Fresh Fanny and Her Muffin Top

OK. Reality Check. How many people think there are actual "ovens" inside a Starbucks that are used to bake things? As in pastries? Delicious, sugary loaves and rounds of confections that are a delight to the tongue and palate? Gorgeous, tasty, calorie-filled carbohydrate bombs that decimate diets and serve dire warnings to diabetics that they should never venture anywhere near a Starbucks pastry case?

Attention boys and girls, how many of you out there think that there are giant ovens in the back of YOUR favorite Starbucks store dedicated to turning out piles of your favorite black-and-white cookies or crumb cakes or old-fashioned donuts? I mean, they make coffee there, why not cakes?

Yeah. I know. Reality is such a harsh mistress. The only baked that happens in Starbucks is probably going on around 4:20 p.m. and involves the patrons and possibly a few baristas - although I've never personally witnessed any "baking" of this sort going on.

Fresh Fanny is going on fifty. Fresh Fanny has flame-red hair, although it hasn't been "naturally" red in some decades, and Fresh Fanny uses enough hairspray to account for a hole in the ozone the size of France. Where she's never been, to "drive through Paris, in a sportscar, with the warm wind in her hair." She's a shriveled old prune who DROVE five miles from the mall, which has a perfectly good Starbucks, to come here. Maybe she needed a smoke. Maybe she wanted to flirt with the monkey-boy barista. (edit: this is the same one involved in the apron-twirling episode, so I'm going to call him Little Apron Aaron) Maybe she just wanted a fresh pastry ... and here our story begins:

FRESH FANNY: Casts a disdainful eye over the pastry case. Fresh Fanny is haughty, for she wears the uniform of a mall department store cosmetics counter worker, although you can buy *HER* brand in Wal-Mart. (Starts with "C" and ends with "linique," much beloved by drag queens everywhere. True story: I once knew a drag queen that wanted to call herself Clinique Lancome. They loved cosmetics. I don't know why.
BARISTA: "What can I get for you?"

FRESH FANNY: Another sneering eye. You work a cosmetics counter girlfriend. Noth the White House. Not even White House | Black Market. "Uh. Is this fresh?"
BARISTA: "What?"

FRESH FANNY: "Is the cake fresh?"
BARISTA: "We put it out a couple hours ago."

FRESH FANNY: "But is it fresh?"
BARISTA: "We don't bake it here."

FRESH FANNY: "Oh."
BARISTA: One of those looks of "Kali deliver me from the stupidity of this evil, especially from a fellow customer service wage slave."

FRESH FANNY: "Well, where does it come from?"
BARISTA: "Well, some comes from Miami, some comes from Tampa."

FRESH FANNY: "But is it fresh?" Obviously, no one has gotten "fresh" with this crone in a while.
BARISTA: "Yes." Because that's the path of least resistance. And there's no use telling her it comes frozen on a truck from Tennessee or wherever the rest of Starbucks pastries arrive from. Fresh Fanny has the cherished dream of a coffee farm - where young pastries and donuts gambol fresh and fancy free under a gorgeous mocha sky and grow up gently caressed by the tender mercies of a warm caramel rain.

FRESH FANNY: "Well let me have the lemon pound cake."
BARISTA: "Coming right up." Because that's obviously been sitting there the least amount of time. I saw that pound cake when I rolled up - and it looked left over from this morning. Way to go there old girl.

Fresh Fanny takes her grande coffee and her lemon pound cake and hoofs it out the door into the caramel latte night, never to be seen again, except in the darkest recesses of the make-up counters at the Macy's, wielding an eyebrow pencil and lipliner in a desperate bid to recapture her lost limoncito youth.