Before Mac Arthur, before Greenbrier, before Lynnhaven, there was Pembroke Mall. And inside Pembroke was our very own Orange Julius! Does anyone know what an Orange Julius is, and why in God's name you would want to order a hamburger from something called Orange Julius?

According to Wikipedia, an Orange Julius is a mixture of orange juice, powdered milk, egg whites, and crushed ice. Way to take advantage of the 80's raw-egg-white-drinking-to-build-protein craze.

I don't know who came up with the idea of colored / flavored sugar in a tube to be consumed straight-up, but he clearly had world domination in mind. Pixy Stix controlled a large portion of the our middle school behavior, between hyping us up and causing us to spend time scraping up enough change to buy more.


I suppose that they had different flavors, although it was hard to tell the difference once your mouth was coated with the powdery stuff. I have to admit, though – the purple ones were not my favorite. For those of us who liked things sour, colorful, and/or cheap, there were those neon ones from the Dollar tree. How annoying was it when neither end would open up all the way or when it was humid outside and it all got stuck together?


Of course, the texture of the original Pixy Stix lended themselves quite well to being snorted. I'm not really sure that we were trying to imitate doing drugs so much as we were fascinated by the idea of a quick delivery system. It was also unbelievably entertaining to be out trick-or-treating and to hear somebody say “whoa, my snot is blue!”


Ah, pure sugar. It's too bad that we refine our tastes as we grow older.

(photos via copyrighteous, flickr x 3)

Fried chicken and DEEP-FRIED biscuits! With honey on top! Mmmm....frying oil and honey taste so good together. (photo via)

Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to find a picture of Pollard's puffs. Not even the kid in the picture is eating a puff. He appears to be eating a dinner roll, or a piece of Hawaiian bread.

Pollard's Chicken has been our go-to chicken joint since I was a kid. It's kind of ghetto inside, and when I was a kid, I would be so embarrassed to go inside. I would think to myself, WTF there is not enough room in here for my whole family! Why do I have to eat my chicken on top of the Pac-Man table?! But now I yearn for their delicious chicken and biscuits.

I found out much later that my parents loved going to Pollard's because it was where they ate dinner after they got married at the Justice of the Peace of Va Beezy back in 1980. That must have been the most tasty, well-seasoned, and juicy love dinner of all.

Ah, the taste of a radioactive-green citrus soda. We all believed that it had more caffeine than any other soda and the fact that our parents hated it - well, that just made us love it even more.

For me and my nerdy KLMS friends, it spawned our version of a margarita: Surge with a healthy dollop of lime sherbet. Oh yes.

Sadly, now that we're adults, we know that it contains less caffeine than Mountain Dew and thus was not pulled for any controversial reason. It was all about the sales. It always was.

(Wikipedia)