
The Entenmann’s box with the see-through window is sometimes used as a metaphor. Usually this has to do with ideas about tranparency. The Wacky Pack “Antenmann’s” parody sticker (on the left) compared the Entenmann’s see-through window to a window on an ant farm. The shrink-wrapped Entenmann’s box on the right is an advertising promotion: a deck of Entenmann’s box-shaped playing cards. Strange for playing cards to have a see-through window. If you’re playing cards, you generally want the hand you’re dealt to be for your eyes only. (See also: Wacky Packages and Playing Card Packs.)
1. Consumer
A 1996 remembrance by Wendy Wasserstein, about Martha Entenmann’s life is entitled, “She Saw Through Us.” By “us” she means Entenmann’s consumers so the metaphor is about Martha Entenmann’s early insight into our consumer behavior—that we customers were as transparent to her as the “see-through convertible bakery box top” that she invented.
2. Coffin
A character in F. Paul Wilson’s, The Tomb, while eating crumb cake, talks about wanting to be interred in an Entenmann’s box:
I’ve decided that after I’m cremated I want my ashes buried in an Entenmann’s box. Or if I’m not cremated, it should be a white, glass-topped coffin with blue lettering on the side.” He held up the cake box. “Just like this. Either way, I want to be interred on a grassy slope overlooking the Entenmann’s plant in Bay Shore.”
Another example of Entenmann’s box as coffin was found in these comments on a blog post about burying a pet parakeet:
I buried my budgie, Petey, in an empty Entenmann’s box . . . the cellophane window allowed for excellent viewing at the wake that we held for the neighborhood kids.
... Naturally, one would use the Entenmann’s box after consoling oneself with some tasty brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and/or cinnamon rolls.
3. “Believers” (and non-believers)
A sermon by Harold C. Warlick, Jr. entitled “People See Through Us” uses the same basic metaphor a Wendy Wasserstein—the “transparency” of people. Here, however, it is not about what Martha Entenmann sees in us, but how we look in God’s eyes...
Martha Entenmann invented the see-through cake box. Suddenly all manner of baked goods from pies to doughnuts began to arrive in see-through boxes with a proud blue Entenmann banner stamped on them. This caused those Entenmann baked goods to fill the shelves from New York to Miami.
As soon as the Christian church was organized as an institution, the letters and epistles of Paul and the epistle of James began to hammer home a message people did not want to hear. All believers and congregations are see-through to the world. People see through us. They really do! There is a see-through box top that covers every congregation and every believer.
from Sermons on the Second Readings
Interestingly, the Entenmann’s box also plays a role in Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander’s novel of Orthodox Jewish life...
(The Entenmann’s box as “literature-of-last-resort” after the fold...)
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