The Princess Diaries

My name is Princess Molly and I love to bitch.

Luckily I work with a lot of awesome ladies ( AND GENTLEMEN) who like to do so too, as evidenced by the other blog posts. 

But lately I feel like that’s all I do. School has started up again and it’s looking like it will shape up to be an especially demanding semester. My weekday job involves chasing around two kids under the age of 6 who refuse to feed themselves. Add in my extracurricular hobbies and freelance work and I’m pooped! When I get to the weekend I just want to relax but instead I end up schlepping my glittery ass all over San Francisco on crowded busses to entertain screaming kids while my finger slowly loses circulation from tying balloons. So my blog posts usually follow a simple format. Opening allusion to fairy tale + set up+ bitch+bitch+ bitchety bitch bitch+It all got better+cheesy tagline/unflattering picture.

 But what I fail to mention here is what I like about this job, or more accurately, what this job saves me from.

An acerbic, albeit observant, ex told me once that he always knew where to find me : lying on my side on some kind of cushioned surface , watching T.V. on my laptop. (Funny how he could notice that but could never seem to absorb that my “oh god yes” ‘s were always less than genuine) He’s an asshole but he has a point. When I have leisure time I usually spend it lying prostrate and watching endless episodes of terrible sitcoms and hating myself.

This job makes me go to places I’ve never been before. It makes me take busses that I , a formerly “M line ONLY” girl had been too scared to try. It lets me go into Mcmansions with views of the golden gate , the kind that would only previously let me in provided I brought my own lemon Pledge and didn’t touch the silver. It takes me to bad neighborhoods that are so different from when I grew up  but are still fascinating in their own right. This job has made me unafraid. I now feel confident that anywhere in the city ( if not the world) is my oyster.

All I need is bus fare and time to ride.

Princess Tip: Treat every trip as if it’s an adventure!

On the day I became a magic prince my biggest surprise was not the poor costume quality, the good tips or even the sudden ability to actually feel the magic weave around my fingertips; it was the lack of others like me.

When I filled out the Magic Prince application, I imagined myself joining a mystical brotherhood of assorted queers, magicians, clowns, performance artists, hustlers, poets, preschool teachers and actual fairies. Even the mythical Normal Straight Dude who Isn’t Into Theater but Got Tricked Into it Due to His Great Talent would be there. United in our princitude, we would put aside our differences and create surreal and revolutionary children’s theater, then bedazzle our capes while engaging in witty court banter.  I would be shy at first, I imagined, in the company of my gender role models, but with a little determination and impeccable manners, eventually I would become one of them. Certainly it would be difficult, there would be hard days, but those would be good for me; they would edge my prince. I would pass through the trials of bloodthirsty youngsters and become a real prince.

I thought there’d be so many princes, it’d be hard to get in. It’s the Bay Area after all. Where else would the princes be?

Perhaps they all work nine to five now, or maybe they’ve retreated back to the magical world. I don’t blame them. It’s an uncertain, precarious life, being a magic prince in this dimension. There are two other princes now—but they’re both even newer than me! One of them lives two hours away and the other was already my friend, who I introduced to the whole princing shtick. So, no court of magic prince elders. Did you bring your invisible magic hankies to wipe those glittery tears?

But you know what’s better than a court of magic princes? A court of magic princesses! I’ve only met a few, but so far the magic princess community seems pretty badass. They make their own tutus and create their own blogs. They do everything we princes do, but in corsets and with scratchy wigs. Maybe I don’t want to be them, but I want to be with them.

And about that prince circle—I’ll just have to make it myself. Prince G. may live two hours away, but we’ve already traveled 200 light years together from a galaxy far, far away, and managed to convince 20 six-year-olds that unlike those actors they may have seen on TV, we’re the real jedi deal. And bonding over princeness has rekindled my friendship with Prince A., a truly magical individual who I feel sappily happy to have back in my life.

