Teapot in a Tempest

Some people hear voices. Some folks see dead people. Some guy driving on a freeway in California saw Adolf Hitler in a billboard advertising a teapot. Seriously?

Frankly, I could stare at that sleek little kettle on the billboard until the cows come home and see nothing more than a teapot with a bell perched on the spout, but one woman's cookware is another person's tyrant I suppose, and it's all about perspective. It did not take much for me to begin to question myself, to wonder whether this little teapot was just a little teapot, short and and a bit stout,  or whether this little teapot was indeed something far more sinister. Could this billboard have been the ultimate example of subliminal advertising, a call to neo-Nazis everywhere to start cooking up their hateful brew?  

Like many drivers who, I am sure, drove by the advertisement without noticing the the horrific resemblance, I had failed to put the teapot in the proper context. I just wasn't thinking about Hitler. If I had been, I would have been appalled.  My goodness, the likeness is uncanny. That is, at least, if you pour with your right hand. Turn the pot around and I think Adolf would disappear, and we'd be more likely to see someone who parted his hair on the left, someone who might more likely be our collective cup of tea. Abe Lincoln springs to mind.  

The power of suggestion is a force to be reckoned with. After reading the news reports of the teapot-gate, I went downstairs and gazed at my own teapot, a splash of green in my otherwise bland kitchen. I don't even drink tea that often, but my teapot remains on the stove top at all times, just because I like looking at it. Talk about a buzz kill. I suddenly saw Kermit, a smiling but, let's face it, hideous green frog, the last image you want to conjure up every morning in your kitchen when you've spent more than three years out in the dating world and kissed way too many frogs. Sorry Kermit, I guess it's really not easy being green. The teapot's going in the cabinet. 

Yes, I know, sometimes a teapot is really just a teapot, and Hitler is dead and buried, and I've pretty much eliminated the amphibians from my dance card. And, frankly, I could do a lot worse than Kermit. Like any red blooded American, I grew up singing the silly ditty that had me pretending to be a teapot from time to time. It's a free country; anybody can be a teapot, and, I suppose, a teapot can be anybody. 

It's all a matter of perspective.