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Oct 27, 2025

A Child’s Garden of Woke Delights

There’s no place with gnomes

By Ed Goldman

OOne of my favorite distorted kid rhymes is the following:

“Hickory Dickory dock,
The mice ran up the clock.
The clock struck one
—And all the others escaped with minor injuries.”

What if some of our more beloved children’s stories, songs and poems needed to acknowledge reality—including “woke” concepts and the daily news?

Edgy Cartoon

Rabbit transit

1. Snow White and the Seven Height-Challenged, Non-Union Mine Workers Forced To Share Inadequate Housing Far Off The Grid

2. An excerpt from “Little Red Riding Hood”:

“Grandma, what big eyes you have!”

“Yes, I just had them done. I’m told the look will ‘settle’ in a few weeks and I won’t look perpetually astonished.”

3. From “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”:

Mama Bear: “Who’s that sleeping in our bed?”

Papa Bear: “I know nothing about this. I simply invited her over to discuss her movie career.”

4. Robert Louis Stevenson’s delightful poem: “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me/What can be the use of him is more than I can see/I’m thinking of getting a restraining order.”

5. In the reboot of “Hansel and Gretel,” the evil witch is stopped from eating Hansel when Gretel informs her, “You do realize he’s not gluten-free, yes?”

6. Since the conclusion of “Jack and the Beanstalk” is considered an example of discriminatory giantism, instead of causing the giant to plunge to his death from his perch, Jack leaves him a bowl of high-fiber magic beans, understandably causing the giant to become a shut-in. When asked how he decided to use this approach rather than any number of other murderous tactics, Jack modestly says, “It was a process of elimination.”

7. When the prince comes to see if the glass slipper fits Cinderella’s beautiful foot, Cinderella—who’s become a fashion influencer with her own podcast, “Raggy Chic”—asks to instead see something in a strappy mid-heeled sandal. As she tells the befuddled and besmitten prince, “You’re thinking Barbie, your highness, but I’m, like, Manolo Blahnik, right?”

8. “Old MacDonald Had A Farm/E-I-E-I-O/And on this farm he had both threatened and officially endangered species/E-I-E-I-O!/And what’s the deal with labeling MacDonald as ‘old’ /E-I-E-I-O!/With a lawsuit here and a cease-and-desist there/E-I-E-I-O…!”

9. An excerpt from “The Three Little Pigs”: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll have your house condemned by the planning department.”

10. “Mary had a little lamb/Whose fleece was white as snow/But Mary is a vegan now/And lamb is a no-no.”

11. “The sky is falling!” cried Chicken Little. “And while we’re at it, the glaciers are melting and the rain-forest fire is only 50-percent contained.”

12. “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall/And winter pretty much sucked, too.”

13. “Peter, pumpkin eater/Had a wife and couldn’t keep her/‘Damn these tariffs,’ Peter said.”

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14. “The itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the water spout/Down came the rain and washed the spider out/Then came the gutter guards, the leaves plugged up the spout / So the itsy-bitsy spider just sat the autumn out.”

15. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?/With biological products, not chemicals, you know.”

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).