R E C I P E

Peep Waldorf Salad

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T A B L E++T A L K

Should high school reading lists be required to include minority and women authors? Weigh in on the book quota debate in Table Talk's Education area

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R E C E N T L Y

Not waiting to inhale
By Dawn MacKeen
Joycelyn Elders on why teens are going up in smoke
(04/09/98)

Dear Daughter: Go to jail. Love, Mom
By Lori Leibovich and Dawn MacKeen
Pro-family advocates would rather pass judgment on Monica Lewinsky's mom than on the government forcing her to testify against her child
(04/08/98)

The water lilies look splotchy up close
By Polly Shulman
The artist is the hero in these sensuous children's books
(04/07/98)

The fun police
By Diane Lore
Being your kid's killjoy isn't as fun as it's cracked up to be
(04/06/98)

Women beware women
By Katie Roiphe
Our ongoing national catfight has revealed an unpleasant truth: Women have always betrayed each other
(04/03/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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KATE MOSES | As mystifying as our children's innocent passions for the unctuous or saccharine stations of childhood -- Rainbow Brite ponies, Barney, late-career Raffi -- are our own early, misguided tastes. As a kid, I blissed out every Easter on Peeps, those squat chorus lines of yellow marshmallow chicks, now available to a new generation of candy fiends in chick and bunny forms and in a variety of unappetizing colors (purple bunnies, turquoise chicks -- the mind and stomach reel). In my lurid youth I could eat a whole package of them at a sitting, deftly picking shreds of Easter grass from their sticky sides, though I was so charmed by their chickie shape that on occasion I made them into toys, poking pipe-cleaner legs into their undersides and propping them on furniture in my doll house. My brothers and I conducted scientific taste-tests on the relative qualities of peepish marshmallow over time: How hard would they get after a week? Two weeks? If you waited until Halloween?

I took a bite of Peep again recently, a nod to my fond remembrance of Peeps past. Yes, I felt the enamel on my teeth curl back like wood shavings, and no, I can't say that I swooned Proust-like with the exquisite pleasure of memory. Believe me, I will peep no more forever. But one particular scrim of my childhood did rise up before me. Peeps of aggressive sweetness, unvanquishable multiplicity and radioactive color schemes reminded me: A passion for Peeps ended my age of innocence.

Easter was my favorite holiday as a child. I loved the new dresses and white lace-cuffed socks and slick Mary Jane shoes and the big fat basket overflowing with bad candy. I was also an extremely pious little girl who'd taken first Communion early because our parish priest had singled me out to the nuns and the rest of the catechism class as a true student of God. I felt the great, pompous weight of my holiness when I became a communicant, and I remember lying in bed on Saturday nights concocting bogus confessions designed to make me look noble in the eyes of the Lord: "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I planned to save my artichoke heart for my little brother, but I was so weary from helping my mother change the cat litter that I forgot and ate it myself. What should my penance be?" As self-righteous and ultimately cynical as I was, I still believed in the Easter Bunny and other assorted magical agents of childhood bounty. (In a bizarre theological misapprehension, I decided that the Easter Bunny was actually some sort of understudy for the Lamb of God, who I assumed was too frail and bandy-legged to make the Easter egg rounds.)

For most of my young life we spent every Easter at the sunny home of my mother's aunt, who lived at the top of an oak-dotted hill across the bay from San Francisco. There was always a massive egg hunt for the kids before the whole family and lots of friends and neighbors gorged on a buffet of ham and scalloped potatoes. Later in the afternoon, everyone stripped off their holiday finery and lounged around the pool, the adults holding their sweat-beaded cocktail glasses aloft and surreptitiously lifting jelly beans from nearby baskets, the kids wrapped in sopping towels reading Archie comics on the hot pavement or playing loud, splashy games of Marco Polo. Easter at my great-aunt's house was, to my mind, truly miraculous: When I was 4, my older brother found a trembling black-and-white bunny in his basket; another year, my cousin Peggy got a long-legged baby goat wearing a wide satin ribbon and chewing through the rope that tied it to the pool house door. Another time my big cousin Mark took us one by one into his bedroom, where a Great Dane puppy was sleeping in a wicker dog bed, safe from the hubbub of the egg hunt outside.

N E X T__P A G E: My turn for a ... pony?