You gotta be kidding!
My friend Margie wanted to show me around Princeton. That is Princeton
in the state of New Jersey. Her home town was not far away. Princeton
is your typical upscale university town — charming, peaceful dotted
with lots of quaint little shops and boutiques. As we were walking down
one of the streets near the campus, I noticed a sign above a shop as
we were approaching an intersection. Pawtisserie, the sign said.
First reaction was, good, some good French pastries. I was getting a
bit hungry. My second was to point out to my friend that the spelling
was wrong, one [W] too many. Well, I said, taking on a superior
attitude, if people want to be snobs and use French, at least let them
spell the word correctly. Or maybe they did it on purpose just to be
cool. I went on and on about restaurant menus in foreign countries where
translations were always so atrociously misspelled. If you are going
to bother to use a foreign language at least do it correctly. As we
got near the display window, I noticed a beautiful 3 tiered wedding
cake all white and creamy. Wow what a beautiful cake. Kind of small,
but well deco- rated nevertheless. I wonder what kind of pastries they
have inside.
My friend looked at me and quietly said, huh, Maria it is not misspelled. It’s meant to be that way, it’s a pastry shop for animals, look at the top of the cake. The top of the cake, where I assumed would be the traditional bride and groom was actually occupied by male and female canines dressed in wedding finery.
I stood there in complete shock. You gotta be kidding! A bakery for animals! Over and over I repeated the same refrain, I can’t believe it. Then I looked inside. There was a regular bakery type counter with little cakes and cookies— and all for animals. People walking out with little ribboned packets. My friend had to practically drag me away. I went back at least 3 times to the window to make sure I was actually seeing what I was seeing. It just blew me away.
A Patisserie for animals. And I thought I had seen just about everything.
Dis moi que je rêve.