I hate The Man

It's officially summer! The kids are finally out of school and we spent this morning eating pancakes, and making our weekly schedule and list of field trips. One of the things we have been planning to do is hold a bake sale to benefit Share Our Strength, a charity that focuses on childhood hunger. Our plan was to hold it during the morning commute at our local train station, selling breakfast items like muffins and scones, thinking the site of adorable children up at the ass-crack of dawn, all to benefit charity, would persuade the locals, most of them parents themselves, into donating. It would be like shooting fish in a coffee-cake-flavored barrel!

And then I called town hall.

I wanted to be sure we didn't need some kind of permit, before I spent a week baking and loaded my three kids and several cartons of baked goods in to the van at 6:00am. Turns out we don't. We can't do it AT ALL. The town does not allow any kind of fundraising on its property. The good news, I got from the poor woman I was interrogating, was that the town does not own the train station and I'd have to call New Jersey Transit. How bad could that go? I mean, why the hell would they care about some little Podunk train station out in the suburbs?

Turns out they don't. They care about being sued by some idiot who claims to have had an allergic reaction to something we made. We can do the bake sale if we write a letter of intent and only sell packaged goods from manufacturers. My kids were going to make breakfast breads and muffins! Homemade goodness! A Fiber One muffin I bought at Stop & Shop could never compete with a Mollorca sweet bread from Starbucks down the block (and what the hell is that anyway? I smell bullshit. More like Jersey City sweet bread).

I am enraged, dear readers. This fear of litigation is sucking all of the fun out of our society and our kids' childhoods. I am not asking to sell wine coolers, or crack. I would assume any reasonable adult with food allergies would be able to read the sign "contains nuts" and stay away from the banana nut bread, and if not, would be too embarrassed to sue. Or, at least, that should be the case. Why must we be protected from ourselves? All common sense seems to have gone out the window. We live in a society where our coffee cups need to warn us of their hot contents. Is this all really necessary? Aren't we messing with some kind of natural selection here?

So I have two choices. I can hold the World's Lamest Bake Sale, or I can sell our poisonous fare outside the local grocery store, since that's private property and they allow that sort of thing. I refuse to sell that packaged crap, so it looks like the latter, which I am thinking , will be way less successful. Now we'll have to try and sell baked goods to harried mothers and geriatrics, both of who often (infuriatingly) pay for their groceries with checks instead of guilt-ridden, over-worked parents who have a few quarters leftover after buying their morning joe. I plan on bending the law though. The town technically owns the sidewalk, so we would be restricted to the parking lot of the store, but a lot of people walk by that store on their way to the train. Whatevs po-po, I ain't on your sidewalk, I'm just at the very edge of this asphalt selling my wares, keep it movin'.

H, make sure you keep your cell on that day. And cash for bail.