So, that’s my first report from the land of make-believe. Tune in next time for a comparative study of superheroes, childcare workers and submissive princes in popular culture. –prince e.

hi friends. Princess Jen here. having wrestled with long drives, badly formatted video footage and uncooperative programmers for the past couple of hours, I thought I’d come on the internet to discuss another issue I had today. that issue is one I’m sure you’re all familiar with: the Bitchy Parent.

the BP wants her child to believe in fairies (or Snow White, or giant singing frogs or what have you) until the sprout goes off to college and discovers Nietzche. the BP herself probably wants to believe pretty dang badly. I’d be B, too.

my natural speaking voice (and the voice I use in my other performance career) is on the deep side. my princess voice is, of course, bubbly as shit, but I like to talk to the parents as if they are adults. I’ve caught a little flak from the parents for it — from “your voice doesn’t sound like Cinderella’s” to “you sound like a grownup — are you sure you can pull off Jessie?” — and it never fails to destabilize me a bit. sometimes I do a bit of “the voice” for them on the phone but I always feel a little goofy about it.

sometimes the BP zeroes in on something else. I once did a “makeover” party as “Fancy Nancy,” and the dad hadn’t got the memo about it, as he appeared to think the eyeshadow and little swirly eyelash things were just really, really shitty face paint. this BP was a special BP. it was his two little girls’ birthdays and he wanted them to have good face paint, damn it all. so I’m sitting there in my ill-fitting glittery dress and my jauntily-asunder plastic tiara, doing eyeshadow and nail polish and shooting the shit with the girls, and suddenly he’s THERE in all his B glory, yelling what what what is this you call this face paint, that’s not face paint I could do that. on and on. actual yelling. I just kinda stared at him, and so did the girls. he exhausted himself and went off to call Kris. moment of silence, then the older of the two birthday girls went, well, we think we look pretty. shit-shooting recommences. 

now it’s today, at the end of one of the longest days in the world, and a lady in the South Bay is cranky because she thinks I’m too old to be a plastic gunslinger. to which I say — shit. if I can be a subservient blonde in impractical footwear, I can be anything. at least cowgirls aren’t afraid to have the blues.

Belle’s Stockholm Syndrome and Ariel’s hoarding and Snow White’s vaguely rape-y happy ending aside Disney Princesses are awesome. But as I recently discovered so are the girls that play them.

One of the weird things about this job is that you don’t really have a chance to get to know your coworkers. Mostly you just go to parties alone( eerily similar to my entire high school experience) and the only people you ever interact with on the job are whiny, cake splattered, children ( eerily similar to Super Nanny’s entire show business career). Every now and then, however you get a double gig. A double gig is just what it sounds like, a gig with two or more princesses. This is a rare opportunity for us to commiserate with another about the rigors of royalty and to split up the magic show so you don’t have to do the tricks you don’t like. Double gigs are the only time  you get to talk to another person  about your job who knows exactly what you’re going through and who would never roll their eyes during a story about a particularly harrowing story and say “well it’s not like you have a real job, you just play dress up for a living!”

But I was tired of only interacting with my fellow princesse so I decided to host a Princess Party at my apartment. It was my first time ever talking at length with many of these girls, some of which I had never seen sans tiara. I was struck by the pre party fear that everyone would sit around awkwardly and make forced small talk, but I needn’t have worried. If there is one thing every princess is good at , it is talking. Not one of us shut up that entire time, closing our mouths for small intervals only to chew cupcakes or swill cocktails cobbled together from whatever I found in my freezer.

I was surprised at some of the talk I heard that night, things like “I’m almost sorry I started a go-go revolution” or “My boyfriend is like sooo pretty” or even ” have you ever seen a cat get a boner?” ( The last one is a bit of dialogue scrapped from early drafts of Beauty and the Beast).

But the surprises didn’t stop there. When they’re not schlepping across the bay area toting balloons and sycophantic smiles, they’re doing all sorts of amazing things. One is a beat poet, one interns at a radio station , and one is a professional model whose rocking pink hair was featured on Hottopic’s website.

Their opinions on princesses and princessing varied. Some were zealous ” I think we should have a costume making party next!”. Some were really zealous ” If you really think about it, Belle wouldn’t wear a ballgown to a kid’s party, that’s just silly”. But all of them were interesting and had good things to say and offered me insight into the company itself.

