Summer and Ice Cream

It's B-A-A-ACK!
It’s B-A-A-ACK!
Spring has finally given Winter a well-earned kick in the groin and sent him flying back to the North Pole, where he will have to wait his turn to have fun with us again. Spring is doing her best to make the pretty flowers bloom and the not-so-pretty pollen waft into the twitching noses of hay fever sufferers.

This means that Summer will be hot on Spring’s tail. In New York City, the first heralds of oncoming Summer are the ice cream trucks. They bring with them the world champion of all maddening earworms:

The Mister Softee Ice Cream Truck Song

This one is right up there with “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” vying for the title of World’s Most Maddening Earworm. It’s so bad that New York City officially declared it noise pollution. All ice cream trucks are now forbidden to play their tunes when they are parked somewhere. They can only play them when they are in motion. Just to show that they are not partial, the New York City lawmakers imposed this rule on all ice cream trucks, including the ones that play that out-of-tune version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Sometimes our City Council does something right.

New York City can now breathe easier during the summer – well, as easy as you can breathe when it’s hot and the humidity is so thick you can swim through it. Mr. Softee’s anthem can only be heard in transit. This gives it just enough time to get it stuck in your brain, so that you are singing it in your head even when there is no ice cream truck within a two-mile radius. Half the radios in New York City get tuned to the oldies station, in hopes that they will play something like Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” or Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” because that way people can replace the ice cream truck earworm with another one that at least won’t jiggle every brain cell.

The only people who actually like the Mr. Softee Song are – you guessed it – kids. The sound of that little tinkly tune makes them salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.

KID: Hey, Mom! The ice cream man is here! I want a big chocolate-vanilla cone with lots of sprinkles! Can I have one, Mom? Please, please, please, please!

MOM: You can have five of them if it will stop that freakin’ music!

This convinces the man in the truck that the tune he himself has learned to ignore will help him sell enough ice cream to retire and buy an island. The saga continues.

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9 thoughts on “Summer and Ice Cream”

  1. It doesn’t bother me because, after all this time, whenever I hear the ice cream truck music I instantly turn back into a 5 year old. This can be a problem when I’m driving …

  2. I can’t say I like this rule at all, at all. Can the ice-cream truck drivers not get around it by traveling at the slowest possible speeds? I’ll come over and push the trucks if needs be. This is far too important an issue to let pass.

    1. I’m sure that they travel at the slowest possible speeds when they are driving on back streets. The kids have to be able to catch up!

  3. At least there’s an ice cream payoff with the Mister Softee jingle, unlike that vicious Small World earworm. 😉

    1. True. Mr. Softee ice cream has a texture like white grease, and you wonder if it’s real or fake ice cream, but sometimes on a really hot day it’s nice.

      I have a feeling that Mr. Softee ice cream is a lot like Dairy Queen ice cream — fabulous in the old days, but deteriorated since then.

  4. The average ice cream entrepreneur driving around in those vehicles go mad at about the same rate that convenience store employees do who hear that chime over and over again each time their doors open as customers enter.

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