Now that's a slimey business

I don't have much experience with slime.

It just wasn't a thing when I was a kid.

We had modeling clay, which came in dull colors - brick red, battleship grey - and wasn't all that pliable. So while Auguste Rodin, or a professional potter, might have been right at home with it, I remember finding it hard to work with. The best I could do was roll it out into a string and then coil it around to create something boring or other.

Play-Doh, in comparison, was a revelation. When colored Play-Doh was introduced in the mid-1950s, I was all in. I loved pretty much everything about Play-Doh, including the memorable smell. I loved the fact that, with just the basics - a can of red, yellow, blue, and white - you had the entire rainbow, plus - with that white - the ability to create pastels. And it was a lot easier to work with. My favorite thing to do was make fruits and veggies with it. The only downside with Play-Doh is that, if you let it dry out, it developed a crystaline coat and was useless. The trick with Play-Doh was to dismantle your project and stuff it back in the can, where it inevitably dried out anyway. (Oh, you could pour warm water on it, but that wasn't a perfect solution.) Plus, once you made purple, there was no magic to unmix the mix to get it back to red and blue. 

Whatever its deficits, I adored Play-Doh. 

I also loved Silly Putty. You didn't make anything out of it, but you could stretch it, knead it, punch at it, scrunch it, hurl it...And, most wonderously, if you pressed it against a newspaper comic strip, the comic strip panel was transferred to the Silly Putty. How about that?

But, alas, we didn't have slime, which I know I would have fully and unreservedly embraced. 

So if I envy kids of today anything, slime might be it.

Thus, I was interested to learn about the Sloomoo Institute, a place in NYC that promises:

Escape! Get off your screens and immerse yourself in our mesmerizing world of #satisfying joy. The Sloomooverse is full of never-ending, hand-crafted slime, yummy scents, vivid colors, and soothing ASMR delights.

What? You don't know what ASMR is? Tsk, tsk! It is, of course, this:

An autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Personally, this sounds more like nerve damage to me, but it's supposed to result in a feeling of moderate euphoria. 

Contributing to the experience at the Sloomoo Institute is the crazy variety of slime available to play around if - a variety that Sloomoo is always expanding on.

Twenty-year old slime "savant" Chase Kellebrew is one of the folks that the Institute counts on to come up with new slime versions. 

He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 2022 and said that he earns “a very comfortable salary” as a full-time employee of the institute, which is within walking distance of Stuyvesant Town, where he lives with his mother.

“It’s easy to create a prototype,” he said. “But it can sometimes be a long, hard process to figure out how to make all this in bulk. We make about thirty-five thousand gallons a year. Each time I create a new slime recipe, I write down everything I’m using.” He has his co-workers test it out. “On any given day, there are one to two running the mixers and anywhere from five to fifteen packing the slime,” he said. (Source: New Yorker.)

We're not just talking about slime that smells like lemons, or is the color of a maple leaf. We're talking wild combos. For The New Yorker visit:

That day’s prototype was geared toward the spring holidays. Kellebrew removed some yellow cellophane from a plate that had six circular indentations, each filled with a different slime. He explained that it was a Seder plate, with the six traditional Passover foods translated into slime: haroseth (“peach clear slime with small foam cubes, apple scent”), horseradish (“dark-red snow-fizz slime, with a lemon-ginger scent”), parsley (“light-green clear slime”), an egg (“clear slime with one yellow felt pompom to represent the yolk, unscented”), bitter herbs (“light-green butter slime”), and, not to be forgotten, a shank bone (“made out of clay”).

And, in case you're wondering, this slime is K for Kosher. And because the Institute is equal opportunity, Kellebrew also came up with slime that smells like honey-baked ham in time for Easter. 

You can buy all sorts of the Insitute's slime in their gift shop or online. For $35 a month, you can purchase a subscription box full of surprises. 

Slimes can be pretty, and they can smell good - peach, pineapple, watermelon. And some of them can even make sounds:

Kellebrew is an expert at giving his slime sound effects, “gorgeous pops” being the most requested, with “fart sounds” a close second.

I searched their site and couldn't find any "fart smell" slime, which would likely be a best-seller with little boys. Bet Kellebrew could come up with that if he put his mastermind to it.