by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I do not eat well.

Let me rephrase that. I do not eat wisely.

I’ve always eaten well. That’s how I became an endomorph. I was born at six p.m., and, as my dad put it, “He came into the world at dinner time and hasn’t missed a meal since.”¹

Anyone who’s ever seen a picture of me in my college baseball uniform knows I’ve always eaten well. I once went out to warm up a pitcher at Santa Clara and the Bronco dugout erupted: “What are you, the team dietitian?” “Jeez, mix in a salad, will ya?” “Does your shadow leave marks on the pavement?”

But, as that bench jockeying might suggest, I have not eaten wisely. My idea of a balanced diet is one in which the cookie dough and the chocolate chips weigh the same amount. There are raccoons in Laguna who have better eating habits than mine.²

The only green things I eat are lime jello and mint-chip ice cream. I have matured enough to take the Santa Clara suggestion to heart and mix in a few salads, but that’s the exception to the rule. And even then, they tend to be salads that have highly caloric dressing or chunks of fried chicken mixed in.

What’s more, I am addicted to baked goods. I react as predictably as Pavlov’s dogs when a pink box shows up in the office.³ I consider myself very lucky that when God was passing out addictions, She gave me doughnuts instead of alcohol, power, or other dangerous drugs.

My eating habits almost cost me my first job in this county. Two weeks after the bar exam I interviewed for a job as a post-bar law clerk in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. As related to me years later by a member of the final interviewing panel, the final decision came down to me and two others. One of the panel members was in a hurry and didn’t want to spend time on the final winnowing out.

“I don’t care which one you hire,” he threw back over his shoulder as he walked out the door, “Just don’t hire the fat wimp.”

To which one of the other panelists replied, “Dick, he can’t be a wimp. He was a Division One catcher; you can’t be a wimp and do that.” (Notice he didn’t try to defend me on the “fat” charge.)

Came the response, “Alright, if you wanna hire that fat wimp, hire the fat wimp. I don’t care.”

They not only hired me, they assigned me to the guy who didn’t want to hire me. Prosecutors do have a sense of humor; it’s just not the same as everybody else’s.

So with all this background,⁴ it should come as no surprise that I love ice cream.⁵ Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy ice cream, and that’s close enough for me. The stereotype says if you see a woman eating ice cream right out of the carton, you know something’s wrong; if you see me doing it, you know only that there’s no adult supervision in the house.

And my love for a particular flavor is largely determined by how many confectionary additions have been thrown into it. While I can appreciate a first-class vanilla, I will always gravitate to the cartons that show chocolate chips and caramel ripples and marshmallow crème and peanut butter candies and . . . well, you get the idea. I am not a purist.

So this headline almost gave me whiplash: Miller High Life Brews up Beer-Flavored Ice Cream.⁶

Honest. This was on a reputable news site and showed up on other reputable news sites. This is not Andy Borowitz.

Here’s what else it said, “Miller High Life and Tipsy Scoop have teamed up on an ice cream ‘dive bar’ [clever pun] with real beer and notes of peanuts and tobacco.” This is Miller High Life’s way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the ice cream bar, something I’ve been doing since I was six, but corporate America is apparently just catching up with.⁷

Tipsy Scoop is a company that specializes in alcohol-infused ice cream. Their website will allow you to order flavors like Vanilla Bean Bourbon, Dark Chocolate Whiskey Salted Caramel, Cake Batter Martini, and Tequila Coconut Margarita.

And now you can buy “six packs”⁸ of Miller High Life Ice Cream Dive Bars for $36. This is giving new meaning to the term Good Humor Bar (which they resemble). People will now have a chance to get Eskimo Pie-eyed.⁹

Nor can I express adequately what a bad idea this seems to be. This seems to me to be biblically bad. Apocalyptically bad. I’m pretty sure Revelations includes something about “war, famine, pestilence, and beer-flavored ice cream.”

For one thing, I do not indulge in adult beverages. It’s not a moral or philosophical thing; I just don’t like the taste. Coffee, beer, wine, spirits . . . just not my cup of tea.¹⁰

So adding beer to ice cream does not light up my pleasure centers. Any of them.

For another, ice cream with “notes of tobacco” sounds to my ears like “cotton candy with notes of asphalt” or “white chocolate with notes of turpentine.” I’d rather be in a room where they were mixing hydrochloric acid and magnesium sulfate.

So this just doesn’t appeal to me on a basic tastebuds level. But I have another problem with it. I started my career prosecuting DUI cases, and they are surprisingly complex. You’ve got expert witnesses, chains of evidence, opinion testimony . . . a lot of the things that make lawsuits less pleasurable than . . . well, than ice cream.

Imagine adding this to the mix:

“Excuse me, Sir, we stopped you because you seem to be weaving, and you bounced off three-parked cars and a residential garage before stopping here on this lawn. And on this home-owner. Have you been drinking?”

“No, Offisher. Not a shingle drink.”

“I’m over here, Sir, you’re talking to a tree.”

“Oh, sho you are. Well your partner has lovely limbsh and beautiful leaves. But I have not been drinking.”

“Have you been in any bars tonight, Sir?”

“Not a one. Been home all evening. Just on my way to pick up some more ishe cream. Love ishe cream; don’t you?”

“Yes, Sir, I do. Tell me, Sir, what kind of ice cream were you eating?”

“Miller High Life Dive Barzh. Two six packs. They are DELISHUSH!! Wait a minute, should you be reading me my rightsh? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure you can’t make me walk a shtraight line just because you suspect I’ve been ashuming . . . er, rezhooming . . . er conshuming—yeah, that’s it, conshuming . . . ishe cream!”

“Sir, why don’t you sit down here and wipe the chocolate off your chin while I call this in. We may need to get the watch commander out here for this one.”

Bad idea.

When I was a rookie DA, back in the Pleistocene, we were all invited to take part in “Drink-and-Blows.” The young prosecutors would join a bunch of CHP officers at a school parking lot, drink alcohol, and then try to drive a course set out with traffic cones. The idea was to demonstrate how insidious the effects of alcohol are on driving.

I never did it because they didn’t offer piña coladas or margaritas. It was pretty much, scotch or beer.¹¹ I figured it wouldn’t do anyone any good to find out how many scotches it would take to make me to throw up in a waste basket so I didn’t show up.

I might feel differently if they start testing beer ice cream bars. I might volunteer for that.

BEDS NOTES

1. Dad was from a generation for whom “nurturing” was not part of the male job description.
2. And their wives and mothers probably shook their heads at them, too.
3. Although Pavlov’s dogs probably would not rip the box open like a starving bear.
4. I re-define TMI every month, don’t I?
5. And my vocabulary is not good enough to describe how I feel about gelato. It’s probably the best argument I’ve encountered for the existence of God.
6. The headline wasn’t in italics, but it should have been.
7. William Isaly invented the Klondike bar in 1922. Seems to me if they’re gonna rename Hastings School of Law, they oughta consider Mr. Isaly.
8. I keep wanting to add, “Honest” to every sentence. I am NOT making this up.
9. Yes, I know there are readers for whom the terms “Eskimo Pie” and “pie-eyed” have no meaning. But those are precisely the readers most capable of Googling both.
10. I couldn’t resist. Discipline is not my long suit. And I don’t drink tea, either. Unless I’m sick and we put lots of honey in it.
11. It was the early seventies. Prosecutors were pretty much all men, and “real men” drank scotch or beer. I wasn’t a “real man,” I was a “fat wimp.”

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.