Almost all of them had asked for and gotten raises, something I had seriously considered but had been too chicken to do. We reflected on the lack of communication between princesses, one princess didn’t even know it was common practice among us to pocket our overtime, and how it affected our job. We shared party horror stories, fraught with weird things like coke dealing parents and a child who, when getting her face painted said “Dad says Grandpa went to live in heaven, but I miss him!” We shared good stories like celebrity encounters,( Princess Alex met Gerard Butler at a safari party..and politely declined his invitation to dinner. She’s such a bad ass). It felt good to talk and to laugh and to be girly.

It reminded me of a quote from Frances Hodgston Burnett’s The Little Princess. 

“ It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.”

It makes me happy to think that walking around the city, in places like radio stations, photo shoots, and community colleges, there are Princesses among us. And I’m happy to be one of them.

Princess Tip: A princess is nothing without her friends.

Despite their very best efforts, princesses get lost.

For some it works out ok. Snow White’s adventure in the scary forest yielded 7 new roommates who turned out to be awesome wingmen.

For me it means walking along train tracks in South San Francisco in a clown costume ten minutes before a gig wondering where the fuck I am and utterly hating my job.

I was really excited about this gig at the offset. Most princesses I’ve met hate clown gigs. As one princess put it ” Kids just don’t give a fuck about clowns anymore, it’s not a thing.” And to be fair our company specializes in a lame ” non threatening clown” that usually involves mismatched clothes and a balloon hat. Cirque du Soleil it is not.

But I love the idea of clowns. In my real life I think I identify more with clowns than with princesses in that neither of us take ourselves too seriously. When playing a princess you have to be glamorous and sparkly ( and in my case, two shades lighter skin tone). You have to be dainty and use nice words,or “Princess Swears” as I call them. You find yourself peppering your lilting sentences with phrases like ” oh my goodness!” or ” oh my heavens!”. With clowns you can say sillier, if still child friendly ,things like ” crackers!” Or ” nuts” or my personal favorite, ” Poopiefish”. Being a clown sounded so freeing to me and I was excited to go to my gig.

That was before I found out it was in the buttcrack of nowhere.

That’s not a term I use lightly. In my mere 4 months on this job I have been to several buttcracks of nowhere. This term usually applies to Half Moon Bay back roads or super secret Antioch country clubs, stuff way off the beaten path for someone who considers it a schlep to go to the golden gate bridge. The difference between those buttcracks and this one ( for more info on buttcrack comparisons see my friend Cassie’s blog “RaunchyRevelations”) was that I had to go into this one alone.

Google maps led me to believe that this gig was a mere block away from the BART station. Google maps led me to believe that I would merely have to skip down a single street and I’d be there and hour and a half early, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

Google Maps lied.

The gig was somewhere off of the Tanforan shopping center, which as anyone knows is surrounded by almost no houses and mostly industrial space. I walked around that neighborhood for a good half an hour trying to figure out if the kid’s birthday was in an airplane hangar or an auto parts shop. I walked by 2 train tracks and 3 taco trucks before I finally admitted to myself that I must have gone the wrong way.

Looking like a sad clown velvet painting, the likes of which were sold in front of several of the auto shops I passed, I trudged up the barely paved streets. After turning myself around and retracing my steps for what felt like miles past streets with names like “Dollar” and “Commercial” ( Who is their city planner? Richie Fucking Rich?) I reached the house.

Holding my breath, I snuck a peek at my watch, imagining that hours had gone by. To my shock it was 3:29 , a full , gorgeous, sixty seconds early.

I went inside and, in my humble opinion, rocked the gig, and walked out an hour later with a plate of cake and a thirty dollar tip.

Princess Tip: A Princess always remembers that , even when things look bad, no voice bad, 100 year nap bad, abusive step family bad, they always get better in the end.

There are several things I’ve learned in my 4 months as a princess.

Where there’s a roast pig there’s a chocolate fountain.

Glitter never really washes off.

And

Princesses are bad asses.

I learned this my very first day of princessing. It was my firs weekend on the job and I was up half the night with “back to school” jitters. The kind of jitters you get that make you feel both excited and desperately certain that you’ve forgotten something very important. That weekend was a 5 gig-er, something most princesses wouldn’t bat a fake eyelash at but something a lowly public transit hack in a tiara like me had never encountered before, and truth be told has never encountered since.

