published by the Smithsonian

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The Smithsonian publishes a handful of excellent magazines, and a number of interesting blogs, including Food and Think. That has to be one of the best blog titles, ever, and the content is interesting, too.

Periodically, Food and Think will throw out a topic, and invite any random person to write up a story on the topic and submit it for publication on the blog.

The June topic was "foods that made you sick, or foods you were fed when you were sick."

When I was a kid, the neighbor boys and I all got sick from chocolate ice cream. That was the last chocolate ice cream I ever enjoyed. I thought of chocolate ice cream,  immediately, when I read the F&T topic, but ... who wants to hear about stuff that made a person sick? (Perhaps this is why they had a dearth of entries for that topic -- everyone else thought the same thing: "Who wants to hear about that?")

I kept rolling the topic around in my head, and realized that the twist to my story was that, though my 5-yr-old brain put hot chocolate in the same category as chocolate ice cream (so I never liked it, again, either),  my 50+-yr-old aversion to hot chocolate was overcome by the delicious hot chocolate I drank in France last summer.

Reminding myself that the worst thing that could happen was that they'd never reply, I wrote it up, asked my daughter to edit, rewrote, and submitted my story.

I was surprised and pleased, a few weeks later, to get email calling my story "delightful," and saying they "hoped to publish it in a few weeks" -- from someone whose title is Senior Editor, The Smithsonian!

I didn't tell anyone until it actually was published. The editors left it almost entirely intact, but changed my constant references to "chocolate ice cream" to just "chocolate." That makes it more succinct (not a bad thing), but leaves the (incorrect) impression that I didn't like *any* chocolate. I was always fine with ... solid ... forms of chocolate. Candy bars. Kisses. Cake. Brownies. It was just the ... liquid ... forms I couldn't countenance. Ice cream. Hot chocolate. Chocolate milk......

In any case, here is a minute and a half of my fifteen minutes of fame.

Published by the Smithsonian!


Remember, in Shrek, when Donkey says "Did you hear that? She called me a 'steed'!"

In the same tone of voice -- "Did you see that? They called me 'the grand finale'!"

Yay!

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