part is "the cleanest and greenest theme park in the world," HERSHEYPARK (yes, in one frighteningly German-looking aggregate). Check out the freaky (i know i have said freaky about eight times already, but really, there's no other word) chocolate characters on the homepage--at the real park, those are people in costumes, and it's incredibly horrible.

We went the first time when i was probably nine, during one of our inhumane American summers. While waiting in line for the gondola-type ride, I got heat stroke and passed out and when i came to there was a man in a giant REESE'S PEANUT BUTTER CUPS costume looming over me. Aaaaagh! I passed out again.

(When asked whether she'd like to contribute an anecdote to this little saga, the Tape Wizard said "I don't know...i think Mom said that Nightmonkey (our little brother) got diarrhea." !!!)

I originally started writing this thinking that I would expose the bizarre and awful horridness of Hershey. But, you know, they're not all that bad (at any rate, who am I to say anything derogatory? Even as i sit here now, one cheek is crammed with a crappy free Palmer's chocolate heart*). So plop on, little Kisses-maker. Plop on. clm.

*Not because i have a valentine, mind you.