Over in the corner of the church basement, Miss Rhonda kept a long rack of princess dresses, including favorites like Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, etc. All the little girls grabbed at the dresses like it was the first night of eliminations on The Bachelor, and my daughter followed suit. All she had to see were kids her age grabbing at the dresses to know she desired them.
From that day forward, the girl was all princesses, all the time. The Disney Princess people have made marketing inroads into every facet of American existence, and I was now forced to deal with all of them. They have princess stickers on grapes. They aren’t special grapes, mind you; they’re just grapes that happen to be marked up 200 percent. Suddenly, I saw princesses all over the place, hiding in plain sight. It’s like when you buy a car and then suddenly see nothing but that particular car every time you go out driving. I wanted to refrain from buying her so much princess crap, but the girl just seemed so excited by it all. I didn’t want to kill her buzz. No parent ever does. Suddenly, the whole culture had seduced not only my child but my wife and me as well. We bought all the princess movies. We bought all the princess games. We bought all the princess Barbie dolls. The girl forced me to personally dress the dolls on several occasions.
“I don’t think this Princess Jasmine halter top will fit on Princess Aurora,” I told the girl. “It’s been tailored for a more . . . uh . . . buxom princess.”
“Just do it!”
“Why are her hands so rigid? It’s like she’s dead. I can’t get any of the fabric past her wrist.”
There was no stopping the girl’s descent into Princessmania. She loved all the princesses and she loved Miss Rhonda. Certain people have the touch when it comes to dealing with children, and Miss Rhonda had it. She knew which princess was each student’s favorite at any given second. She offered to make princess dresses for my daughter. She even invited the girl to her end-of-summer party at her house. We ate that shit up. I felt like I had gotten in with the Mob. Miss Rhonda had tapped our child for greatness. We were IN. And while I despised the entire Princess Industrial Complex, I wasn’t above flattery. When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it’s because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends. Let’s see little Brandy Reynolds down the street get that kind of audience with Miss Rhonda!
At the end of ballet season, all the parents were invited to come watch the students perform a recital. The theme of this recital was Pocahontas, one of the lesser Disney princesses but also one of the most attractive. Miss Rhonda dressed all the girls in Native American outfits and gave them headdresses made out of construction paper. She lined the girls up in an imaginary canoe and had them pantomime rowing down a river. As they heaved and hoed, Miss Rhonda suddenly stopped them.
“STOP!” she cried. “I hear the paleskins coming!”
I whispered to my wife, “Did she just say ‘paleskins’?”
“I think she did,” my wife whispered back.
“Is that racist? I mean, she’s talking about white people, so that’s okay, right?”
“Shhhh!”
The girls stopped pretending to row, and Miss Rhonda commanded, “Now say, ‘What do you want, paleskins?’”
And all the girls shouted, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, PALESKINS?”
I turned to my wife. “Holy shit! Now they’re all saying it!”
“Shhhh!”
Then Miss Rhonda assumed the role of the bad guy from the Virginia Company.
“I’m going to take all your land!” she shouted at them.
Well, the little Pocahontases weren’t about to take being colonized lying down. They jumped up and chased Miss Rhonda all over the room while doing an Indian war chant, patting their mouths and making the stereotypical BABABABABA sound, which was just breathtakingly inappropriate. I gritted my teeth and prayed that no members of the Sioux Nation would stumble by the church basement window to see it. It was a revolution in miniature, and Miss Rhonda couldn’t quash it with smallpox-infected blankets the way real settlers did.
Every month, my daughter latched on to a new princess to worship. She got so into Snow White that she would play the DVD and pantomime every scene in it. At night, she demanded that I tell her the story of Snow White getting lost in the dark and frightening forest, then she demanded I tell it again and again and again.
“And then Snow White got lost in the dark and frightening forest,” I said. “And all the evil trees tried to eat her.”
“No, no, no! They were nice trees!”
“They were?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Because in the movie, the trees look pretty angry.”
“No, when she wakes up, all her animal friends are there.”
“Yes, and then all of the nice rabbits and deer showed up and Snow White was happy.”
“Tell it again!”