Confessions of a Free Sample Connoisseur

Let me admit, via anecdote, to a little folly that doesn’t exactly cast me as candidate for anybody’s brain trust.

When I first moved to Connecticut last year and had spent a day or two in the darkness of our little apartment attempting to recuperate from the trauma of driving cross-country for fourteen hours with two felines, one incontinent and one who protested as if she were being tortured with sharp bamboo stakes for the trip’s duration, I at last ventured outside for a walk into the picturesque surroundings of lovely Old Greenwich. It was the height of springtime. There were ducks on the pond across the street. Flowers bloomed on every tree. I took a deep breath of the fresh air, then began strolling down into the quaint little village.

Along the path, I passed a woman with a double stroller—a stroller of gothic proportions that probably cost more than my car and was roughly of the same bulk and manufacturer as the Munster Mobile. I smiled and nodded at the woman pushing the contraption. Her skin was coal black; the babies in her stroller were blond and white as Wonder Bread.

A couple of minutes later, I passed another dark-skinned woman pushing another stroller with a little blond girl in its seat. When I passed another woman of color with a couple of more little Aryans in tow, I innocently thought to myself, rather impressed, Gosh, there sure are a lot of interracial marriages in this neighborhood.

Then some other part of my brain mocked back, more accurately, You blithering idiot. Those women are NANNIES.

There are indeed a lot of nannies in this particular neck of the woods. They’re far outnumbered, however, by a species I’ve come to think of as the professional Connecticut Mommy. Now, I have to preface my remarks by saying that I know many mothers with small children, and it’s rare that I bear any animosity toward them. Hey, I had a mother myself. It’s hard work. And not all mothers in this state qualify to be a Connecticut Mommy.

When you see one, though, you know them as a breed apart. They’re the younger ones wearing lululemon for every occasion, whose long blond hair is always in pert ponytails. They have a smartphone in one hand, and the keys to their BMWs in the other. They’re the ones who have grooves across the tops of their palms from pushing their strollers, which they strategically use on sidewalks in the same way locomotives have cowcatchers, or which they nose out into traffic at crosswalks to test the volume and velocity of vehicular traffic. They’re an entitled breed with above-average wealth who pick up entire dinners at local caterers so that they can spend their afternoons scrapbooking their baby’s last play date, and who hire babysitters so they can crowd the Cos Cob Starbucks and meet other professional Connecticut Mommies to hog the tables and talk about . . . well, I don’t know what Mommy stuff they talk about, because I can never get a table there. (I swear, I can’t go to that branch any longer. It’s like a Starbucks stocked with identical blond clones from a Talbots catalogue.)

I’ll sum it up thusly: Connecticut Mommies often shop at Whole Foods Market without using a single coupon. Oh yes.

Marvel at that, if you will.

You see, I know much about the Connecticut Mommies because they and I have similar schedules. I have something of an aversion, bordering on morbid phobia, of driving on I-95 anytime between the hours of, oh, noon and midnight., when for a stretch of about fifteen miles the highway becomes a parking lot. So if I need to run an errand to a supermarket beyond the usual trip to Stop ’n’ Shop, or if I have to visit CostCo or head to the mall, I find myself doing it at the same time as all the professional Connecticut Mommies. I narrow my eyes when I see them and know that I’m going to have to do some nimble stroller dodging. Their eyes flick over me, note my sex, and with some special Mommy-only arsenal that you’d think the military might capitalize upon, render me invisible not only to each other, but to any clerks, shop assistants, or cashiers in a fifty-foot vicinity.

A professional Connecticut Mommy will think nothing of making me wait in line for thirty minutes at Kinko’s to pick up a simple completed order, while she makes the life-or-death decision of whether to have the staff there design birthday invitations to her darling’s first birthday in eighteen-point Comic Sans, or sixteen-point Comic Sans. Eighteen? Sixteen? Eighteen? What does the clerk think? In fact, what do all the clerks think? Sixteen? The clerks are rendered helpless by whatever dark magics the Connecticut Mommies work and become utterly helpless to multitask or utter the words Let one of us help this poor schmuck standing behind you, lady, it’ll just take a sec. All they can do, like stone statues before Medusas, is stare slack-jawed and motionless from the place of their final doom.

All right. Maybe I sound bitter. But you know why? It’s because when it comes to free food samples, Connecticut Mommies don’t respect the system.

