King Cake

Fat Super Tuesday

Yesterday was Mardi Gras- which is french for Fat Tuesday-because you are supposed to eat like a grand gourmand before Ash Wednesday wherein you have to fast for about 40 days before Easter-or at least give up meat a few days a week. This year it fell on SuperTuesday.
So there was a party in church basements across the land --while others were glued to the returns for Super Tuesday. The church basement shin digs were much more subdued than the jazz blaring streets of the Big Easy. If your church basement was anything like the one in my hood, people mingled, drank just a little too much sweet tea and wine, ate a little gumbo and listened alternatively to laptop projected dixieland and bad disco tunes from the 70s- No offense to Gloria Gaynor but honey, hang it up.
The scragly creepazoid geriatric church lady from Brooklyn who saw one too many reruns of Travola in a white suit under a mirror ceiling ball who served up the vegetarian side dish thinks she is married to the priest as the church basement housewife (which he claims is purely platonic all for the service of the Lord) She tells him to thank the DJ, and he follows her orders nicely. She taps him on the shoulder and attempts to entice (pull) him to the dance floor to the mild horror of a quarter of the room. Whatever in the world would give such a woman half a notion that it was remotely appropriate to do this to any priest is another story for another Bad B movie in a sleezy Brooklyn theatre. It isn't that she is so pathetically emotionally disturbed, or that she dances with the grace of a strangled chicken so much as she actually thinks she is hot-or at least hip (with or without a replacement). If only he knew exactly how completely retarded she looked to the rest of the world and how even more retarded this priest looks giving her the sort of attention that fuels this amazing misperception. Life must be really lonely in the Rectory. Reality altering lonely. (Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln the gumbo was yumbo)

Then there was that cake with the tiny plastic toy baby in it. They call it a King Cake, having something to do with the wisemen. They brought Gold, Frankinsense, Myrr and coffee Cake apparently. Cake with a pink plastic baby in it maybe. No actually, I think that the baby is supposed to be the Baby Jesus.

Another sweet priest explained that in New Orleans in offices people start bringing in these cakes after Epiphany up until Mardi Gras, and the person who gets the piece with the baby in it has to buy the next one. So people play tricks like when they find there is a baby possibly in one piece they cut around it and leave the piece with the baby half hanging out. That's because they are too cheap. The piece with the baby in it will cost them. They might actually have to work an hour overtime to get the $30. to buy the next one.

Metaphors exploded. Isn't that what guys do when they don't want to pay child support and tell their girlfriends to abort instead? Isn't that what men do when they get involved in relationships and don't feel like paying for anything involving children so they cut around the good part? Leaving the baby dangling out unprotected and unfathered.
The baby of course doesn't go away, nor the potential of discovering that there is a baby hidden in the cake. The baby remains- it just doesn't get delivered to the person who cut around it---
because they are too cheap. And isn't that just, well, retarded.

In a larger sense- cheapness is of course wed to that demon poverty which keeps people from the fullness of life under the misbelief that God is a stingy God rather than the source of all abundance and blessing. That is a misperception of God's goodness almost as dramatically off the rails as the bizarre notion that the scraggle-hag psycho church-basement wife travolta groupie wanna-be doing the throttle-chicken trot is remotely hot.

Then there was Lent. Maybe the geriatric basement Hell-Hag will give up the witches brew bucket of libido-enhancing pharmaceuticals that make her hormones act outside her decade.

God, please take me to the desert because I can't take much more of this party-hearty Joy.