Saturday Night Gingerbread

Here’s an ad with the backstory already firmly in place – the marital doldrums of one Jack and Alice, saved by…well, I’ll just bet you can’t guess what brought these two brilliantined-and-Marcelled dopes back together. I’ll let the suspense build a little.

Alice, you see, has noticed that “Jack was getting tired of domesticity and just her…his eyes wandered all too often in the direction of pink and white Betty Thornton, a recent arrival in town.”

Ah, ’twas it ever thus! Those pink and white new gals, the ones who use Dorothy Gray creams and slink around the country club batting their eyelashes.

Well, Alice springs into action. She buys a black satin dress “which made her figure look like a movie star’s.” Presumably she also hides the bill, because if Jack is anything like, say, Ricky Ricardo, he ain’t gonna like the look of that. And then she cooks up a meal, the high point of which is gingerbread made with Brer Rabbit molasses. I trust that Alice did not whip it up while wearing the black satin.

And then, as Jack is stuffing down dessert, he says the magic words. To wit: “There’s something about this dinner, darling, that makes me feel like a pampered prince! Everything is so perfect – and you look like a princess.”

Alice is happy with that (personally, I would be excusing myself to hunt down a spare air-sickness bag, but to each her own). She thinks “it’s the gingerbread that did the trick…” Maybe it did, Alice, maybe it did. Maybe that molasses will slow Jack down a little. In which case, aren’t you going to have to pony up the gingerbread 24/7? That’s quite a little baking precedent that’s being set, don’t you think?

I’d still keep an eye on Jack and Betty, that’s all I’m saying.