January 14, 1962

Swiss Miss was taken into East German custody yesterday for “yodeling and spreading good will,” according to ConAgra, the American company that manufactures the popular chocolate powder used for making hot cocoa. She had accidentally wandered over to the east side while promoting the product to West Germans. At the time of her arrest she was carrying 808 grams, enough to make 43 six-ounce servings of hot cocoa. Hot cocoa, though not officially banned in East Germany, targets customers who should only want to buy chocolate from Halloren-Kugeln, Germany’s preferred chocolate maker since 1804, if they know what’s good for them.

After the wall was put up last year, replacing the barbed wire fence, the East German government has tightened restrictions on who can enter or leave the country. “Swiss Miss, no matter how neutral she claims to be, is considered an agent of Western aggression,” said Helmut Burkhart, general assistant to the overall assistant to Walter Ulbricht, the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). “We have reason to believe she was trying to incite mass defections of East German residents by luring them with chocolate powder and using our water to make hot cocoa. She’s lucky we didn’t put her in front of a firing squad,” Burkhart added.

President Kennedy, who’s getting tired of all this communist shit, vows serious action against East Berlin if just one strand of blond hair is touched on Swiss Miss’s head. He says he already has enough on his plate with Castro doing God knows what just 90 miles from Miami and now this? “What this country needs right now, besides a strong space program…and the death of the mob…and an end to all those rumors about me and Marylin, is someone willing to stand up to the communists. I’ll go straight past the GDR and all the way to Khrushchev if I have to start cracking heads here!”

The entertainment industry is not wasting any time. American pop stars including Brenda Lee, Chubby Checker, Dion, Ray Charles, Connie Francis, Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin are planning a benefit concert called Cups Across America to be televised live on NBC this Sunday following Bonanza. Viewers will be asked to drink Swiss Miss hot cocoa during the duration of the concert, which could last as long as three hours. Children are being encouraged to go outside, hold hands from coast to coast and yodel at the top of their lungs, hoping that East Berlin will hear their pleas to release Swiss Miss. That way, she can come back to Menomonie, Wisconsin and East Germany can go back to being a one-chocolate country. “This could very well be the only measure of diplomacy that would enable the international powers to shift their attention to more pressing matters,” according to Joe Farley, President and Founder of Cups Across America.

But East Berlin is not buying it. “When we agreed to make the world an unsafe place by joining forces with the Soviet Union 13 years ago, we meant it and we will not waver from our promise. Nothing short of a nuclear missile aimed straight at us will enable Swiss Miss to ever see the light of day again!” says Burkhart. “You Americans see a cute and adorable little girl with blond braids. We see a spy who infiltrated one of our most impenetrable checkpoints, who wants to steal our secrets and spread freedom and democracy. If we give in to her, we’ll wake up one day and all of Germany will be doing The Twist and sucking down Coca-Colas and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. I think you cowboys have watched one too many Ronald Reagan movies.”

Maybe so, but perhaps it’s time for the U.S. to put its Cold War policy of containment on hold and win one for the Gipper. Until then, the U.S. waits and prays that East Berlin will have a change of heart and release Swiss Miss before everyone’s hot chocolate gets cold.