Who Is My Favorite Fairy Tale Princess?

Who is your favorite fairytale princess?

This, the nice people at Caress soap company, ask me.

I figure a lot of people don't answer their carefully thought out question. I know I usually just stare at ads like this with incredulity and then move on to leaving neato comments on my friends' Myspace pages. Today, though, I thought I would take some time out for Caress and answer their question.

The options (I'm working from memory here, which we all know my little misfiring synapses fuck with, so bear with me, however, this is basically what they are) are as follows:
* Cinderella (um, NOT a princess, but I smell a Disney theme)
* Snow White (technically NOT a princess, but a rags to riches story)
* Sleeping Beauty

I think there was a fourth one but she probably wasn't a princess either. You get the idea.
It's a moot point because I didn't choose any of them.

I chose me.

Yes, I selected myself as my favorite fairytale princess. I know what you're thinking: "Gee, in love with yourself much?" Well, no, but I do tend to live in my own little world, but as I'm telling you this I just thought about how fairytale princesses do too. So. Moving on.

The reason I selected myself is because the more I thought about it, I have a lot in common with fairytale princesses. Oddly, enough. I mean, I wouldn't have thought about it but I really do in that Kennedy/Lincoln sort of way. Permit me to illustrate:

I have had my experience with the step-parents. Let me tell you, for the most part, just by the very dynamic of trying to combine families that grew in different environments, this is a breeding ground for evil right off the bat. I was, in a sociological manner of speaking, "lucky" enough to, at various points in my life, get to live with both a step-mother and a step-father. Check this out. Not only did I have a step-mother but her children had red hair. Yes, that's right. The proverbial red-headed step-child. Everything they say about them? It's all true. Every word. I'm not exaggerating. They are little bitches. AND: they put deodorant meant for your underarms on their feet. PLUS: they get upset when you are old enough to date your favorite New Kid on the Block and they are not. This is just a drop in the bucket. They are also tricksters. One of the brothers tried to charge his sister to lay in his window to get a tan. It worked for about fifteen minutes when I went and told her they have sun for free outside. Thus, illustrating the stupidity of the red-headed step-child.

On the step-father side I possibly have something even better. He had a carefully groomed handlebar mustache. I'm not making any of this up. I really wish I was. AND: the entryway to the kitchen had saloon doors. PLUS: he built a large safe, oh the size of a small closet, which he kept by the cat bowls, right off the kitchen. He was a thin line away from tying women to train tracks. Speaking of which, he did have a computer game called Railroad Tycoon. Weird. He also had one of those black and white conductor's hats and his hobby was gambling and gold panning. He was evil, pure evil, though. He had this habit of staking me out at the top of the stairs to his room and then when I would return home from my friend's house, leap down the stairs, ninja-style, and commence screeching about nothing and everything in the universe, including blaming me for (hold on, I just threw up a little in my mouth) he and my mother not having sex anymore. *SCREAM* This was one of his favorite accusations to casually bring up in conversation, say, while we were wrapping a nice present for my Mother. Or doing the dishes after dinner and letting my Mother just hang out and wasn't it nice we were doing this and by the way you know that...*SCREAM* ALSO: he had this fucking weird habit of stealing my bath poof and throwing it away. It took awhile before I figured out I a) hadn't left it in Washington D.C. on a class trip, b) left it in the cat's vision c) hallucinated that I had one in the first place. When approached about it, his answer? "What is it anyway? Brilliant!
(Mom is single now. Yay! Don't know about Dad, but well, the red-headed step-children are definitely not around)

One more thing, in fairytales, children are often banished. Step-dad, made me go live with Dad and the red-heads. I returned, an angsty teenager full of well, an intense desire to spend large amounts of time in the darkroom at school listening to Tori Amos and selling pictures of "cute" athletes to cheerleaders. Then. The writing. Then. The job at the movie store where I thought I was ruler over the entire town's entertainment source. But I digress.

Sometimes, a spell is put upon a fairytale princess and she goes crazy. One day I couldn't stay awake in poetry class in college. I just couldn't do it. I love poetry! This is absurd. Everytime I would go in there, I would just...nod...off. Eventually I stopped fighting it. I believe this professor, with his overheads and his hypnotically dim lighting put a spell on me with what was allegedly "poetry" but what I now believe to be a Crazy Spell. It was a few weeks later that I left school completely because I said to my Mother, from under my bed clothes, "I cannot move and I would like to put my brain in a jar for a vacation." She went to work, terrified I'm sure, and when she came home I had not moved a muscle, was staring at the same spot on the wall and said, as she stood quietly in the doorway, "Do you have the jar because if you don't I think we should get one or go to the hospital." We went to the hospital. We, in fact, went to the hospital twice more in the next two years because sometimes spells are really hard to break. You should know spells are like anesthesia. They stay in your system for quite a long time. Crazy spells, well, there will always be parts of it floating around in your brain. You can clean some of it out or shoosh it with medication, meditation or special therapy but you have to be very dedicatied. You have to be your own sentry. You have to maintain your own tower and that's okay. I don't know if Rapunzel was a princess but I think she had a Crazy Spell. Ironically, I am currently growing my hair out. I think it is because I am ready to let someone climb up my hair. Plenty of friends are allowed up the stairs, but only one person climbs up your hair.

A lot of this sounds horrible, I know. When you think of a fairytale, and I think the nice people at Caress forgot about this, you forget how really violent and terrible they are. The original ones are sort of the original horror stories.

In the end, though, something magical happens. I feel that magic. You can see it in my eyes. I always say, and this is strange because I am not scientific at all, that the pendulum has to swing equidistant in one direction as it does in the other. Sometimes, it even swings evenly.

I don't believe in happily ever after, but I believe in progress not perfection and beauty in imperfection. Which, in the end, THE END, which can also be the beginning and ONCE UPON A TIME, can also be happiness. A labor of love.