By Clara Glendale-Frolic | Beacon shop-with-a-cop beat

It’s beginning to look a lot like disappointment-narrowly-averted-for-tens-of-local-kids this year as Bass Lake Authority Police rekindles its shop-with-a-cop program in the St. Nick of time.

On Saturday the BLAP force will park their bicycles and put down their squirt guns for a few hours as they treat needy local children to a day of shopping at equally needy local businesses.

But this year’s event almost didn’t happen.

“We almost didn’t have the budget for it,” said recently re-appointed BLAP chief Gwen “Tug” McNabb. “What with the new hires and this recount business and all.”

McNabb said a sudden influx of cash from the evidence room saved the day.

“We forgot all about that stack of ones we took from the illegal lemonade stand last summer,” Chief McNabb said. “So it’s kind of like out of the hands of babes to the hands of other babes, I guess.”

One of McNabb’s so-called “babes” is little 9-year-old Little Kenny Needsmore. Still just as needy as he was last year, owing to the failure of Bass Lake sister city Beijing to open a bottle cap factory, where Little Kenny’s father hoped to secure a job driving truck, the Bass Lake Elementary third-grader hopes this year is better that last.

“Last year sucked,” Little Kenny said. “That fat cop took me to that chicken store uptown. I ended up with a metal funnel. That cop said I could use it to chop the heads off chickens. We don’t have chickens and he wouldn’t buy me one!”

The program has seen better days, but not in recent memory. Two years ago a scheduling snafu forced local undertakers to stand in for police.

But this year, with the recovered lemonade-stand cash and  a renewed feeling of comity among Bass Lakeans, Little Kenny may get exactly what he wants – a toy assault rifle.

“My daddy won’t let me play with his real one anymore,” Little Kenny said, “cause I shot his best fightin’ dog with it on accident.”

Jingle all the way.