From the Beacon Grapevine

Hold the handcuffs. The annual Shop-With-a-Cop Day will be cop-less this year, thanks to a scheduling conflict.

The popular event, which teams one of Bass Lake’s finest with several of Bass Lake’s tiniest for a day of Christmas shopping, will happen as scheduled but without the Men in Blue.

Instead, local funeral home directors have agreed to step in. The newly dubbed Shop-With-a Mortician Day will happen Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

So what went wrong with the original plan? It seems former Bass Lake Authority Police Chief Gwen “Tug” McNabb double-booked the BLAP squadron while still in charge.

Acting BLAP chief, Chiou Yueh, discovered the error while reading the duty list for Black Friday, the traditional SWAC day.

“Apparently Patrolman McNabb, when he was chief McNabb, booked the entire force at a weekend seminar on how to park squad cars in sub-rural settings,” Yueh said. ‘The damn thing is in an extended-stay hotel in a different time zone. We have to go.”

Yueh said the non-refundable $1,000 registration fee should not be wasted.

“What choice do we have?” Yueh said.

On the bright side, at least the excitement of last year’s SWAC Day will not be repeated. Beacon readers may recall that then-chief McNabb arrested the parents of the children with whom he shopped after returning the tykes to their home, where he discovered an illegal turkey-breeding operation behind a backyard shed. The children had to open their gifts at a foster home.