Most of us have this game; sometimes on a street corner, at a bar, or at a party. Using three cups with a coin, a bottle cap, or a pea, the con artist hides the object under a cup and quickly shuffles the three cups around. Your job is to bet which cup covers the object. Of course, the con snatches up your money, as you have chosen the wrong cup. You are mystified by this two-hundred-year-old trick–and out five bucks!

Me? I discovered this week I, too, was a victim several weeks ago at a garden center, where some sick, deranged fool switched the identifying stakes in the tomato plants. I thought I bought “Better Boy” and “Celebrity” tomato plants, but after five straight days of rain and three weeks of desert sun, the vines were a sea of green small balls. Damn! Cherry tomatoes! What good is a bushel of cherry tomatoes? Megamillions of seeds to lodge in my teeth and wreck havoc in my digestive track. I certainly was in no mood to grind them into salsa, nor cook them down and strain all the seeds.

My only choice was to remove the plants, go buy new ones, hope the weather cooperated, and I’d reap a crop. “Do you think it’s too late to plant these?”

“Not sure, ma’am,” said the guy in the garden center. “Depends on the weather.”

Duh. “The only reason I have to is I got snookered by Thimblerig!”

He looked at me quizzically. “Uh, what?”

“Thimblerig. The Shell Game. Someone switched out the stakes in your plants; I thought I was buying big tomatoes, not cherry tomatoes. I’m not wasting my time and my water bill on dumb little cherries.”

“Ha, I hear ya! I got gut problems, too. Let me tell you a story about my friend who bought his kid a pygmy pig and ended up with a 400-pound sow.”

By the end of his story, I was regaled in laughter. Yes, Suzanne, there’s a lot worse things than buying cherry tomato plants.