June 1988
Publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven
The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday
By Mimsie Coleman
The Commissioners of Cake have assembled. The meeting has been called to order more or less. As the proceeding proceed, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary gathering. It is more like the Mad Hatters tea party in wonderland where things are not quite what they seem, where reality and fantasy converge.
The Commissioner of Protocol speaks. "Will now turn to the next item on the agenda which is whether to serve forks with the cake."
The Commissioner of Icing responds: "I think it is a good bureaucratic policy to offer forks, to offer people the option, but I don't think that requesting a fork should guarantee one."
Another voice, in rapid succession: "I move that we state in writing that we will offer forks, but that we make them unavailable."
A fourth voice: "I think we should consider the environmental impact that plastic forks will have and not offer them at all."
The environmental argument wins support within seconds for a No Fork Policy. The Protocol Commissioner announces, "I move that this be so decreed, by order of the Commissioner of Waste Management, of which there is none."
Believe it or not, the speakers here are actually leaders from New Haven's art and business community. There mission is a real one: to help plan part of New Haven Colony's birthday celebration by helping to design and facilitate distribution of 3,500 pieces of free cake-The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, to festival goers on the New Haven Green, June 4th and 5th.
"Our primary mission is to serve cake." said Beverly Richey, the artist and organizer who dreamed the project up. "We'd also like to make the experience fun and insightful," she added. Richey decided that the cake, in honoring a city and its institutions, should also pay homage to its bureaucracy. She has planned a bureacratic maze to accompany the cake, facilitating an orderly approach and allowing cake eaters to participate in bureacratic inspired activities.
In exposing bureaucracy, Richey has created her own. She has established her own Cake Bureau composed of 30 individuals, including a system consultant, a fashion designer, cake production officials, maze developers, paperwork producers, and more than a dozen Cake Commissioners. The bureau has taken over all aspects of planning and design. So far for example, Leon's Bakery will bake the cakes: artist Ted Tihansky and others are designing its appearance; Project Director Joyce Greenfield oversees the mechanics; and of course, the all-important Cake Commissioners determine policy. They abide (albeit loosely) by Roberts Rules of Order, the rules which govern official meetings; they couch motions in semi-appropriate language, trying to be faithful to the spirit within bureaucracies, while creating an atmosphere of bureaucracy at its most absurd.
"I approached this expecting a crumby experience," Jim Greenfield, the group's undisputed bureaucratic spokesman par excellence, explains. "But I found that it is a very gratifying experience, that I am enjoying it a-la-mode. I had no idea the depths to which a bureaucracy could descende until my experience as a Cake Commissioner."
This same humor should prevail on June 4th and 5th, when the A-Mazing bureacratic wonderland is brought to the New Haven Green. The cake bureaucrats will be joined by various regional dignitaries, including Representative Bruce Morrison and Major Biagio DiLieto, to serve people cake. Cake will be served from 1-4pm and 5-7:30pm both days, at the Arts tent on the lower Green.
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