An FYI to Houston readers – I had a column in the last issue (November 25, 2010) of the Examiner newspapers making the case for getting birthday treats out of schools. If you’re a regular TLT reader and/or read my recent guest blog post on The Wellness Bitch on the same subject, this will all be familiar ground.
I also just realized that an excerpt from my first post about Sarah Palin’s sweets-in-schools protest appeared on the Atlantic Monthly’s “Atlantic Wire” blog the same day it appeared here, which was sort of cool.
But don’t worry – I have no present plans to beat the treats-in-schools topic into the ground any further. And all this coverage of my anti-cupcake stance is pretty ironic, really, given my intense love for them outside the school setting. I just hope my rhetoric doesn’t result in my being barred from my favorite cupcake bakeries – that would be much too high a price to pay for my principles.
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you know….i’m not sure why i didn’t think about this and mention it before. it just came to me. i have a friend; i will call her M. i’m going to keep her anonymous because she is the granddaughter of a hollywood golden age film star/oscar winner of the hollywood royalty variety, which makes this story somehow even more hilarious than it already is. when M. was in elementary school, first grade i believe, she had an event (might have been her birthday, i’m not sure) where the plan was for her to bring cupcakes to school. mom forgot to make them. so mom went to a bakery in beverly hills and bought a bunch of individual cake treats shaped and decorated as small animals and brought them in to school. all the kids ate them. hours later, mom got a call from the school and had to show up and explain herself. it turns out, the cakes were soaked in rum. some of the kids were throwing up. all of the kids were wasted. they were in first grade. now, this is hilarious. then, probably not so much.
this story isn’t about making a case against cupcakes in school on the grounds that you don’t know what’s in them. the point is to use an extreme case to illustrate the fact that what one parent contributes for her own child affects all of the kids in a class, and despite the best of intentions, can do so in a very adverse way.
Anthony – what a story! And yes, as crazy as that episode was, it does illustrate the fact that many of us simply don’t want other parents feeding our kids, whether the issue is based on nutritional grounds, religious ones, the issue of food-allergies . . . or because we just don’t want our kids hitting the sauce at school.
– Bettina
Oh, I want one of those rum cupcakes.
And yea for you Bettina! I’m glad your blog bits are getting picked up. You are a terrific writer.
June: Me, too! Yum! And thank you for the kind words.
Bettina
Yes, please! I would like a rum soaked cupcake! DROOL!!
And Bettina, I see that you missed Celebrity Cupcake on your iconic listing!
Cheers!
Stephanie: I confess that I just can’t get behind the Celebrity Cupcake, beautiful as they are. But people think I’m crazy for liking Crave, so to each their own cupcake, I guess.
– Bettina
please keep writing about this. I hope your coverage on this topic gets picked up by other papers across the US. This is an important topic and you bring a good perspective to it.
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