Growing up in the California desert 30 years ago, Darlene Waddington decided that she wanted to start a roadside attraction for a time, as she calls it, "when I inevitably turned into a mentally questionable old lady." Cement dinosaur was taken, so was fiberglass gorilla, baby doll collection and rocks from famous places. "Since I was too immature and sulky as a teen to go out and get a job, I had very little money," she explains. "I only had loose change to spend on my favorite food, candy, and from this the idea was born—collect the wrappers from the candy I ate." Thirty years later, she is the proprietress of the Candy Wrapper Museum, a collection of several thousand wrappers. That has meant eating—or at least unwrapping—a whole lot of questionable candy with a whole lot of questionable wrappers.

"There's the 'What the hell were they thinking?' wrapper," Darlene explains, "such as , a pack of candy cigarettes with a 1980sstyle aerobics babe on the front. Then there's the whimsical foreign wrapper with a kooky name or graphics, like my box that looks like it's going to take you on a psychedelic trip. There are technology-based wrappers that will become funnier over time, such as candy and . You can't pass up diet-trendy wrappers like the Low Carb Diet Sugar Free Natural Flavors Gummy Bears (which tasted awful, by the way). Wrappers with unwholesome themes are great, such as , featuring an anthropomorphic baby pig defecating in a honey pot."

With thousands of wrappers, choosing a favorite is impossible. "I love my ," she says. "Many of my wrappers never fail to make me laugh when I run across them, making me happy to have had the foresight to save them: my commemorative mint patty, my bar, my and my box of featuring a contest in which you could win a chance to meet Neil Sedaka."

Darlene didn't get that chance to meet the heartthrob via a box of Junior Mints, but as it turned out, it was another candy wrapper that brought her the love of her life. "Back in 1975," she reminisces, "when I was faced with the solemn task of choosing the first—cornerstone—item for my collection, I picked a box of . It was a good candy, like tasty candy corn shaped into brightly colored mice, and it came in a funky Mighty Mouse-like pop art carton. Little did I know that at the same time a cute boy 2,600 miles away in a small town in Pennsylvania was reaching for Nice Mice too." Thirty years later, that same Pennsylvanian "for some god-forsaken reason, was on a lifelong quest to find any information about that long-defunct beloved candy. After years of searching in vain, he finally came across my site shortly after I had posted it. He saw a picture of me and thought, 'That's my dream girl!'"

Boy emails girl, and "after a prolific stream of 'chummy' emails between the two of us, we finally fessed up that we had madly fallen in love long distance, and he moved out here to be with me. We'll be getting married next June. We're arranging to have an organ version of '' play as our bridal processional!"

SWINDLE MAGAZINE
No. 10
Page 36

"Sugar, Sugar Wedding March" by Dana Countryman