Kiera Munko ’24
A few of my friends and I were out playing at recess one day in elementary school. As usual, we were playing a game we had come up with. We were always coming up with different games to play, but often we would play pretend. We would come up with a plot, and then we would each create a character for ourselves. Although the games we came up with had varying plots, there was one part of them that was constant: the age of our characters. Every time we made new characters, they would be teenagers.
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As a kid, Tootsie Pops were one of my favorite things. My grandma came over every Friday, and she would always bring me and my brother Tootsie Pops. Not only were they delicious, but I always found the commercial for them very entertaining. It was an old commercial from 1982 that lasted 30 seconds, and it was a classic. I would always see it when I was watching TV. The commercial starts with a boy holding a Tootsie Pop and walking up to a turtle. He asks the turtle, “Mr. Turtle, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”
The turtle responds, “I never made it without biting…ask Mr. Owl.”
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I didn’t dislike being a kid. I never thought of it in a negative light. I just found the thought of being a teenager exciting. They had phones, they could drive, and they seemed so mature. It wasn’t just the thought of being a teenager though. I just thought it could be cool to be older in general. I would see the eighth graders at my school and be in awe, thinking how I couldn’t wait to be their age.
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The boy then walks over to the owl and asks the same question, “Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”
The owl takes the Tootsie Pop from the boy, quickly unwrapping it and saying, “Let’s find out.”
He then starts licking the Tootsie Pop, counting “One, two, three,” and then he bites the Tootsie Pop. The owl hands the Tootsie Pop stick back to the boy, giving him his final answer of three licks.
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Outside of school, everyone around me was older: my brother, my cousins, and of course all the adults in my family. I was the youngest in my family. As the classic youngest sibling, I would copy almost everything my brother did. My cousins and brother were all around the same age, but I was a few years behind. I wanted to skip past the years, to get to the “good part,” the part that many people I knew were at.
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After this there is a visual of six Tootsie Pops being unwrapped, then being narrowed down to the center, and finally reaching the center through a bite. During this, the narrator comes in, saying “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.”
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As a kid, I was always eager to grow up. I wanted the years to go by faster so that I could get to the “good part.” Now that I’m at the “good part,” I wish that I had savored the years as a kid.
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The boy never really found out how many licks it took to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop, and neither did the viewer. Everyone who tried ended up biting it to get to the center. Everyone was just eager to get to the center, ignoring the rest of the Tootsie Pop.