Too Much Of A Good Thing

I really, really, really loved angel food cake. It was a rarity in our house because my mom was a healthfood spaz, but it did show up at Easter. I’m not sure what the celebration of the Resurrection has to do with fluffy sponge cake, but I was glad somebody thought of it. Coincidentally, back before VCRs (yes, there was such a time), Easter was also the one time in the year when you could see “Sound of Music” because they played it on network television. And if there was one thing I loved as much as angel food cake, it was movies about song triumphing over the Nazis. Life was good. Until that year. The year when what we will refer to as “the incident” occurred. The family had settled down with our reasonably-sized slices of sponge cake and watched goatherds and brown paper packages tied up with string until bedtime. Sounds nice, right? It was until I ruined it. Just before bed, I snuck in and cut myself a ridiculously giant slab of angel food cake for a secret midnight snack. Which I gobbled down in its entirety long before the clock struck twelve. And then it proceeded to make several violent reappearances all night. I couldn’t eat angel food cake for years after that and “Sound of Music” is still a bit tainted. The voracious snake in Richard Buckley and Eric Carle’s The Greedy Python shows the same lack of restraint. And he learns his lesson, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Greedy-Python-Richard-Buckley/dp/0689820593

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Carle