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Penny Marshall enjoyed drinking milk and Pepsi as a child, long before she starred on Laverne & Shirley

By: Catchy Comedy Staff Posted: December 9, 2024, 10:01AM

We've all got food from our childhood that makes us nostalgic, but how many of us can say that we made one of our childhood beverages famous?

Laverne & Shirley is known for quite a lot of things, least of all being Laverne's signature beverage, a mixture of milk and Pepsi. In theory, it sounds a bit strange, but it might be helpful to know that the drink wasn't developed out of thin air; it was a real drink that actor Penny Marshall enjoyed in her youth.

"Laverne's milk and Pepsi? I actually drank that as a kid," wrote Marshall in her book, My Mother Was Nuts: A Memoir. "At kosher camp, they couldn't drink milk with meat so they had Pepsi. I wanted Pepsi, too. But my mother made me drink milk first. Then she gave me the soda. Sometimes she didn't rinse out the glass. Sometimes it wasn't even empty. Eventually, it became half and half."

Marshall decided to introduce milk and Pepsi to the series because she knew that people might look to it and see themselves. "When I did it on the show I knew it would get a reaction," she wrote. "And it did. People related to those little details."

This wasn't the only instance that Marshall was encouraged to draw from real life on the set of Laverne & Shirley. Marshall, along with her costar, Cindy Williams, frequently brought elements of their own lives, specifically their childhoods, into their characters' personalities.

"We constantly drew from our childhood," wrote Marshall. "I put pictures of Julius La Rosa and Audie Murphy in Laverne's bedroom because I'd been a fan of theirs when I was a kid. All of Laverne's 45s were my actual 45s from childhood."