Free Cake

A few of you have sent me the story of the 26 year old Single girl who has been baking cakes and taking them to bars around Los Angeles in a quest to find a husband. Here's her blog. It's subtitled "Attempting to Lure Boys with Sugar", which I find endearing.

It gives me an idea. It's for a dating website for women who want to be housewives.  Normally I hate dating websites because they are ALLLLLL about judging men and women on their looks and spelling, but I would see this as a gift to the women of the world who abhor the marketplace and just want a husband and home to take care of, but are afraid to say so.

I'm talking the women who want to get up at seven to feed the illicit chickens in the shed before before making muffins for the family. The women who actually enjoy doing the laundry and the ironing and the mending. (Mending?) Women who get out there and do the weeding before the sun gets too high and who prefer to dry the sheets out on the line because a dryer would just not replicate that great dried-outdoors smell. Women whose homes smell like lavender and baking and breezes. Women who could run a flat on their grad school husband's measly stipend, and women who could run a house on their blue-collar man's growing zillions. Women whose special joy is making cakes. Women who get that there are groaning millions who dream of staying at home.  Because there are men who want to marry women like that, only they don't know where to find them.

But back to the cake girl.

On the one hand, the cake girl is doing right. She is a Searching Single, so she correctly divines that she has to live in public in order to meet men. You can live in public just by having a popular blog or by writing a column in a newspaper, but the cake girl takes it to the streets or, rather, the bars.

On the other hand, the cake girl is going to bars.

I know women who met their husbands in bars, but those women were the waitresses. The husbands were regulars. The bar was either an extension of the husbands' living-room or the husband came in one day and thought,  "Gosh, this girl is really, really pretty, and conveniently I don't even have to ask her phone number to see her again. I can just come back." These were not men who went to bars to get loaded or have a fling, or to get loaded AND have a fling. Bars are full of men who go to bars with their friends to get loaded or to hunt for flings. They do not go to bars intending to find wives.  At least, I don't think so. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Bars are places of jollity and misrule, and if some zany girl offers you free cake in one, well, that's pretty well in keeping with jollity and misrule. Of course, you are taking a risk by eating food offered by a complete stranger, as a street-person once told me when I tried to offload some day-old muffins on him. But never mind that. If a pretty girl offers you cake, the least you can do is eat it.

On the other hand, cake is not that hard to come by.

Any able-bodied man with an oven, a cake-pan, a bowl, a spoon, butter, sugar, eggs, self-raising flour, and an orange can make a cake. Alternatively, he can go to a bakery and buy one. Of course, a bakery cake might not taste like the cakes his mother used to make because his mother did not make cakes. My mother makes cakes, but my mother was born before the Korean War. The smell of home-baked cakes no longer evokes the memory of a hard-working woman who smelled like lavender, baking and breezes looking fondly at her great-souled, workin'-man husband as he said, "Gosh, Lucinda. This sure is good cake." The smell of home-baked cakes no longer makes a man think, "Ya know, I want a girl who is just like the girl who divorced married Dad." At least, probably not in L.A.

But to go back to the first hand, it's a good excuse to meet people.

But on the other hand again, it's a bad idea to tell complete strangers that handing out cake is your husband-hunting strategy.

If I were the cake girl--and I have a lot of admiration for Cake Girl, and I hope she gets a cookbook contract out of this--I would not give away my cakes for free. I would still take my cakes to bars, but I would raffle them off for a guaranteed crowd-pleasing cause, like the Veteran's Association. This way I would still have an excuse to talk to everyone in the bar, and it would be for a much more noble-sounding cause. A girl in a pretty dress who offers strangers free cake is a zany free spirit, but a girl in a pretty dress who bakes cakes to raise money for wounded soldiers is the female embodiment of America the Beautiful.

To conclude, I don't think creativity, kooky and cake is enough to capture the male imagination. Men respect chutzpah, but they will commit only to character. If I asked, I would recommend that cake girl combine her fun idea with another cause she believes in. "I wanna husband" is not so attractive. "I'm open to meeting great people as I voluntarily--and creatively--raise money for others"--that, if so obvious it need not be said, is attractive.