Cake Wrecks Book Signing

Okay, I know I've been going on and on about cake lately, especially about my winning cupcake in the Cake Wrecks book tour signing (read about it here and here), but I promise I'll stop soon. I just had to rejoice with you that my cupcake made it to the actual Cake Wrecks blog! Here is the entry, and if you scroll down through the winners from that night you will see my crazy orange wildcat (you can actually see "Katie R." written on the paper plate in that picture), in addition to my non-winner, the "Winter" cupcake.
I was completely bummed to find out at my birthday party that my most local cousin, Matt, is also a fan of Cake Wrecks! Somehow in all the planning, blogging, and cupcake decorating, I ran out of time to put out a call to all my Hillsboro homies to see if anyone wanted to attend the book signing with me, and Matt hadn't heard about it. Darn! I think that if we had been able to put our heads together ahead of time, we might have been able to come up with a grand-prize-winning cupcake entry (or at least I would have had an expert photographer there to take my picture).
And Portland drew an..interesting crowd of hundreds. Let me say that I love Oregon, LOVE it, and feel right at home here. But the Portland metro area doesn't completely exemplify the rest of the state. Portland is very urban hippie, with plenty of dreadlocks, hiking boots for everyday wear, REI "moisture-wicking" style pants, and lots and lots of Subarus. However, the dreadlocks and pants are clean, everyone rides around on their bikes with clear, Neutrogena-commercial skin, and everyone gives you a smile as they swig from their stainless-steel water bottles. Not necessarily so for much of the rest of the state, where the people are a little more conservative, slightly "country," and don't so much favor the deodorant. On my first visit to Oregon, I talked about my driving route up and down I-5 with a friend and her family who are native Oregonians. Noticing that the cities I was visiting constituted an almost-vertical line on the extreme west side of the state, I asked them, "What's in Eastern Oregon?" "Nothing."
Another story comes to mind of when I was working as a college recruiter a few years ago, with the Pacific Northwest as a major part of my territory. A big group of representatives from various different colleges were all up in Seattle for an event, planning to drive south in a caravan of cars to Oregon for an event that started the next day. I was at a convenience store with a few other reps, including one snarky guy from San Francisco who would not stop trash-talking about how we were leaving Seattle for the land of the hicks and "country folk." When we finally got up to the cash register with sodas and chips and such, the cashier idly remarked, "Road trip?" I nodded my assent and the snarky rep said, "Yeah, we're going to the place where they're lucky if they've got all their teeth." The cashier politely asks, without missing a beat, "Oh, where in Oregon are you going?" I'm not making this up.
So yes, there were some more colorful characters at Powell's last Friday night. After the winning cupcake entry was selected, the crowd began to disperse to go eat cake and get their books signed, while I hung around at the front of the room hoping that one of the other winners with a camera would take my picture with Jen, the author. While I was looking around, a grey-toothed woman came barreling up to the front of the room to the table with the cupcakes. She retrieved her entry, and proceeded to passive-aggressively whine to Jen and her husband about how she had driven 200 miles to get here, and then had to decorate her cupcake on a table downstairs in the bookstore because she'd been so afraid that the cupcake decorations wouldn't survive the journey. She flipped her long, knotted hair over the fanny-pack-sporting shoulder of her batik sundress as she lisped to them that she just couldn't understand how she didn't win! Poor blogger Jen and her husband John eventually managed to get away, but I sure didn't. I wound up two people in line behind this loony woman in the hour-long wait to get my book signed. I shifted my weight from foot to foot (in shoes that might have been comfortable had I not already been standing for an hour and a half in the crowded room while the book discussion was going on) and tried to ignore the B.O. and dagger-eyes of crazy greytooth as she kept shooting glances at my Carrot Jockey necklace, which I was proudly sporting. Happily, the Grand Prize winner and I were the last people in line, so at least Jen and John didn't leave Portland with their last memory being this smelly woman ordering them to sit and put down their cake so that she could take a picture with them. But it takes "all kinds" to make a world, doesn't it?
And now, as this disgusting cake says..."That's all, Folks!"