As reported in my 82nd birthday posting “Three greetings for 9/6/22”, while I was holed up at home in severe and debilitating heat misery on the day, some friends e-mailed me delightful greetings — visual, verbal, and musical — and a hundred or so of them wished me a happy birthday, mostly via Facebook. Meanwhile, I ordered up some coffee gelato (it was also National Coffee Ice Cream Day, and that’s my favorite ice cream flavor) and a carrot cake (which is, well, cake, but very flavorful and chewy and not terribly sweet, and it comes with a lovely cream cheese frosting, all of which suits my tastes). I found no way to honor the Marquis de Lafayette (born 9/6/1757), though here I’ll give my summary from the Lafayette section of my 9/7/19 posting “Big sexy prime birthday gay ice cream”:
A man of enormous physical courage who took up the family military career at the age of 13 and later pursued an extraordinary public career devoted to advocating for democracy and human rights in two countries [mine and his], and managed somehow to live to the age of 76.
Then on the day after came sweet messages from people apologizing for having missed the day itself. But as I said to one of these (an old friend, an admirable person, and one of the small core of my regular readers — so someone whose good words were especially important to me):
I’m inclined to view my birthday as a fairly large region in time, not just one day. The net congratulations largely achieve the purpose of maintaining and reinforcing relationships, and that doesn’t have to happen on just one day.
And from one of the Aging Life Care of California folk (who, among other things, take me to medical appointments, of which I have a great many), who recently began reading this blog. Full of apologies for having missed the actual day, which I countered with the Region Theory of Birthday Time (above), and then bearing a gift box of four Sprinkles muffins, from the company’s Palo Alto store (in Stanford Shopping Center). A box notably including
dark chocolate (Belgian dark chocolate cake with bittersweet chocolate frosting, in curls)
carrot (walnut-studded carrot cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting)
About the company. From Wikipedia:
Sprinkles Cupcakes is a bakery chain established in 2005 [in Beverley Hills CA]. It is considered the world’s first cupcake bakery.
There are (so far) 24 locations throughout the US, but mostly in Southern California. The one in Stanford Shopping Center:
(#1) (photo: Foursquare)
The sprinkles in Sprinkles. The company gets its name from the little elongated or round sugar shapes (the company uses both types) serving as decorative toppings for confections. From NOAD:
noun sprinkle: … 3 (sprinkles) mainly North American tiny sugar shapes, typically rods and balls, used for decorating cakes, ice cream, and other desserts.
In my 12/1/14 posting “Rainbow rice”, I consider alternative names, from AmE and BrE, for various sorts of sprinkles: rice, hundreds and thousands, sugar strands, jimmies, nonpareils, dragées. Illustrated here with Singaporean donuts with rainbow rice, as these colored sprinkles are known there:
(#2) To Singaporean eyes, these are just festively colored rice; while to my eyes, they’re rainbow food: gay food
And now a box of 4 Sprinkles cupcakes — not the 4 I got, but it illustrates the variety of presentations:
(#3) The carrot cupcake looks much like the top right cupcake here (which I suspect is strawberry)
Unsurprise! The mascot that was not chosen. Not surprisingly, the Sprinkles cupcake people have chosen not to avail themselves of Annie Sprinkle as a mascot or spokescharacter. From Wikipedia:
Annie M. Sprinkle (born Ellen F. Steinberg on July 23, 1954) is an American certified sexologist, performance artist, former sex worker, and advocate for sex work and health care. Sprinkle has worked as a prostitute, sex educator, feminist stripper, pornographic film actress, and sex film producer and director. In 1996, she became the first porn star to get a doctoral degree [AZ: almost surely not the first porn actor to accomplish this, but quite possibly the first porn star to do so], earning a PhD in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. Identifying as ecosexual [AZ: and as a sex-positive feminist], Sprinkle is best known for her self-help style of pornography, teaching individuals about pleasure, and for her conventional pornographic film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle(1981). … Sprinkle, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, married her long-time partner Beth Stephens in Canada on January 14, 2007.
Sprinkle and Stephens together perform a variety of “ecosexual” wedding ceremonies to nature (to the fog, to the brine shrimp, to fire, to the soil, to the coal, etc.), all of them photographed. These are playful, silly, and deeply earnest, all at once. I’m especially fond of this one, because the two women look so wonderfully happy:
(#4) The White Wedding to Snow in Ottawa, Canada [3/26/11], produced by SAW Gallery in a decommissioned Catholic cathedral. (photo: courtesy of Benoit Aubrey)
All the scene needs is some all-white Sprinkles cupcakes.
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