Warning: Unsolicited Product Plug

I don't normally rave about products - but this is an exception.

There have been some times in my life when, despite all the "where is your mother when you need her" do-it-yourself books, online tutorials etc. I just could not get that stain out of the (fill in the blank).

The first incident that I recall really struggling with was the red dirt from the baseball diamond when my son played Little League sometime in the early 90s. I tried everything. Finally, one thing that seemed to work was Fels Naptha soap = but not the flake laundry soap, the scruffy bar soap that nobody sells. Fortunately a bar lasts a long time, so once you found one, you were good for a season or two of stains on white synthetic baseball pants.

Then when I moved to Florida, one day there was a knock on my door and some poor kid was stuck promoting some product called "Supreme" that was supposed to be this wonderful multi purpose product. It even shined brass he said as he proceded to clean one square inch of my door handle. Obviously I had to buy the stuff - how else was I going to get the rest of the handle clean? Well, turned out that this "Supreme" stuff worked wonders on the baseball pant stains too and was much easier to use than that bar soap stuff. But all good things come to an end, and I ran out of "Supreme".

Fast forward to son in a college fraternity. How they manage to get things like footprints in the middle of the back of a dress shirt that even my fabulous dry cleaner can't remove, or random red juice/punch/who knows what stains on shorts, is beyond me. But the stains on the shorts are no longer beyond me because I found Nature Bright.

I found this stuff by coincidence - a story that doesn't need to be told here. It is made by Shaklee - a company about which most of us have heard. They make all kinds of cleaning products in concentrated form and you dilute the stuff with water and get bazillion ounces for $19.99 compared to the cost for bazillion ounces of (fill in the blank).

The demo looked pretty good (the iodine dissolved in water disappeared!) so I bought two different cleaning products - one of which was this Nature Bright which was purported to be "better than Oxy Clean".

Home came the two pair of red stained shorts and one with a mysterious mustard/curry colored stain. I tried spraying the spots with the solution and nothing happened. I figured I had nothing to lose so I filled the sink with cold water - poured in some of the powder - swished it around to dissolve it and put in the shorts. The next morning.....drum roll please.....NO STAINS!

I was in shock. Given the cost of those J Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren shorts - that Nature Bright was a bargin! And I have lots left. I'm even tempted to buy some more and give it to my son to take back to school. The parents of all his fraternity brothers can thank me later.