Great Jelly Plop Plunge Now Has a Generic Flavor

How to make raspberry gelatin for 32,000:

Start with 4,000 family-style packets. Mix them up in 50 20-gallon plastic trash bins. Shut them in a cold-storage locker in Mira Mesa for a couple of days. Then drive them downtown, cordon off a city block, and empty the gelatin into a 1,000-gallon spa.

And jump in.

That’s the Leukemia Society’s idea of fun. The San Diego chapter has scheduled the fund-raising event for July 26. They’re calling it the Jelly Plop Plunge--because the makers of Jello asked the Houston chapter to quit using their name.

“They felt their image was eating--not sweaty bodies swimming in it,” said Susan Dean, the Leukemia Society spokeswoman in San Diego. “So we thought of calling it the Gelatin Plop Plunge. But that doesn’t roll off the tongue.”

The spa will be on B Street between Columbia and State with a slide to send bodies hurtling into the ooze. People who round up at least $25 in sponsorships will be permitted to take the plunge, donating the money to the society.

Pat Patton, co-chairman of the July 26 Waiters’ Race and Jelly Plop Plunge, is a veteran gelatin navigator who last did the Houston plunge three years back. He went in head-first with a snorkel and his six-year-old son on his back in 95-degree heat.

“Slimey is probably a good word,” recalled Patton. “. . . If you can picture sliding into something that has a lot of mass to it. They had a radio talk-show host interviewing people. He interviewed me through my snorkel.”

For now, the matter of gelatin disposal remains unresolved.

“Actually, we could probably wash it down the street,” Dean said. “We’ll check with the city. We may have to haul it out and dump it in an industrial drain.”

Don’t Ride the Dryer

If sitting in a molded plastic chair in a hot self-service laundry watching your underwear spin past at dizzying speeds is not your idea of fun, check out Vista’s latest attraction--a laundry/fitness center/tanning salon, dubbed Clean and Lean.

The idea is the brainchild of Dee and Greg Trabert, the latter a general contractor whose six bouts of knee surgery forced him into a new line of work. They decided to create a service for busy people like themselves, incorporating housework and fitness into one.

According to Trabert, the center is equipped with 24 washers, 11 dryers, 12 fitness machines and three exercise bikes. A full circuit of the machines, with a warm-up and cool-down on the bikes, takes the time of the average wash cycle, he says.

Similarly, the dryer cycle is timed to last the length of a second circuit on the machines. The tanning bed and the electronic massage table also run for that time. Clean and Lean is loosely divided in two--laundry separated from fitness by a glass wall.

“We wanted it visible so that when the machine has completed its cycle, you know when to get your laundry,” Trabert explained.

As for the price, it runs on a sliding scale. A combination package of 16 wash visits and 16 workouts runs for $62.40. A one-time visit costs $4 to use the fitness machines, 75 cents for the washers, and 25 to 45 cents for the dryers, Trabert said.

“We also work on Visa and Mastercard,” he added. “Which I don’t think any other Laundromat does.”

Firm Grip on Life

Tina Carter, a 30-year-old mother of four from El Cajon, is the founding editor of Hot Tea, apparently the nation’s only newsletter for connoisseurs of teapots, tea spoons, tea strainers, tea tins, tea sets, tea bag tags and other tea paraphernalia.

As such, she has a few thoughts on teapot aficionados: “I have a little theory,” Carter confided. “People like teapots because, one, they have a handle. There’s a place to pick it up and feel like you’ve got a grip on it. That’s my personal feeling, maybe because I like to feel I’ve got a handle on life.”

Carter, who publishes the bimonthly pamphlet out of her South Mollison Avenue home and circulates it to 200 readers in the United States and Canada, also theorizes that the act of pouring tea is symbolic of a certain generosity, and that tea drinkers tend to take life slow.

The latest issue of Hot Tea includes a critical review of a new book on willow-pattern china, an article on tea bags (to be followed by a second article on paper tea bag sacs), a photo of a pot made into a lamp, and listings of china conventions and “pot nut” reunions.

“I get all kinds of interesting letters,” said Carter, who is married to an employee of San Diego Gas & Electric Company and started collecting teapots six years ago.

“One recently came from someone in New Jersey. She said: ‘I’ve collected teapots for years. I have 700.’ She had this mansion full of them and she had to move to a four-bedroom home. She didn’t have room for her teapots.”