It’s not easy being a princess (tell me aboudit), particularly when one is a Disney Princess. We all know the rigors that American Imperialism can subject one to when one is, say, Iraqi or Navajo, but I beg you to indulge me as I lay out for you the innumerable small sufferings that are the lot of the Disney Princess.
I met her at a Christmas Eve dinner. She was young, she was beautiful and she was no longer, although she had been, Princess Mulan on a Disney Caribbean cruise.
She was still in recovery.
Naturally, the world is in thrall to the glamour of cruising through the Caribbean; however, when asked to describe the crew’s living quarters she paused thoughtfully and long. Eventually she sighed and volunteered that they resembled “some kind of internment camp, really.”
Talk about living the dream.
For two hours, twice a day, she was a Princess, and for the rest of the time she was a dangerous free radical that had to be contained in the belly of the ship, lest she blow up some poor, chubby, suburbanite’s kid’s dream.
And so…
When the ship docked, which was often, Caribbean islands being accustomed to company and clustering together for immoral support, the passengers would go ashore. And so would the entertainers, having no-one left to entertain but the skeleton crew, and as anyone knows, skeletons are not easily entertained, particularly when they’ve seen your “Milton Bearle as Ace Ventura, Pet Detective” routine a hundred times already.
But…
If you are known far and wide on the ship as Princess Mulan, you can hardly be seen sneaking ashore hung over, wearing a ratty death metal t-shirt and cutoffs, leaning on the arm of some stevedore you picked up last night at closing time. Little Timmy’s dreams, and more importantly, Big Timmy’s dreams, must be protected. Because we all know who pays for those gowns, sweetie.
So, every time the ship docked, Princess Mulan would layer on more pancake makeup than Marlene Dietrich, don a wig that would shame a drag queen, plop on dinner plate-sized sunglasses, wrap her throat in a scarf, and hope to sneak ashore looking totally unremarkable, like a five-foot-nothing Asian replica of Greta Fucking Garbo.
Still, every damn time some smartass parent would ask, “So, aren’t you Princess Mulan?”
raincoaster 
I’d ask you to act out that little scene, but the thought of Raincoaster acting like Princess Mulan impersonating Milton Berle doing his impression of Jim Carey in the role of Ace Ventura is just too much to wrap my small brain around!
(Big Timmy’s dreams are still intact.)
David, you could try wrapping your brain around it, then record the resulting mental anguish in one of your 299-word stories.
:-)
RC…you’re a nut. A delightful, macadamia nut, but still a nut.
Why thank you. I’m slightly hungover, so even David’s sentence is slightly too much for me to wrap my brain around, although from the way it feels today it’s not entirely solid and so must be very flexy.
This post, however off-topic it may be, is about Internet freedom. \”Network Neutrality\” — the First Amendment of the Internet — ensures that the public can view the smallest blog just as easily as the largest corporate Web site by preventing Internet companies like AT&T from rigging the playing field for only the highest-paying sites.
But Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality. If Congress doesn\’t take action now to implement meaningful Net Neutrality provisions, the future of the Internet is at risk.
In the end game, only large companies will afford domains if the communications monopolies have their way with this. This of course isnt new news, but its coming to a head and blogs like this one will be a ghosttown unless all of us figure it our pretty darn quick. I wont post any links, but advise that if you value the internet, and blogs likw this one, that you search Google for \”Network Neutrality\” and educate yourself on this issue as it effects all of us.
It affects all Americans, who form a minority of visitors to this site. It is an important issue for Americans, and if the laws that those corporations seek go through you can expect to go back to the days of early AOL in terms of the richness of your Internet experience, and also to lose a LOT of jobs to countries like Canada, Ireland, and Australia, who won’t have such laws and who have educated, tech-savvy workforces who are fluent in English already.