Wannabe Cupcake Muffin

I told everyone at work yesterday that I used to be in a heavy metal band called "Wannabe Cupcake Muffin." This isn't true, but I was really really bored. And when things get that way at work, I start approaching my coworkers and telling them elaborate lies about my life. It's actually probably my favorite work hobby.

But I didn't make up the phrase "Wannabe Cupcake Muffin" as the name of an imaginary heavy metal band. A couple of summers ago when I used to spend most of my time hanging out with friends instead of working, someone came up with the idea that we should all design t-shirts for threadless.com. This was basically a ploy to get a windfall of extra beer money because, as most everyone knows, threadless pays $5000 for good t-shirt designs. So one night, more as a joke than anything else, we riffed on t-shirt ideas and some one (I don't think it was me) came up with the words "Wannabe Cupcake Muffin."

After drinking some more beers, a complete vision for the t-shirt started to form. The premise was a muffin looking in a bathroom mirror, probably late at night after its little muffin wife had gone to bed. The muffin was slowly applying frosting to its top, just experimenting to see how it would feel to dress up as a cupcake. "Not for any reason or nothing," the muffin would say to himself. "More like as a joke." But he wouldn't tell any of his muffin friends who he worked with down at the factory about it. And when the boys started to make fun of Jerry for not coming bowling because he had to go curtain shopping with his wife, the muffin would mock him louder than anyone. "Jerry is such a little dessert," he would say, not remembering that the night before he had spread pink icing across his muffin top.

Needless to say, this was a difficult story to convey with the picture on the front of a t-shirt. It makes for a pretty confusing image. The similarities in appearance between a cupcake and a muffin, which is kinda the point of the whole thing, actually made it really hard to draw. How do you make a muffin that is distinctly not a cupcake, but also has frosting on top? And where do you put the arms? Or the eyes for that matter? It's perplexing to the t-shirt viewer, and you lose all the gay/tranny subtext.

And as the name of an imaginary heavy metal band, it was not too successful either. Nobody really believed me. But maybe that was because one of my coworkers brought in muffins that had this sweet peanut butter frosting on top. So it was pretty clear where the idea came from.