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?”