Strollerderby : zac efron

Hannah Montana's Gone Fruity

JeanneSager — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:16:00 GMT

I'm all for a brand using its sway with kids for good, but do we really need Hannah Montana bananas?

What about Mickey Mouse apples? High School Musical avocados?

Disney has gotten healthy to face the childhood obesity crisis head on, cutting ties with McDonald's (you'll notice there are no Disneyfied happy meals on your summer road trip this year) and slapping giant mouse ears on good, wholesome fare.

So, is it working? According to a look by the Washington Post, yes. When supermarket chain Winn-Dixie linked its bagged apples to High School Musical, sales spiked by forty-seven percent. The Disney Garden line is now appearing in eighteen of the top twenty mass and grocery retailers in the states, and sales grew seventy percent from 2007 to 2008.

I can admit I've fallen victim. My daughter needed a grab and go snack, and she saw Mickey apple slices on the shelves. She asked because they were Mickey. I bought because they were apples. With the same characters in a different aisle on sugar-packed "fruit" snacks, the real thing worked for me. We've also been known to pick up Princess soup because she begged for princesses, and my first introduction to Hannah Montana came in the supermarket when my daughter started shrieking about the pop star on her yogurt. Again, yogurt, much better than potato chips! Trust me - their branding is working on my impressionable three-year-old.

But I'm not sure how I feel about Disney selling health food to my kid. Is it better than peddling the junk? Sure. But does it have to be either or? I shy away from Sesame Street's organic pasta and breastfast offerings too, because as much as we all love Cookie Monster, he's not making me feel better about a processed box of waffles. And I'm not ready for the forecasted Mickey whole wheat chicken nuggets to replace the homemade version I make and freeze in my own kitchen.

Frankly, I'd prefer my kid make her food choices based on things like "amount of whole grains included" or "no trans-fats." I'd like to think she'd pick up an apple because we live in New York and have raised her on some of the nation's best apples, not because there's a cartoon character stamped on the flesh. Ditto avocados. They're fantastically flavorful and you can't have guacamole (yum) withouth them - so do we really need Zac Efron's mug to get them in my cart and on her plate?

Disney is such a powerful brand, I'm happy to see it inching back from the heart attack on a plate foodstuffs its traditionally backed. For parents who have had to measure just buying a requested item over the tantrum in the middle of the supermarket, it's definitely good news. Trust me, been there, heard the screeching. But I can't help wishing food would just go back to being food, no Hannah Montana, no Elmo, no Mickey. It's why I've fought the organic branding too.

Because in fifteen years, she won't be picking food because it has her favorite superhero printed on the front of the bag. She'll just have to go with her gut, and I'd like to think it's one filled with healthy choices.

Image: Washington Post

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Mom Buys High School Musical Star's Condoms: Would You?

JeanneSager — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:16:00 GMT

If your first reaction to news that High School Musical star Zac Efron's mom buys his condoms is a grimace, don't worry. I don't like thinking of my three-year-old one day having sex either.

But Efron is twenty, and his mom wants him to be safe. Wouldn't you?

When photos of Efron and girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens surfaced, showing them at what appeared to be a sex shop, Efron says his mom confronted him. But she admitted she knew already that he was sexually active - and she showed it by stocking his Christmas stocking with an economy-sized box of condoms.

I don't know that I'd be quite that showy. A box slipped under the pillow or left on the bedroom desk, maybe. Shoved in the Christmas stocking? Er, reserve that for socks and underwear Ma!

But it's nice to see a mother who understands you need to set the squeamishness aside if you want to protect your kids. Remember - I'm not talking about a three-year-old, but if a teen is having sex, and you know it, ignoring it is not going to make it go away. Neither is screaming, yelling or riding them about it. Once it's happened, you have to get cracking.

The problem? A 2000 survey by the Kaiser Foundation showed thirty percent of sexually active teens are too embarrassed to actually condoms (although eighty-seven percent said they believed they were somewhat or very effective at preventing pregnancy, followed by eighty-four who believe they can protect against HIV/AIDS and seventy-two percent against STDs). That's nearly a third of all sexually active kids.

Would you really want to run the risk that your kid is one of the three in ten who won't buy them? Is it worth saving yourself the embarrassment to have to have someone call you Grandma?

So would you follow Mrs. Efron's lead? If you already knew your child was sexually active, would you buy them birth control?

Image: LA Times

Girl Wins Hannah Montana Tickets With Fake Essay

Madeline Holler — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I have had countless conversations about Hannah Montana over the past couple of weeks, which is stunning, considering I don't think I had uttered the rather catchy (and fake) name more than once or twice total before that. In any case, all of the discussions involved one or more of these three elements: first-graders (first-graders!); $450 concert tickets (for a fake singer!); mothers living through their daughters (in this day and age!).

Until today, the sickest anecdote came from my aunt-in-law, a second-grade teacher, who told me about a first-grader at her school. The girl's mom shelled out nearly $2,000 for four concert tickets, plus transportation and dinner for the mother-daughter pairs in a limo that was taking them on the four-hour round trip. Did they open the wet bar too? Stand through the sunroof and lift up their Hanna Montana concert tees?

That story got trumped, though, when I came across this: one Texas mother's strategy to get her daughter (a first-grader ... it's always first-graders!) to a sold-out Hanna Montana concert.

The details:

Club Libby Lu, a Chicago-based store that sells clothes, accessories and other crap for young girls (we'll need to table our discussion of THIS particular merchandiser of hooker lifestyle for the pre-breast-budded for another time) sponsored a writing contest. The prize was a makeover at Club Libby Lu, a blonde HM wig and tickets for the Albany, N.Y., concert (where the debt-ridden Disney fans go to hang out with other first-graders and their moms, I presume).

The winning essay began: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." You know where this is going.

The girl's daddy didn't die this year in or out of Iraq. The named father wasn't even listed with the defense department. Instead, like customers leaving Libby Lu, the adoring fans of Hannah Montana, and anyone with a vagina appearing on the Disney Channel, that heart-breaking winning essay was all heavily made up.

Says the mother:

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win."
Charming! Inspiring! A real warm holiday story, plus years of therapy for her humiliated and/or devastated daughter.

Here's the kicker for me: the company is reviewing the matter and "considering taking away the girl's tickets." Considering? This isn't a case-closed kind of thing? Oh, and that would also mean the mother -- already far behind the starting line on modeling, for her daughter, honesty, perspective, pride, those kinds of things -- hasn't given the tickets back? Doesn't she ...? Isn't she ...? Can someone please explain this to me?

Wasn't I just saying people are such entitled jackasses?

Strollerderby : zac efron

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Mom Buys High School Musical Star's Condoms: Would You?

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Girl Wins Hannah Montana Tickets With Fake Essay