by kir moore

There are five frozen yogurt places on the block where I work. I have worked on this block for two years and one week, and I have patronized each of these places an average of .65 times if calculated based on the whole of my frozen yogurt consumption over my tenure on the block. Not one of these frozen yogurt places has stayed open for longer than 3 1/2 months (with the exception of Pinkberry), and the 3 1/2-month lifecycle of each yogurt storefront does not necessarily coincide with the summer months. The summary that ensues should be understood as my impression of the five frozen yogurt vendors on the street; it should not be read as a business review, but rather as a documentation of facts as my mind perceives and keeps facts.

1. Pinkberry. Pinkberry is green and pink and white and patronized by a line of people coming from the gym around the corner, and stay-at-home moms with their fat little children. Pinkberry has tiny pebbles that are glued together for the flooring. Pinkberry frozen yogurt melts pretty fast and gets mucousy when it’s not rigid anymore. I had a plain yogurt with strawberries from Pinkberry, and I swear there were mustache shavings in it.

2. Yogurpia. Yogurpia is closed now. Yogurpia is now the Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. But “Yogurpia” still has got to be the worst name for any place that attempts to serve food in the English-speaking areas of North America. “Yogurpia” sounds like a word that means “Yogurt Burp.” The yogurt at Yogurpia was irritating, but not offensive. Yogurpia’s yogurt was pleasantly metallic tasting: It did not feign to be anything other than what frozen yogurt is; frozen yogurt is a bunch of carcinogenic chemicals, frozen. I went to Yogurpia twice. On the way to Yogurpia, one would walk by a Mexican restaurant that served you prepackaged, frozen Mexican foods, deep-fried. One would also pass by a hardware store that vended designer scented candles and kitchen-themed bric-a-brac, such as a ceramic chicken wearing an apron and holding a silver serving tray.

3. The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. When Yogurpia closed, my co-workers and I wondered what would come of it, because within a week, there was already another frozen yogurt place under construction across the street from old Yogurpia. (I will get to that place later.) We were certain that there could not be four contemporaneous frozen yogurt purveyors at the same time on the same block. But sure enough, construction started on The Family Milkshake Shop and Occult Reading Room. Its real name is “Millions of Milkshakes,” and they sell both frozen yogurt and frozen evaporated-milk-sugar-product. I renamed it “Family”, because it is clearly not a chain.  One half of the floor plan is dedicated to a very glitter-covered milkshake and yogurt countertop, while the other half of the space is outfitted with custom, opalized Formica display shelves, on which are displayed (I’m sure, not often touched) hardcover editions of the following books: “Dianetics, 2012: Beyond the Mythology,” and “The Mystical Crystal: Expanding Your Crystal Consciousness.” I understand why these books are here though: Of course one should expect to arrive at the point of a personal mental struggle if all he or she eats is frozen, sauced sodium citrate and carageenan.

4. Pump It!. “Whoa! Pump What?,” I thought when I caught first glimpse of Pump It! two weeks before its opening date. A double-than-life-sized poster graced the entire front window. On this poster was a mudflap girl grabbing a large shaft or possibly an udder. It was easy enough to assume, within several seconds of vomiting a little bit on the sidewalk outside, that she was holding a yogurt pump, which is how one self-serves him or herself when they Pump It!. Pump It! took down the poster maybe two days after it went up. Their yogurt is by far the most intriguing on the street. I cannot say that it is “good,” but I did conclude that it was super space-age! This was an exciting discovery of extra-planetary tastes for me. Two flavors enticed me the most: Irish mint chocolate chip (no visible chocolate chips, no visible chocolate- just green), and cookies and cream (no visible cookie crumbles, no visible cream- just a pleasant, warm grey). But holy shit. These flavors were more real than real itself. It was only possible that aliens had synthesized these flavors, because they were as real as the illusion of a beach on Earth that Jodie Foster is transported to in the end of “Contact.” (But the beach is really in a-nother part of the universe and the aliens only made it look like an Earth beach, because that was a comforting place to Earth people. And Jodie Foster could feel the sand!) I returned to Pump it! recently, and there was loud techno blasting air out the front door. A pleasant-looking man had tied his cocker spaniel’s leash to a plastic chair out front, but the chair was too light and the spaniel, most certainly drawn by the magnificence of space-age yogurt, managed to pull the chair inside. So, inside, there was techno blasting, a dog running around with a chair tied to it, and 10 or so fat teenagers wearing lots of charms and complaining that there wasn’t a large enough selection of bowl sizes in which to Pump It!. As if the God-like synthetica of yogurt flavors didn’t win me over! Life at Pump It! is the way life should be.

5. Fake Pinkberry.  Fake Pinkberry (officially “Yogurtberry”) was open for only 1.5 months. I never went in to Fake Pinkberry. Fake Pinkberry was not green and pink and white like Pinkberry: it was pink and white and green. They are a different order. Fake Pinkberry’s exterior  facade differed from Pinkberry because it was tiled with iridescent pink tile. There was a pink-tiled patio before the entrance and there were pink chairs out front on that patio. I walked past Fake Pinkberry coming back from coffee with a colleague a few weeks ago. Fake Pinkberry was on the north side of the street and we were walking west. My colleague was to my north, in between myself and Fake Pinkberry at the time when we passed it. She said, “Hey, look-Fake Pinkberry is now a psychic.” I turned toward my colleague and Fake Pinkberry to look, and there was a giant pink tarp that said “PSYCHIC” in pink on it. It was tacked on to the facade in front of the old “Yogurtberry” sign. Something about this caused me to laugh so suddenly that I actually spit all of my coffee onto my colleague. I imagine that the psychic must have pink hair, pink fingernails and a pink dyed caftan, and she probably eats all the leftover frozen yogurt.

In conclusion, the frozen yogurt available on the 8900 block of Santa Monica Boulevard challenges both the palette and the mind. What’s more perplexing, I ask myself: That we as humans have a healthy constituency of transcendentalists and psychic-goers–or that we eat frozen yogurt?  Too confusing a question. Is it possible that a street be zoned for “frozen yogurt sales and other selectively eligible businesses only,” or is a microculture birthing itself at the corner of Santa Monica and Robertson boulevards? We will never know, unless we contact the City of Los Angeles Building Department. Do fat children eat frozen yogurt (but not ice cream) because they are fat, or are they fat because they eat frozen yogurt (and ice cream)? Perhaps we might entertain an academic study of obesity. These mostly unanswerable froyo questions linger in the sour-sweet milky chemical air that hovers about the doors of Santa Monica Boulevard’s frozen yogurt shops.