The Real Betty Crocker(s)

I spent a couple of days last week at the General Mills headquarters in Minneapolis, where I met another blogger by the name of Latricia.

Latricia impressed me even before I met her because of her tweets on the taxi ride from the airport to our hotel. It was her first-ever taxi ride, so of course, things went horribly wrong.

Her tweets grew more and more frantic as her cab driver pulled over to the side of the freeway, lost and unable to find the hotel even on GPS. He made calls. He drove around. He pulled over again. Latricia started crying. And she kept tweeting. At one point, she even tweeted her cab number.

Reading her tweets from my hotel room, I knew from the cab number announcement that it was about as bad as it gets. When you resort to that kind of thing, it's basically so that they can track down your murderer after your body turns up three weeks later, stuffed in a suitcase somewhere in Mexico.

Her tweets abruptly stopped after she announced that her driver had pulled into an abandoned parking lot and asked her if it was the Marriott. Even as I enjoyed my complimentary Chardonnay, cheese and crackers in my hotel room, I worried about Latricia and feared the worst. I couldn't believe I had basically witnessed a murder on Twitter.

So you can imagine how relieved I was to find her alive and mostly well in the lobby a few hours later.

"I totally got your cab number reference," I told her. "If you hadn't been down here, I would have called the police."

"That's good," she said. "Because someone needed to be able to track down my killer."

Latricia, it turned out, had quite an imagination, fueled as it was by one too many episodes of CSI, Dateline, and Law and Order. If you're a regular reader here, you can probably imagine, then, the way our conversations went on the trip.

"You have to wonder if everyone is who they claim to be," she mused as we eyed the other mommybloggers warily.

""Oh, I'm pretty sure there's a homicidal maniac among us," I agreed. "And I'm also pretty sure it's the one of us who chose to wear a Little Bo Beep costume on the dinner cruise." The light of recognition dawned in Latricia's eyes as we turned our gazes on the Little Bo Peep-clad mom blogger in question.

Later in the trip, a discussion on canned vegetables provided us with an explanation for where most of the mom bloggers disappeared to at the end of the day without so much as a goodbye. Ostensibly, they had been escorted to the gift shop. But they never returned. I'm not even kidding.

"I think they've been taken to the canning factory!" I whispered anxiously.

"They did say they only picked food at the peak of freshness and maturity!" Latricia agreed frantically. "That's.... us!"

"Suddenly, it all makes sense!" I said. "We have got to find a way out of here, or... or..." I closed my eyes and turned pale. "Mincemeat!"

As we waited, we felt the eyes of Betty Crocker upon us. All of them. Yes, we were seated in a room featuring the original portraits of various incarnations of Betty Crocker.

The Bettys

"They'll take us to a room, one by one," I whimpered. "And all of the Bettys will be there. With butcher knives." Suddenly, it dawned on me why they were so bent on us posing as the next Betty Crocker.

"The Bettys will crowd around me with their knives," I said, my eyes glazed over with terror, "and then the movie will end with a pan of all of the Betty Crocker portraits... and the last one is... me."

Latricia gasped, horror-struck. I knew she could totally picture it.

I'm not sure this is the post that General Mills intended when I was invited to tour its headquarters. And yet, I bet you've thought about Betty Crocker more just now than you ever have in your life, right?

You're welcome, General Mills.