It’s hard out here for a Good Witch
I have a Halloween-appropriate confession: I’ve always wanted to be Glinda from the Wizard of Oz. And come on, who wouldn’t? She’s like the Pope of Oz. She has an awesome hat and a snazzy, shiny outfit that could easily smuggle the entire Health & Beauty section out of the grocery store. She gets to travel around in a see-through vessel—in this case a totally awesome pink bubble. She has thousands of Munchkins to do her bidding. And, best of all, she can send people on long, harrowing journeys of self-discovery, only to be all, “Well DUH, everything you need was inside of you all the time and/or on your feet. I just kinda needed you to kill off my obnoxious goth co-worker who doesn’t seem to understand the green concealer is for your UNDER-EYE CIRCLES ONLY.”
And she has the power to smite you when you’re all, “Hey, that whole Pope analogy fell apart before it even began.”
The closest I’ve ever gotten to becoming Glinda is my traditional Friday trip to the cupcake shop downtown. The instant you take a bite of a cupcake you’re permanently covered in edible glitter. Yes, permanently. Have one of these cupcakes at age 20, and in 80 years when you’re on your deathbed, your wife will lean in to kiss you and say, lovingly, “Goodbye darling, you’re the love of my—What the hell? STILL with the glitter? You’ve been out IN PUBLIC with that fleck of glitter on the tip of your nose for the past 80 years? I KNEW I should have married Sal Ruxbin!”
And that’s just after one cupcake. I’ve been visiting the shop for months now, and am so coated in glitter that I’m pretty sure I’m a shoe-in for the next Good Witch of the North, or at least as the disco ball at the roller skating rink on 70s night. But until then I think I’d fit right in at the cupcake shop.
All of the decorations on the cupcakes are edible and made of sugar. When I was in the shop last week, one of the workers was assembling a new batch of cupcakes, and called to the owner, “Where are the witches’ feet?”
Seriously? Where are the witches’ feet? This has got to be the best phrase ever uttered on a job site outside of the porn industry. And there’s nothing more appropriate for a Witch in Training like myself. It’s only a matter of time until I’m bustling around the place calling out to the owner, “Where’s the scrotum of newt?”
“That’s ‘eye of newt’!”
“Not anymore it’s not!” And then I’ll pop two dozen sugar-sculpted newt scrotum out of their moulds and onto the waiting cupcakes.
And when she fires me, I’ll travel home in my pink soap bubble, a little slower and a little lower under the weight of what it means to be a Good Witch.
To say nothing of the vat of buttercream smuggled out in my puffed sleeves.