Ma vie en rose

Maybe because I didn't grow up around girls, I never thought of pink as a "girl color."

To my mind, pink was the color of happiness! Pink meant something special was going down!

Think about it. What was the color of the box that your birthday cake came in? Pink, right?

And if your mom was driving you around and you saw a low-slung building with pink stripes painted on it, you knew there was something groovy going on in that building. Especially, if you were in Las Vegas!

At Fleishacker Zoo in San Francisco at the snack bar, they used sell this sort of a what you call a popcorn brick. Maybe you've seen it. It's a sort of a shrink-wrapped caramel corn thing and it's pink! That's always what I would get at the zoo when I was a kid.

But you couldn't get pink popcorn just anywhere. You could only get it at the zoo. Or maybe the circus. 'Cause it was special.

Well, sure it was. It was pink!

That's why I insist on having a pink cake for my birthday every year.

Poor Jeffrey and Tony were looking all over West Hollywood for a pink cake this past weekend and couldn't find one. Well, of course they couldn't find one! Hell, if you could just walk into the 7-11 and buy yourself a pink cake, it wouldn't be special. You know what I'm saying?

So, bless their little hearts, once we got back to town they conspired to obtain a strawberry ice cream cake from Cold Stone, and Jeffrey showed up with it on Veteran's day morning.

Boy was I surprised! So I fired up my Strawberry Shortcake candle, and we called the teenager and had a little belated birthday celebration.

Maybe one of these years, I'll open up a big pink box with a huge bow and inside will be a doll in a frilly pink party dress and little satin shoes.

Sadly, my friends have never been willing to go that far.

Kurt "big daddy" True
13 november 2005