Fran Magazine: Issue #98

I drank this

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Spring break forever

Next week, Fran Magazine celebrates the time-honored tradition known as spring break. The post-Oscars, no class week won’t be fully off but I wanted to take a step back from the magazine as if it was a real vacation (even though I’m not going anywhere). To that end, there will be a dispatch this Sunday and then next Wednesday and Sunday we’ll be off, and then kick things up again as normal.

In addition to celebrating spring break by not posting, I am also announcing the Fran Magazine spring break SALE! It’s gonna be 50% off annual subscriptions¹ and the offer will be up for two weeks before it expires. The Sunday Dispatches are getting to be a lot of fun, and the reread column will keep building out, so there’s a lot for paid subscribers right now. Go go go!

Maestro moment

Is this our last ever Maestro moment? Maybe — we’ll see what the Oscars bring. In terms of Maestro, he’s looking to “hard launch” his girlfriend Gigi Hadid at the Oscars this weekend. It’s hard to remember what silly pull quotes of Maestro’s have surfaced, but I do think sometime in between last Wednesday and this Wednesday, Cooper said on the Smartless podcast² that he wasn’t sure if he loved his daughter right after she was born. This blew up enough that Joyce Carol Oates felt obligated to reply…

I agree with Oates’s take and I also don’t think what Cooper said is actually wrong in any way. You hear this from a lot of new parents! It’s pretty common. There is a whole Mike Birbiglia BROADWAY SHOW about this very thing that happens to be one of the worst pieces of “art” that I’ve ever seen in my life. I am not offended by Maestro’s assertion that he wasn’t sure if he vibed with his daughter. Beyond that, he seemed to mostly talk about how his dad walked around the house naked. That’s probably fine too!

I will miss Maestro’s candor and well-meaning insanity. If we have to wait another five years for “A Bradley Cooper Picture,” I’ll be very depressed.

I drank this

Every now and then, if I am out running errands or coming back from the gym, I will pop into one of three or four delis in my neighborhood, not with any mission in mind but to see if they have anything in them that I’ve never seen before and might want to try. Here is the most recent one.

This beverage cost $2.99. I’d never seen chocolate coconut water before. There is usually at least one row in the cooler section with a whole row of coconut waters — Phil drinks them more than I do — but they’re all basically “plain” aka coconut flavored. This baffled me. Chocolate and coconut are a great combination when it comes to solid food — Passover macaroons come to mind — but the idea of chocolate coconut water, not even chocolate coconut milk, leaves something to be desire and conjures what is perhaps the grossest-looking beverage in my mind’s eye. Needless to say, I bought it.

I have some degree of shame in my wiser years about being a picky eater for so much of my life. Less “all McNuggets and mac and cheese” type of picky eater, but I was particular and rigid in what I liked, vegetable-skeptical and disgusted by a lot of nuts despite no allergy. For the past decade and change, I swung back in the other direction — open-minded, maybe to a fault, eager to try some new twisted product at the expense of my digestive system. My white whale that I’ve yet to bring myself to conquer is the Sour Patch Kids-flavored (?) Gogurt, which seems truly disgusting. One of these days…

The chocolate coconut water provides an unnecessary piece of lore next to its nutritional information (21 grams of sugar… kill me):

There once was a cocoa tree planted next to a coconut tree. As fate would have it, their trunks got tangled making for an adventure of a lifetime. Their journey led to this rich, creamy nutritional drink made in hydration heaven. The end.

It seems nuts to me that whoever wrote that probably has employer-paid healthcare and I don’t, but that’s why we run Fran Magazine sales!

The mystery of the beverage within its opaque can was “water?” How watery would this be? Should I have it, like, over ice? In order to get the full sensory experience of the chocolate coconut water, I poured it into a glass.

I can’t overemphasize the extent to which it looked like watered down chocolate milk, even in its pour. The opacity of the drink within the glass was encouraging-ish, suggesting this might just be coconut-infused chocolate milk, despite the can’s no dairy label.

The result? The chocolate coconut water is pretty good.

It mostly tastes like chocolate milk. I would say it doesn’t taste like coconut at all, maybe to its overall detriment. The first few sips were really encouraging, and then it mellowed out into a too-sweet drink that feels like it might be the occasional treat prompted by nothing. It reminded me mostly of chocolate oat milk, another forbidden beverage. Because I grew up in Illinois, I know the high highs of drinking a, say, Oberweis chocolate milk, which is one of the most decadent beverages you can find out there. Chocolate oat milk combines the worst of both of its ingredients — usually the chocolate is too syrupy, and like a lot of oat milks, it’s frequently too oily.

I do not feel like my electrolytes were replenished — perhaps this is my fault because they were fine to begin with — and I am not sure that the high sugar content is good for my ever-troubled teeth and gums. This is like as good as the concept of “chocolate Gatorade,” which is to say, even as mostly good as this is, it is not really worth the effort that’s gone into it. Maybe those trees should not have been planted too close to each other in the first place.

If you ever purchased a weird or new drink at your local store, feel free to share any relevant info on that experience below.

1. I know some of you have tried to game the system by cancelling your regular and/or paid subscription to re-enroll using the sale rate… Substack is onto people who do this and usually they don’t go through. Sorry!!!

2. One of the most bizarre and insidious cultural forces…