All That Candy is Going to My Head

The day before Halloween, my niece, Kate, came out of school carrying two bags of candy and the hat to her witch’s costume.

She was a cute little witch. But the best part of that costume, according to my sister, was the fact that they didn’t have to fix Kate’s hair that morning. Tangled, matted curls are part of a witch's persona.

Kate climbed into my car and immediately began rummaging through her candy. She pulled out a Twizzler and said, “Oooh, I like these!” before polishing it off in two bites.

She held up a Twix and said, “Want one?”

“No, baby, but that’s really sweet of you to share. You eat it,” I answered.

As she unwrapped the Twix, she said very matter-of-factly, “I know what too much candy doos to you.”

“Does,” I said, the English teacher in me feeling the need to correct. “What does too much candy do to you?”

“It makes your hair tangled.”

Someone could have told me that when I was a kid. You see, I have enough hair for three people, and when I was a kid, all that hair was a major pain in the ass.

I remember making my brother and sister late to school because both my mom and I were trying to tame the wild kingdom on top of my head.

It was so bad that my brother nicknamed me “Werewolf.”

Raymond Adkins, the boy who sat in the assigned seat behind me every year in school because Adkins came after Adams, loved to shuffle his hands through my hair and say during Bible class, “I bet this is what Gideon’s golden fleece looked like!”

Kate’s answer made perfect sense to me because I clearly have hair issues and I dearly love Milk Duds, Raisinets, and malted milk balls. In fact, my hair kinks up just thinking about Heath bars.

The next day, I received an email from Disney with this teaser: “Unleash Your Inner Disney Villain!”

I’ve already explained how the whole Disney princess thing turns my stomach. But I can do villains; they're more realistic, in my opinion. I clicked on the email, and to my great delight, Disney had provided a quiz to help me discover who, exactly, is my evil cartoon altar ego.

The first question was, “Your closest friend is . . .” The choices were (A) My hairstylist (B) My gym buddy (C) Anyone who would lend me money (D) I prefer henchmen or (E) I have lots of close friends.

Hmmm. I’m pretty close to my hairdresser. One can’t cope with hair like mine without a dedicated and competent hair stylist. Josh has been taming my mane every four weeks for nearly fifteen years, and in that time, he’s seen me through the birth of a child, a bitter divorce, and sending a kid off to college. He’s a friend and amateur therapist with enough dignity to consistently refuse my offers to live rent-free in my home in exchange for doing my hair every morning.

As for the rest of my options, I have no gym buddies because I prefer to do walking lunges alone. I don’t borrow money from friends. I prefer to pay my henchmen in order to guarantee their silence. And the “I have lots of close friends” option is a copout – that answer will surely result in some sappy “You can’t possibly be a villain” result.

Having eliminated the other choices, the answer to that question is (A) My hairdresser.

Another question: Do you have a fatal flaw? For me, the most appropriate answer is again the first choice, A, which reads, "Well, I do collect more than my fair share of speeding tickets."

And this: What do you worry about? The choices are (A) A bad hair day (B) Looking bad in front of my loyal fans (C) Getting outwitted (D) Nothing (E) Failing in my quest. Of those choices, unfortunately, my best answer is (A).

I tallied up my score to find that I’m not Ursula the Sea Witch, even though I am of German heritage and feel much better when I’m near the ocean. I’m not Maleficent or the Evil Queen or Gaston or, thankfully, Hades.

I am Cruella De Vil, thanks to my over-processed hair and horrendous driving.

It’s quite funny, actually. Three horribly mischievous dachshunds run my life, yet I’m cast as a villainous puppy killer. I finished the quiz and walked downstairs to put my dogs outside for the day. I opened the door leading out to my garage to find that during the night, they somehow managed to jump onto the seat of my golf cart and from there reach onto the shelf of my barbeque grill and pull down the large bag of chewy treats – doggie Milk Duds, if you will. They ate all the treats and then shredded the bag. And then they got sick from eating too much candy.

At least their short hair won’t tangle.

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.

Mentoring the Mistress

Not long after I filed for divorce, I took a trip with my sister and her twins, Faith and Grace, who were four at the time. My job, riding shotgun, was to keep the Disney movies playing. Since my children are out of the Disney stage, I’m a little out of touch with the current animated superstars, so they attempted to educate me. My sister described the little fish Dory in Finding Nemo.

“What did Dory say, girls?”

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!” they yelled in unison.

Just keep swimming. It’s the perfect divorce mantra.

On the same trip, we made the requisite toy-store stop at one of those outlet mall junk stores that sells the toys the big guys can’t unload. Grace picked up a Barbie doll called “Erica,” the spitting image of the other woman, the one I'd dubbed the "moderately intelligent Latina" after I discovered my husband's AdultFriendFinder stating he liked Latinas and that intelligence was only "moderately important" to him. Erica even had the same waist-length kinky, streaked hair.