I’m something of a free sample connoisseur, you see. (Some might say free sample whore. To-may-to, to-mah-to.) In casual conversation, I’ll get all Queen Victoria on the subject: if a supermarket isn’t putting out little samples of crackers and tortilla chips and waffle-cut pretzels, they are not an establishment we care to frequent, I will tell you with an upturned tilt of my nose. Why, when I was living on my own in Detroit and had to economize on groceries, I could get a free lunch out of an hour’s tour of local places that served free samples. An amuse-bouche of frozen chickpeas in Tikka Masala sauce at Trader Joe’s might be first on my menu. It would be followed by a delightful chef’s sampler platter at Costco of fried cheese, animal-shaped chicken fingers, bread-and-butter, and a delicious fruit-flavored chewable kid’s jelly vitamin. Then at Papa Joe’s in Birmingham, the epicenter of sampledom, I could really get down to business with their abundantly-shared cheese breads, fruits, apple slaw, three to four deli meats, scones, various crackers, cookies, and flavored popcorns, and store-made peanut butter if I needed something to stick to my ribs.

And the nicest thing about free samples in stores, as everyone knows, is that they’re completely devoid of calories. Really. I believe there are scientific studies.

There’s a simple system to these free samples. One approaches the station at which they’re being offered. One takes a single sample. One immediately moves on. People in Michigan knew how to do it. Everywhere else I’ve been, children or not, people understood how it worked. The thing about professional Connecticut Mommies, as I was saying, is that they don’t respect the system. Like the U.S. judicial branch, the system is there for a reason. It keeps us all equally protected. It keeps us from devolving into savages, people!

But no. These days, Stew Leonard’s is my current mecca for free samples. There the kindly bakers think absolutely nothing of taking muffins hot out of the oven, detaching the muffin tops from the bottoms, and then tossing the halves into an enormous basket for people to enjoy. That’s a whole muffin top, people. Not some measly mini-muffin. A big, fat, dome of fluffy baked goodness. But the moment that basket hits the counter, there’s sure to be a squadron of Connecticut Mommies zooming into formation with their strollers to assemble around it in such a way that no one of a non-Mommy persuasion can infiltrate past the spiked wheels of their rolling artillery.

They stand there. They sample the baked goods. They do not move on. They say "Hmm!" They munch and stare at the muffins as if they’re actually considering buying them. But they don’t. They say "Hmm!" again. And then, horror of horrors, boldly and without remorse or shame they will help themselves to another sample. Sometimes even a third.

In the meantime, I’m standing there hopping from one powerless foot to the other, barely able to restrain myself from yelling out all kinds of misogynistic vulgarities that would end with DAMN WOMAN I JUST WANT TO GET ME MY CALORIE-FREE CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFIN TOP, YO.

If during my muffin deprivation I’ll spy the woman by the hot donut machine setting out a punch bowl of donut holes, I can be sure to find that by the time I fleetly trip over, the Connecticut Mommies will have somehow materialized, like the Doctor’s Tardis, around the greasy machine, and that the bowl will be empty. Every trace of cinnamon sugar will have been sucked up into the time vortex. They might rely on Rosalias and Marias to do the vacuuming at home, but dang, do they know how to Hoover up the thick-cut sweet potato chips from their sample station. They stand in front of the cheese platters, spearing cube after cube of white cheddar, flaunting the unspoken rules of consumption and not even seeming to care. They block the aisles around the table of buffalo chicken spread on tiny crackers, so that no one with male genitalia may sally forth.

They’re even flocking like vultures at the samples of salad in the produce section, and who in their right minds wants a sample of salad? It’s another scientific fact that adding greenery to the free sample diet upsets its delicate nutritional balance.

It’s rude. It’s upsetting. And it’s even, from time to time, forced me to utter a statement so blasphemous that my younger self (that is, a younger self who still believed in the goodness and simplicity of the free sample ecosystem) would be shocked and disillusioned beyond belief to hear it muttered from my traitorous lips: “That’s okay, I didn’t want that stinky free sample, anyway.”

In this state, it only takes four Connecticut Mommies to be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and leave in their horrible wake nothing but ruin, crumbs, and my own personal starvation. Save for disguising myself as a professional Mommy, I know of no recourse. Yet I couldn’t pull it off—I can attest from experience that I look no good in a ponytail and form-fitting yoga clothes.

Plus there’s the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to emulate their poor example and take more than a single serving. After all, my own mommy taught me to share.