A CCA bedtime story
By Linda Felaco
Once upon a time, in a kingdom by the sea, there lived a prince named Cliff. Prince Cliff lived on an organic subsistence farm in a small passive solar palace he had built himself. For the past 10 years, he’d had an open building permit to enlarge his palace with native granite stones he cut and shaped himself. He’d never paid a heating bill, much less the taxes on the additional square footage, since the town building official had never issued a certificate of occupancy.
Prince Cliff wanted to marry a princess to share his palace and organic farm with him, but he couldn’t seem to find a suitable wife. He despised lies and slander, but none of the princesses in the kingdom ever seemed to think that the things Prince Cliff called lies and slander really were lies and slander. He just couldn’t be certain that any of them truly were princesses.
Then, one dark and stormy night, a young woman who had been caught in a downpour while riding her bicycle through the woods sought shelter in Prince Cliff’s palace.
She told Prince Cliff she was a princess who had written a letter to the editor claiming that the former town council president had committed terrible lies and slander against her.
But Prince Cliff wasn’t convinced that she truly was a princess, so he decided to give her a test. He made her read a blog for 21 months to see if she could find any lies and slander. At the end of the 21 months, she wrote a lengthy op-ed detailing all kinds of lies and slander that she’d managed to read between the lines of the blog. Prince Cliff was overjoyed.
Prince Cliff married Princess Ruth the very next day, in a lovely ceremony at the Shelter Harbor Golf Club, which thanks to Prince Cliff’s favorable open space tax policies was only taxed at one-quarter the rate the rest of his subjects paid.
And Prince Cliff and Princess Ruth lived happily ever after, eating the food they grew on their organic subsistence farm.
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