DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When I heard about MoveOn PAC’s Bake Sale, a coordinated grassroots effort to raise money for the Kerry campaign, I thought of Spinal Tap: there is such a fine line between clever and stupid.

It would likely make the news. Free PR is clever. But any single contribution to the opposition from a defense contractor or energy company would eclipse the total take of a nationwide bake sale, making the entire effort somewhat pointless.

Besides, I thought, who has time to bake cookies for a political campaign?

I do, as it turns out. And I wasn’t the only one. When I checked the MoveOn bake-sale site, I was surprised to see 35 volunteer bakers staffing three bake sales in this small town.

Given our normally tight weekend schedule, we had to compromise somewhat. We planned to make cookies anyway (for a dinner party), but getting them done in time for the bake sale required us to adjust our schedule. The adjustment meant not going to the store to pick up two of the necessary ingredients; instead, we substituted lemon zest for orange, and we used the wrong kind of coconut.

The chosen cookie recipe is nearly without peer: Nancy Jamison’s Coconut-Cranberry Chews. We’ve made the cookies many times before with uniformly excellent results. But our substitutions had an unexpected effect. The first batch sucked: dry, somewhat hard, not-entirely-sweet balls with a slightly astringent finish due to the lemon.

We added a shot of orange juice for a later batch. This cured the dry problem and the ball problem; it turned the batch into one Pangaea supercookie, encompassing all the earth’s landmasses, or at least all the dough on the cookie sheet. This cookie was so big, if we’d tried to dunk it in milk, it would have caused a tide.

This episode notwithstanding, I have a knack for cookies. I’ve seen a lot of sad-looking cookies, especially at, for example, community bake sales, and I’d looked forward to delivering a batch of something better. So it was with a distinct air of regret that I loaded a plate with the best of my own sad-looking cookies, and drove them downtown to find one of the local bake sales.

I’d had to choose between the perfectionist route — skipping the bake sale because my cookies didn’t turn out the way I expected — or participating with a slightly sub-par result. In the end I realized this was a completely appropriate conclusion for participation in a political process. I’d started with the best of intentions, made a slight compromise to accomodate a conflict, and the result was disappointing, leaving the consumer with a bitter aftertaste.