A Twist on Happily Ever After

I have finally figured out the whole Disney formula for happily ever after, and it’s not that complicated. Sitting in Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyworld eating a $150 breakfast one fine morning, I had an epiphany. Cinderella and Prince Charming approached our table, and my friend Ann looked at me and said, “Look at Prince Charming. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

“Yeah, and gay.”

“Nooooo!”

Prince Charming was, in fact, charming. He was, like Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way,” with his blue eyes, blonde hair, and too-perfect smile. But there was no missing that he was gay, unless you were Ann.

“He’s not gay. Look how good he is with children.”

I swear she said that.

So here’s my revised happily-ever-after formula: Go ahead and marry a gay man if he’s a fabulously rich prince. He won’t care about the thousand bucks you drop on a pair of Manolo’s. Come to think of it, as your stylist, he will probably insist they were practically made for the new Vera Wang you need for the State Ball. He wouldn’t dream of jumping you for sex in the bathroom just before the dinner with important heads of state. Why not? Because he did your hair and makeup.

A gay prince will pick up his own dirty socks. In fact, he’s neater than you are. He can cook, too, better than you can. Happily ever after, indeed. I can’t see the downside.

And it’s a helluva lot more realistic than the Princess crap we parents happily pay Disney to disillusion our daughters with.

Look at Belle, the young beauty whose love is enough to turn an ugly, brooding beast back into a loving prince. Hell, marriage is almost the exact opposite, don’t you think? Those loving princes turn into brooding beasts about six minutes after the honeymoon ends.

And don’t even get me started on Pocahontas. She’s a Disney princess who actually represents the Mouse’s attempt to portray a strong, independent heroine. But do they tell what happened to the woman after the movie ended? No. They forget to mention that John Smith, her prince in the movie, is not the man she married. Four years after she saved John Smith’s life, her father, Chief Powhatan, and the governor of Jamestown, Thomas Dale, arranged a marriage between her and a man named John Rolfe, even though she was already married to another Indian chief named Kocoum.

Did you get that? Her dad and a dirty politician basically annulled her marriage and gave her to another man. Pocahontas was a strong, independent woman who, as it turns out, had no voice in her own life.

She traveled to England with her new husband at the invitation of British businessmen hoping to use her to attract investors for development of the new colonies. While in England, she contracted smallpox and died.

Happily ever after for, what, a couple of years?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for having dreams and pursuing them with a passion. But teaching our daughters – or allowing Disney to teach them – that a man is the means for achieving their dreams is doing them a terrible disservice.

So dress your daughter up as Pocahontas. Let her be Princess Pocahontas for Halloween and every day for the rest of the year. But let her know that Pocahontas didn’t live happily ever after with Prince Charming, and that’s sometimes the way life goes.

Or sometimes, Prince Charming has some secrets she won’t discover until it’s too late for happily ever after.

A few months after my sister married her very redneck, absolutely heterosexual husband, a friend casually mentioned that they had heard a rumor that a former boyfriend of hers was actually gay.

Her husband slowly turned his head toward her and, with half a can of Skoal poking his lower lip out, drawled, “I jess hope to Gawd he was that way ‘fore he met you and you didn’t make him like that.”

Maybe that’s what happened to Prince Charming.