To Visit a Princess

If one wants to meet a storybook Princess

at the Magic Kingdom, a Princess pulled

from the archives of Disney Princess Movies,

he must, as literary types claim, “suspend

the sense of disbelief”; though he knows

that young girl, petit and beautiful, donned

in a baby blue gown, coiffed as we all remember

her to be, though he knows she’s a young woman

dreaming, perhaps, of acting, singing, dancing,

the theater, the stage, the smell of greasepaint,

the roar of the crowd; or perhaps just a summer job

to pay the high cost of college where she pursues

loftier goals, engineering, medicine, the very real world

of high finance, using her beauty as a ticket to something

else, something bigger, and why not, so much of her life

has been controlled by men, their sense of value and beauty,

and femininity, telling her she can’t, setting limits, controlling

her image, her body, her life, why not turn it against them

in this man’s world, getting what she wants in the end, not

forced to perform or compromise, and so he suspends what he knows

to be true - she is just a woman playing a role. I know this, standing

in line to meet Cinderella, out of place among the young girls

eager, too, to meet her, autograph books at the ready, mine, as well,

and there she is, just as I’ve always known her to be, blonde and petit,

she of the mice and the rats and a fairy Godmother to make

it all real, believing again in Happily-Ever-After, Kindness in a blue dress,

for this is all so real, this real Cinderella that I first saw

on a giant screen so long ago, and have seen many times over

through daughters and granddaughters, like the one with me this day, fifteen

years older, since she was five, when I first introduced her

to a very real Cinderella, the Cinderella of a Disney’s Classic,

the Cinderella of the Little Golden Books pulled from

my bookshelf and read night after night, the heroine

of my granddaughters’ youth, perhaps what got them through

childhood and into those teen years, something to believe in;

but today is my day, no children, no young children, grand

or otherwise, but an old man’s fancy to meet a storybook princess,

and to believe again that the story is true, right down to “and they

lived Happily-Ever-After”; that is disbelief suspended and a new

reality for this aging life, a reality of imagination made real,

good enough for me, good enough for the fantasy into which

I find myself now placed, right now, right here, in Disney’s

Magic Kingdom where an old man’s dream can come true,

to meet Cinderella and be reminded again of Kindness

in a blue dress, of Happily-ever-After, of what it means again to be young.