When I decompress at the end of the day, I will sometimes turn on the TV and do what my father refers to as channel flopping. Every once in awhile my son comes in when I have the show Toddlers and Tiaras on. He can't believe I ever watch that. I guess it draws my attention the same way a train wreck would. It's a show about little girls with obsessive mothers who play the kid beauty pageant circuit. [Disclaimer: when I hit puberty I still was wearing my hair in braids, wearing my brother's old cowboy boots and wondering if there was anyway to realize my dream of being a swashbuckling pirate. I suppose this partly explains my horror.] So far the only balanced child I've seen so far [Another Disclaimer: I only happen on this show during flopping, so I in all fairness, I have not seen all the kids.] was a little girl who was being coached by a drag queen. The two of them were having oodles of fun bringing out their inner divas. Mostly though, the families portrayed on this show make the family from Little Miss Sunshine (trailer here) look fairly functional. The point of being for most of these people is that they (or their daughter) want to win the biggest crown which will be awarded to the young child who can best look and act like a drag queen. It's a bit over the top. Fake huge hair, fake tans, fake teeth and incredibly fancy dresses turn, what in the before pictures look like perfectly cute little girls, into the epitome of shallowness. Both mothers and girls spew vile remarks about their competition in front of the camera, that I assume they realize will rebroadcast their remarks across the country. These little girls may never be able to live down the nastiness that is being coaxed out of them at this time. (hmmm... maybe that's what the artifice if for... it's just a clever disguise?)
The show I actually watch in its entirety is Chopped on the Food Network. It's a timed contest in which chefs must prepare a meal from a basket of seemingly random ingredients. It's fun to watch because the whole time you're watching you are wondering things like, "What does one do with star fruit and tofu skin?" Sometimes amazing dishes are created and sometimes you learn that probably you just shouldn't cook some things.
Okay, third line of thought (I promise to bring them together in a minute): last night Benjamin (the ninja who lives here) went off to babysit his sister's girls. He was going to show them the movie Mulan (which I have not seen) in hopes to coax his toddler niece into wanting to be a real person instead of a princess. In the context of Toddlers and Tiaras, I totally support this. As a child who was weaned on fairy tales, I have a difficult time with it. My mother didn't raise us on Disney fairy tales, she raised us on real fairy tales. Tales that were so frightening she had to hide the books from my older siblings when they started having nightmares. My mother and I were made of sterner stuff and enjoyed finding new tales right up until her death at a wise old age. She taught me that life is hard and princesses must struggle, often for a very long time, in order to be true to the things they value and to increase the quality of life for those they love. She taught me that sometimes the prince never comes, or if he does, he doesn't make things easier. The important part is to maintain that purity of heart that makes a princess a woman deserving of respect and valued by others. One of the stories we liked was The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. That little girl learns from the beautiful sari clad mother of her childhood friend, that all women are princesses and their husband is their prince. The little girl remembers this even as her life enters a downward spiral into desperate orphaned poverty. She not only remembers it, she tells the tales she learned in India to the other girls and puts them in touch with their princess selves.
Last night as I was flopping, the Home and Garden channel had a show called "Million Dollar Rooms". One segment of it had a woman showing off her five million dollar closet. Brides had come to have their wedding photos taken in this woman's closet. Her parting line was that she wished that every woman could have a closet like that. Wow, what a weird wish. Not a wish that no woman would ever have to watch her child die of starvation? No woman would be sold into sexual slavery? A five million dollar closet? Because it made her feel like a princess.
I'm not voting for the closet lady for princess. I'm not voting for the hyper sexualized twisted children with giant crowns for princess. I'll tell you who I would vote for for princess. She was on the cooking channel and I don't remember her name.* She was a very heavy cafeteria lunch lady at an elementary school. She would not win at a beauty pageant. But she was the picture of grace on this show. She was pitted against other lunch ladies from around the country. She never lost a chance to encourage them. At one point she told her sisters in lunch, "We've already won just by being here. Who would've imagined that as a lunch lady we would be competing on the cooking channel!" (Or something to that effect.) In the snippet of interviews it came out that in addition to creating tasty food for the kids with her limited budget, she also packed back packs for the more impoverished children to take home on the weekends so they wouldn't have to go two days without food. She never expected to be there. She never expected to win $10,000 for her cooking. But she had been a princess the whole time. I'd vote for her.
*Google says her name is Cheryl Barbara and for an excellent review of that particular episode you can click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment