We’re just back from four days at that ground zero of princess culture known as Disney World. The honest truth as a frank, sometimes jaded New Yorker: I loved it. All of it.
The thing is: When you go to a theme park, don’t expect to be backpacking through Eastern Europe. There are gift shops at every turn, caloric desserts the size of your head, crazy bachelorettes stumbling around in white mouse-ear veils, long lines you must wait on to do things you will enjoy to varying degrees, and, yes, princesses.
If you have a daughter, she will simply be a princess while she’s at Disney, and that’s that.
The monorail captain will say, “All aboard, Princesses!” The waiter will ask, “And for the Princesses?” And the ride operators will caution, “Watch your step, Princess,” even as you’re boarding the Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin wearing nothing remotely sparkly, pink, or floor-length.
I asked my 7-year-old daughter, Thalia, how it made her feel to be called “Princess” everywhere.
“Good,” she smiled. “Special.”
And I think for four days out of the year in Orlando, why the heck not. Go ahead and be a Princess in your head in sight of that big, iconic castle. Imagine that you live there and that you can go on rides every single day of your life and have dessert after every meal. Live a little, kid. Because back home you have to clear your dishes and do your math homework.
Friends might be surprised to hear me say this, considering my avowed discomfort with a culture that urges girls into sparkleland quickly and without a say in the matter. But the truth is our costume bins at home include wands and tiaras alongside the fireman hats and scarves that become hula skirts or cowboy bandanas. We watch “Tangled,” and we watch 100 other movies that aren’t “Tangled.” Sometimes I call the girls “my princess” when I kiss them good night, and sometimes I call them Honey or Pumpkin or Weirdo. (That last one mostly belongs to my 5-year-old, Sage, who likes to make up songs where every verse ends in the word “fart.”)
I’m not anti-princess. I never have been. I’m just pro-choice.
I’ve never seen Sage so excited in her life as when it was her turn to have her picture taken with Woody from “Toy Story” and she hugged him like she’d never let go.
Of course the girls were equally excited to get photo ops with Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Snow White, and Belle at the Cinderella’s Castle luncheon. And I kind of liked that even in a sea of little girls dressed in their Chinese-made polyester finest, their hair dipped in sparkles, heat curled, and sprayed to within an inch of oblivion, my girls felt right at home in their regular park clothes.
They were not the only girls in the banquet hall who didn’t “dress” for the occasion, but they were certainly the only ones, maybe in history, who got up from the table to demonstrate to Belle their own patented Bock Bock Chicken Butt Dance.
I’ve come to believe that imagination, fantasy, and creativity in pretty much any form is amazing for kids. If that includes princesses from time to time, so be it. As long as that’s not the only choice. As long as they can be pirates and astronauts, teachers and Hobbits, chefs and artists and farmers and zoo animals too.
As long as they can pick the pink LEGOS or the blue LEGOS and not have some sign in a store tell them which one is only for girls.
The princess luncheon led to a great discussion later in our hotel room, in which we told our girls that it’s okay to be strong, smart, hardworking and still dream of marrying a prince.
