Mozcake

So, I've promised a post on this for, literally, years, since it first came up in comments, and Mama Shakes recently scanned pix for me so I could finally write it.

The backstory: Todd (aka Mr. Furious) and I, who have been best friends since the Pleistocene, have birthdays 9 days apart—which, naturally, means we've frequently celebrated them together. The year he was turning 17 and I was turning 18 (1992), we were having a joint birthday party, and we wanted a Morrissey cake. Like ya do.

So Todd's mom arranged for us to have a Morrissey cake. But the day of the party, we picked it up, and it was horrendous!


This cake was, we were certain, the worst thing to happen in the history of America! [/Little Edie] That cakemaker had ruined Morrissey! It was humiliating! He looked like a cartoon, not the serious artist who knew the very roadmap of our souls! And we would die—die!!!!11!—if we had to serve it to our friends (none of whom even gave two shits about Mozza, btw). We were both utterly destroyed and completely hysterical. What were we going to do??!!

Quick-thinking Mama Shakes pulled out her cake decorating supplies and told us to work on the disastrous Mozcake to disguise it, while she worked up an alternative. So Todd and I set to work creating a "Your Mom" cake:


At the time, "Your Mom" jokes were all the rage with the idiots with whom we were forced to attend classes every day in the angst-inducing nightmare for Camus-toting gay boys and fat chicks that is public high school—and we'd taken to shouting it at each other (ironically) almost incessantly. "Who was the woman who did the background vocals on that Iggy Pop song?" "YOUR MOM!"


Todd adds the final touch to the "Your Mom" cake: A dialogue
bubble in which "Your Mom" says, succinctly, "Poo!"
Meanwhile, Mama Shakes had been busy in the kitchen, making us the Mozcake of our dreams, complete with perfect pompadour, authentically squared jaw, and—the pièce de résistance—cocoa powder five o'clock shadow:


Now that was a Mozcake of which we could really be proud! There may have been fighting over who got to eat his dimple.

Our party was saved. The mix tapes over which we'd slaved for weeks, perfecting every track transition and spoken "Twin Peaks" sample, rocked my parents' basement, and the Mozcake was an unqualified success. For a brief, shining moment, we were the coolest bitchez who ever had birthdays, genuine intergalactic legends in our own minds.

And then we returned to school on Monday, where we were just a couple of queerbaits once again.