10
The campaign
with the
aggro bullies
screaming
at low-wage
essential
workers was
called ‘A Pep
Talk in
Every Drop.’Illustration by R. O. Blechmanold spots for Calgon. Even Mucinex has
quieted its obnoxiously jeering mascot,
Mr. Mucus, in favor of a female D.J.
who sits on the fl oor, digging through
crates, crafting a playlist. In the second,
post-cough-drop half of Halls’s ‘‘The
Hiker,’’ the yoga person lands her pose,
and the photographer gets his shot of
an elusive mountain lion. In this fram-
ing, a nasty cough isn’t a disruption of
your busy work day; it’s a block in your
self-actualization.
If this feels like a story about work as
told in cold-remedy ads — the move from
gig-economy hellscape to great resigna-
tion — well, such ads really can feel like
a decent barometer of work culture. In
the 1980s, for instance, offi ces and other
workplaces seem to have featured less.
Brands like Therafl u and Tylenol’s cold
off erings depicted sniff ling baby boom-
ers fi nding relief within the cozy wall-to-
wall carpeting of their own homes; they
switched off soft-bulbed bedside lamps
for a good night’s rest or snuggled up in
front of roaring fi res. The most memora-
ble Halls ads of the 1990s featured cough-
ing people leaving their workaday world
for a Tetris-like liminal space grandly
called ‘‘the Halls of Medicine,’’ an alter-
nate universe of candy-colored relief.
By the aughts, tag lines like ‘‘We’re
Going to Work’’ and ‘‘Get Halls and Get
Going!’’ started to ally the brand with
functional illness. But things seem to
have really changed in the years before
the pandemic, as millennials reached a
labor market grown precarious and Dar-
winian, where workers needed to rely on
their hustle rather than their employers.
The Halls campaign with the aggro bullies
screaming at low-wage essential workers
was called ‘‘A Pep Talk in Every Drop.’’ It
featured tough-love slogans — ‘‘Don’t try
harder. Do harder!’’ and ‘‘Don’t wait to get
started’’ and ‘‘Be unstoppable’’ — printed
on actual cough-drop wrappers.
Interestingly, Halls has not gotten rid
of the wrappers with these slogans. But
like fortune cookies or horoscopes, they
are open-ended enough to change their
meaning: ‘‘Impress yourself today’’ sounds
very diff erent in the context of the bliss-
fully introspective ‘‘Live in the Moment’’
campaign. ‘‘Take this medicine because
you can’t aff ord not to’’ was one kind
of pressure. Now we see another, more
aspirational and, frankly, more annoying.
I can always rely on an Ada Limón poem to give me hope, but Limón’s poems don’t give
us the kind of facile Hallmark hope; rather, her hope is hard-earned, even laced with grief
or unhappiness. is 14-line pseudo-sonnet roughly follows the structure of a Petrarchan
sonnet with its octave (fi rst eight lines) stating a tension and the sestet (fi nal six lines)
including a volta (or turn). Here, the tension was a child’s divided life due to a parent’s
divorce, and the volta begins with, ‘‘But let me say.. .’’ which prefaces the fi nal beautiful fi ve
lines. Limón is a master at making a simple idea (that of hindsight, seeing the bright side
of things) askew. ‘‘And so I have/two brains now,’’ she writes. ‘‘Two entirely diff erent brains.’’
Limón gives us two brains in her poems too, revealing new ways to view the world.These ads zero in on pandemic-inspired
curiosity about escaping the rat race for
a life of quiet meaning. They sell cough
drops not merely to soothe our throats but
to off er nothing less than portals to a better
self, to wellness and windsong.
This is probably temporary. In this
third Covid spring, as workplaces settle
into new shapes, Halls is running diff er-
ent ads. These feature the sportscaster
Joe Buck, who is portrayed as needing
cough drops to do his job — a job that
could make any voice scratchy, for totallynonalarming, noncontagious reasons.
What’s most interesting about these spots,
though, isn’t the premise but the product
itself: a new kind of Halls called Minis.
These tiny pellets come in a little box, with
no crinkly wrappers. Now those venturing
out with a sore throat or a light cough can
discreetly pop cough drops without clear-
ing the cafeteria line or the subway car. In
a way, this is a return to familiar, prepan-
demic form: The cough drop, as always,
promises to keep your illness between you
and your remedy.Poem Selected by Victoria ChangJoint Custody
By Ada LimónWhy did I never see it for what it was:
abundance. Two families, two diff erent
kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two
creeks, two highways, two stepparents
with their fi sh tanks or eight tracks or
cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or
reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record
scratched and stopping to that original
chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken
back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy
but I was loved each place. And so I have
two brains now. Two entirely diff erent brains.
The one that always misses where I’m not,
the one that is so relieved to fi nally be home.Screenland
5.8.Victoria Chang is a poet whose fi fth book of poems, ‘‘Obit’’ (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was named a New
York Times Notable Book and a Time Must-Read. Her book of nonfi ction, ‘‘Dear Memory: Letters on Writing,
Silence and Grief,’’ was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in Antioch
University’s M.F.A. program. Ada Limón is an American poet whose latest book is ‘‘ e Hurting Kind’’
(Milkweed Editions, 2022), from which this poem is taken. Her previous book, ‘‘ e Carrying’’ (2018), won the
2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.