Betty Crocker Never Was

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a radio dial tuning in, a warm announcer tone, then silence)
Nineteen twenty-one. A flour company. A problem.

[Verse 1]
The letters kept arriving and the letters wanted answers:
how long do I bake it, why'd my angel food collapse?
And the company thought, well, a woman ought to sign
the replies we're sending back, so the ladies feel it's kind.
So they made one. Out of nothing. In an afternoon.
"Crocker" from a director who'd retired from the room,

[Pre-Chorus]
and "Betty" 'cause it's friendly. That's the reason. That's it.
They picked it 'cause it's friendly. And that was that.

[Chorus]
Betty Crocker never was! Not for one single day!
The most trusted woman in America never drew a breath!
They held a handwriting contest for the girls in the typing pool
and the prettiest signature won and became her hand!
Betty Crocker never was. Betty Crocker never was.
And she answered every letter that a lonely kitchen sent.

[Verse 2]
Then they gave her a voice — several, actually, on the air,
different actresses in different cities, all of them named her.
Then a face, in 'thirty-six, a composite, a blend
of the features of the women in the test kitchen, all in one head.
Then she aged. They aged her. Seven portraits, one per era.
She got a little younger in the eighties. That's a real thing that happened.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And here's what gets me: she worked. She genuinely worked.
Women wrote to her in wartime about things they wouldn't say
to a mother or a neighbour or a husband or a priest,
and the answers came back kind, and the answers were sincere,
composed by real women in a room who could not sign,
who poured themselves in letters underneath a borrowed line.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(a letter being folded)
Somebody wrote those back.
Somebody real wrote every one of those back.