Ice Cream for I Scream

It’s summer, and just the sunniest of afternoons. Outside the sanatorium, in the arboretum, the attendees are served their teas. The strudel is toothsome when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern, contradicts the consensus that I is for ice cream. No, now he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti, all spaghetti, he avers, being once alphabetti, all spaghetti being once that capital I that it is when it’s dry, not the maddening doodle that it is when it’s done and awry. His audience listen, but once he has spoken, then beneath their applause that’s not fulsome but token, they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.