As a young cupcake, Sweet rarely looked to storybooks to fill her imagination. She was more likely to find inspiration in The Bangles than Sleeping Beauty. Somehow the bridge between Sweetling’s reality and Susanna Hoff’s seemed easier to travel than the space between Sweetie and Aurora. Maybe it was the fact that guitar lessons were available in her town but princess training wasn’t listed anywhere in the yellow pages.
Your Candy Girl tells you this so as to properly frame her thoughts on Disney. The bottom line is that La Cake never bought the whole “when you wish upon a star” pitch. Magic Kingdom? No, thanks. Magic Bus? Yes, please may Sweet have another!
Do not get your dearest wrong. She has no argument with Belle’s fans, or even those who favor Ariel, that little chick of the sea. But the Disney Company is a different story altogether.
 |
Inserted into many of the glossy mags this month is an eight-page advertising layout proclaiming the Disney parks as places where “once upon a time happens every day.” Boosting the fantasy factor: Celebs like Scarlett Johansson, David Beckham and Beyoncé are costumed as storybook heroes and heroines. Leaving aside the fact that Disney is the only enterprise that has found a way to turn Beyoncé downright plain or the fact that Scarlett is suitable as an innocent in about the same way that Lindsay Lohan would be suitable as a spokeswoman for M.A.D.D., the ads irritate your usually unflappable, constitutionally bright authoress, dear readers, because THEY ARE NOT TRUE (excuse Sweet for suddenly getting so…LOUD!).
Disneyland is not the place, no matter what the legend declares, “where every Cinderella story comes true.” (If you fear that Sweet is about to trundle down the same old postfeminist lane—women don’t need a rescue; stories about damsels in distress, even clever ones, who wait for their prince to come undermine girls’ self-esteem; etcetera etcetera—fear not. Honey-pie will let you go there without her.)
No, there is something more troubling than Cindy’s Feminine Mistake. If Sugaree remembers the tale correctly, the young lady forced to live in squalor eventually moved into better quarters. She was hard-working, loyal and true. In time she found her reward.
Apparently at Disney low-earning hourly employees need not apply for the Cinderella ending. According to a very lively editorial in the Los Angeles Times (La Cake’s new reliable source of Hollywood gossip) Disney is vehemently fighting to keep affordable housing away from the precious castle gates in Anaheim, California. They don’t think it would look very nice to have cheap apartments jutting onto the roadways just as people are about to surrender their paychecks and wee little brains to buy the storybook ending. “Many of the people who work at the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ sleep on air mattresses, in by-the-week motel rooms and in apartments shared with other families,” Steve Lopez says in the Times.
Talk about your gulf between what’s real and what’s imagined! Talk about not being a Disney girl! If there is one thing Sweet would like to stand up for, besides a congressional proclamation marking National Nail Technician Week, it’s the rights of working people to live decently near their jobs. If that idea is not O.K. by Disney, then Disney is not O.K. by Sweets. Some bridges were never meant to be crossed, and the path to a wonderless Wonderland will simply not be trod by Sweet Cakes until she can be sure that Disney workers get the happily ever after that all of us, not just Beyoncé, deserve!