Mayor Michelle Kaufusi's Search for the Lost Danite Mine

Michelle Kaufusi, Mayor of Provo, Utah

Michelle Kaufusi comes from sturdy pioneer stock. Her forebears crossed the plains on Parcheesi boards during the dead of winter, determined to find a new home where they could work, worship, and juggle chainsaws in complete freedom.

As a child, Kaufusi displayed natural ability as a leader. Instead of just playing with dolls, she lined them up and harangued them on the importance of self confidence and encouraged them to study the hard sciences at their doll schools. She herself became a dab hand at Recombinant Memetics by the tenth grade, and spearheaded a NASA program that sent mint-frosted brownies into space to see what effect weightlessness had on their calorie count.

A successful entrepreneur, Mayor Kaufusi opened the first organic plectrum shop in Provo, which she later sold for an obscene amount of money to the Mirisch Company.

Running for Mayor of Provo in 2017, her platform included a promise to bring more wealth to Provo through prudent, sound financial management. Consequently, as soon as the polls confirmed her as the first woman Mayor of Provo, she set off into the mountains around Provo looking for the Lost Danite Mine. 

This rich deposit of silver ore was supposedly discovered by one Jacob Jacobson back in 1867 while he was lost in the mountains during a blizzard. Seeking any shelter he could find, Jacobson allegedly stumbled into a cave full of gold nuggets the size of savoy cabbages. After the blizzard passed, he packed his mule with a dozen or so nuggets, which he brought to the assayer's office in Provo, where a gang of rowdy Danites seized him for spitting on the sidewalk and trussed him up. He pleaded with the Danites to let him down and he would reveal the whereabouts of his fabulous gold mine, but before they could unloose him he was carried off by a fit of the fantods. To this day, no one really knows if there really is a mine full of giant gold nuggets, or where it might be.

But Mayor Kaufusi is confident she can find it. She intends to turn over the entire contents of the mine (minus a modest finder's fee) to the city of Provo for a new water filtration plant, the eradication of Chinese chestnut trees, and to build dozens of fountains throughout the city that squirt lime jello all year long. Since taking office she has led dozens of expeditions up into the mountains, providing everyone with picks and shovels -- and she has usually returned with just as many people as she went out with. Not always, of course; but you can't make omelettes without losing a few eggs along the way. 

She plans on publishing her autobiography this coming spring, tentatively entitled "The Hand Lotion's Tale." 

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