Education

Unjust Desserts

October 28, 1987 1 min read
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Officials at Mount Mercy Academy now know it can be a mixed blessing to be rolling in dough.

The Buffalo, N.Y., school had ordered 700 doughnuts as a mid-morning treat for its 660 students, who were attending an all-day seminar. But a local bakery delivered 700 dozen instead--that’s eight thousand four hundred--and refused to take them back.

“When all of a sudden, the fourth truck of doughnuts came upon us, we knew we needed to make a quick decision,” said Sister Joan Sherry, the school’s principal. “These doughnuts just kept coming, and coming, and coming.”

The seminar leader, she said, came to the rescue by singing “Buy a doughnut!” to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah,” while accompanying himself on the school’s auditorium piano. This, she said, stimulated students and faculty members to each buy a dozen doughnuts.

The bill--which was $1,265, less the amount raised from the impromptu sale--will “cost us a lot of dough,” the principal said.

“If you didn’t laugh about it, you’d sit down and cry,” she said, noting that at one point school officials jokingly decided to “freeze them and use them as doorstops.”

“Thank God they’re gone,” Sister Joan said.

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