I tried talking my niece out of Latina Barbie. I offered to buy her the store, but she was hung up on “Erica.” So I grudgingly paid for the trashy doll. We got out of the store, and Erica’s clothes promptly came off. And then I was ordered to put her dress back on. Great, I get to see Erica’s Latina titties. I was happy to note that they were better than the set my husband’s new hottie possessed.

“Now brush her hair,” Grace ordered.

“Oh, sweetie, I hate to tell you, but her hair’s tangled. I’m going to have to rip out a few chunks.”

Of course, Erica’s at the bottom of the closet by now, facedown and naked. Her hair’s been cut off with a pair of fingernail clippers. She’s wondering what happened to all the love and attention she was promised at the time of purchase. And Ken’s busy writing his next AdultFriendFinder ad.

A couple of weeks after Erica, I stumbled across a book on the paperback table at Barnes & Noble. Becoming Latina in 10 Easy Steps sounded like the self-help I certainly did not need, but a morbid sense of curiosity mixed with a demented sense of humor demanded the purchase. The author’s recommendations: date Mexican men, learn to cook Mexican food, and mentor an at-risk Latina.

I suppose I could go out with a Mexican man (Rafael Nadal is Latin, would he count?), and I already cook a mean fajita. The suggestion that caught my fancy, however, was the mentoring.

Suppose I meet and mentor my husband’s Latina. I could introduce her to my three teenagers, the crazy dogs, the parasite-riddled cat, the pet snake, and the Lithuanian exchange student. Then I could show her the toenail clippings he leaves on his nightstand for me to discard. I could teach her how to change the sheets when he comes in so drunk he wets the bed. And then she could retrieve his underwear from the front yard after the dachshunds pilfer through the gym bag he left in the garage and literally air his dirty laundry in front of the whole neighborhood.

I could set her alarm for six o’clock every morning to make the kids’ breakfast and pack nutritious lunches. Meanwhile, his ass is still snoring . . . and most likely not in her bed. He’s been out all night with some other little Latina who’s the backup to the backup gal.

I’d say she qualifies as an at-risk Latina. But I'll pass on the mentoring and the attempts at becoming Latina. Being me is good enough for me.

The Paradoxical Princess

For the past two weeks, I’ve received at least two Facebook “Notifications” every day asking which Disney Princess I am. The urgency and frequency of the messages makes me think that I’m missing something in my life by not knowing which princess I’m most like.

Why do I need to know if I’m more like Snow White or Pocahontas? So I’ll know what condescending names to call the people and animals who live with me? Grumpy, Lumpy, and Dopey, or Thunder Mouth, Barks at Nothing, and Craps on Porch?

The thing is, I spent the day at Disney with four children, two teenagers, and my brother-in-law. My back is sunburned, even though I had on a dark shirt. I sweated in ninety-degree heat, then my hair frizzed up and my feet turned black in my flipflops when it rained. I got home late at night and was already in my pajamas when a member of my household began whining over some chafing in delicate areas and expressed a need for me to immediately throw a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and go to the 24-hour CVS for a tube of diaper rash cream. So even though I spent the day surrounded by little girls in princess dresses, I’m not exactly feeling the princess thing myself.

(And for the record, CVS does not keep the Boudreaux’s Butt Paste in the aisle with the diapers. It’s next to the toothpaste. Maybe it has something to do with the word “paste”? I realize that product placement in drugstores is not an exact science, but good God, diaper cream next to the toothpaste? Really?)

When my former husband was in rehab, the folks running that joint told me that the Disney model of princess meets prince and then lives happily ever after is what got me into trouble in the first place.

Huh? First of all, I was never a Disney princess. Ask my mom; I never dressed up in the Cinderella gown and said, “Someday my prince will come.” My pretend games were a little more realistic than that. I would force my little brother to follow me around pushing my doll in the stroller, instructing him that I was to be called “Mother” and he was “Dear.”

Where I got into trouble, I believe, was sitting for hours every day reading romance novels. Now, I grew up in a Christian home, so these were Christian romance novels. The characters didn’t kiss until they were engaged. But the formula for every one of these books was the same; the heroine is a needy, often shy and fearful, young woman who meets an older, slightly-flawed-yet-powerful man who treats her horribly at first. But it’s just his way of protecting a heart that has been almost mortally wounded by a previous love. Once he realizes just how sweet and perfect and good she is, he falls madly for her and can’t wait to marry her so he can treat her like the absolute princess she is for the rest of happily ever after.

Makes you want to vomit, right? But this is the kind of thing a young girl starts reading after a childhood of being taught she’s a princess in the Disney tradition. And these girls spin this fantasy in their heads long enough they begin to believe that’s how marriage will be. Sadly, reality can’t even come close to competing with this dream.

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.

Which leads me back to the question of my true princess identity: I've narrowed it down to Princess Bitter Bitch or Princess Chapped Ass. I know that someday my prince will come. He will take one look at my bad attitude and my cadre of uncontrollable dachshunds and will quickly become Prince Heads for the Hills.

As for the “happily ever after” dream? That’s a pretty big expectation. I'm shooting for happily ever after every once in a while. And despite the sunburn and the irritating night trip to CVS, the day I spent with people I love was a happy one.