Last week, I was in the cereal aisle of a grocery store in Fairfax County, Virginia, arguing with my son about breakfast choices. He insisted on a box of sugary cereal, so I encouraged him to read the nutritional label.
Engrossed in the specificities of the label on a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, 12 grams of sugar per one cup of cereal, a woman we did not know approached us. She asked us if we had watched the movie “Unfrosted,” released last month on Netflix. When we told her we hadn’t yet seen it, she insisted we must, especially in light of our argument — which was very public, apparently.
I appreciated the brief encounter with the random stranger just outside our nation’s capital. In my experience, those types of interactions happen all the time in the Midwest where I grew up — and in fairness, I am usually the one to initiate them. But not so much on the East Coast, where joggers who wave to people passing by are usually ignored. I knew it was kismet. We had to see this movie that the kind stranger, probably also from the Midwest, recommended.
Over the weekend, I asked my sons to indulge me and watch “Unfrosted” in an attempt to expand their attention spans beyond the YouTube shorts their generation is so accustomed to. The movie, set in Battle Creek, Michigan, is not far from where I grew up and is about a mostly fictitious rivalry between two
