I wanted to get silver dragees — referred to in munchkin parlance as “BBs” — to put on our cookies, but I couldn’t find any. This article explains why.
As any 6-year-old can tell you, sprinkles are a whole food group unto themselves … and silver dragees are, like, the Kobe beef of sprinkles. The best classroom birthday party EVER was the one we had in first grade, when Mike Gourley turned 7 and his mom made us a batch of cupcakes that were completely covered in silver dragees. The boys all filled their mouths with them and then used them to impersonate Kalashnikovs, but I ate all of mine, holding them in my mouth and savoring the moment when the metallic coating gave way to the pure, unadulterated sugar in the center.
A whole generation of kids in California is missing out on that simple joy, just because one overzealous lawyer decided to spoil everybody’s fun.
I bet he isn’t worried about children’s safety at all. I bet he’s just bitter because the bully who sat behind him in third grade tortured him by spitting dragees down his neck at every class party, and he didn’t have the nerve to turn around and nail the kid with a faceful of saliva-coated silver-and-sugar birdshot. He probably ended up being the class nerd, and he’s never gotten over it, so he’s decided to exact vengeance on the guys who kicked sand in his face by ruining everybody else’s fun.
Nice work, Poindexter. Next year, why don’t you see if you can convince the court to ban the Easter bunny? I hear he hasn’t had his tularemia shots. And he’s hiding those eggs at temperatures well above accepted standards for food safety. Better get on the ball and make sure you protect those hapless children.
I feel as though I should organize some sort of underground free-the-sprinkles movement to smuggle as many silver dragees as possible into California. I find myself daydreaming an army of dragee mules out there, all slipping across the border, all armed with official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifles with compasses in the stock and these things which tell time, filled with sugary ammo — bold guerrilla room mothers and 6-year-old dragee freedom fighters, all wearing hand-stenciled FREE THE SPRINKLES T-shirts, and all staring coolly at the bored bureaucrats manning the agricultural checkpoints: “No, ma’am. No fruit in this car,” never letting on that in a secret compartment under the backseat are stashed thousands upon thousands of the dreaded cupcake sprinkles. No fruit here — only fodder for frivolous lawsuits by spoilsport lawyers who got picked on one too many times in the third grade.
Take THAT, Black Bart!
And people can’t figure out why I live in Oklahoma instead of California. Criminy.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 