My first three gigs would be doubles with Princess J, and within minutes of meeting her it was apparent that she was a princess the likes of which Walt Disney ( bless his little frozen head) would never have imagined.

 Princess J was a slam poet and for that I liked her right away

 Princess J also had a moth tattoed on her inner forearm, accessorized for the occasion with glitter. I who had taken pains that morning to conceal the shit out of my foot tattoo ,which by the way is smaller than most atoms, was shocked. Princesses do not have tattoos! “Oh that?” J said when I mentioned it, ” I just tell the kids that he’s my forest friend and that he likes to stay close to me always. Kids love that shit. Fuck I missed the exit!”

I can’t tell you how jarring it was to hear words like that spoken by Snow White, or how awesome.

But tatts and slam poetry weren’t what made Princess Jen a bad ass.

We were finished with gig number one and had pulled into a gas station so I could change from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella ( both involved blonde wigs that were heinously at odds with my dark Archie Comics eyebrows).

As I slid back into the passenger seat, thinking smugly that Clark Kent did not have shit on me, I noticed J was on the phone. Still talking, she pulled out of the gas station and started to drive to the next gig. I tried not to eavesdrop but it soon became clear she was having a very serious conversation. Phrases floated out , phrases like “What do you mean?”, “Can’t we talk?” and finally, ” Don’t you love me anymore?”. After a few more minutes of this she hung up. I sneaked a glance over at her and saw that she was crying, tiny rivulets of mascara slipping down her face. The awkwardness I felt could be cut with a knife, even the flimsy pink ones we had used to eat our birthday cake earlier that day. We sat in silence for the rest of the drive. When we pulled in front of the house J wiped her eyes , applied another layer of glitter and said ” Lets do this.” She then proceeded to smile and do the gig perfectly as if nothing at all had happened.

Princesses have an amazing capacity to persevere. My friend Princess Alex was recently in a car accident en route to a gig. Another car rear ended her, pushing her car to hit the car in front of her. That alone would have been jarring enough for anyone but on top of that she tweaked her back badly and was already in the midst of nursing a gnarly cold. 

I asked Alex if she decided to call off the gig right then and there. She said no and laughed, ” I was already halfway there!”

A few weeks ago I had a glitter tears moment of my own. I was on my way to a gig when tiny problems collided and turned into big messy ones involving two people I really cared about being very angry at me. “That was really hurtful. I can’t believe you” said one text, ” You really fucked up this time, Molly” said the other.  On top of that, I had lost my favorite tiara, the extra sparkly one a boy I was in love with once gave me. I sat on a stoop in downtown Oakland, dressed in a fairy costume, and cried my eyes out. I was so pathetic looking no one even bothered to mug me. After a few minutes of that and a weepy call to my best friend that left a multicolored smudge of makeup on my cell phone I wiped my eyes and went into the party. I despite my best efforts I was kind of a forlorn fairy, a pre applause Tinkerbelle. In the middle of my puppet show my hand brushed the side of my tu-tu and I felt something hard. Looking down I saw my tiara, buried in layers of tulle, shining and secure even after 4 blocks of walking. I fished it out of my skirt and smiled, for real this time.

I realize that most people in “normal” jobs still go to work after bad break ups and after car accidents and disappointment laced text messages every day. Still I defy half those stiff to go through those things and then be smiley and magical for a dozen screaming ankle biters. 

It takes cohones and not a little glitter.

Princess Tip: A princess knows that no matter what, the show must go on.

I should have known things were bad when I smelled burning plastic.

It’s a scent not to be ignored , a scent that brings back memories of Barbie dolls left of hot August cement, their faces contorted half smiles.

This time it was my hula skirts.

Lots of more experienced Princesses have told me that hula gigs are their favorite,the exception to this rule being one Princess who went to a hula party for a one year old and ended up getting ogled by the baby’s creepy uncles.

So I was excited when I got my first hula gig a few weeks ago, though “excited ” was not the adjective I would have used when I first found out I got it.

In case you’re wondering, “pissed” is the word I would use.

You see the company is supposed to take stock of which Princesses have which costumes so they know how to schedule us. When they took stock of mine a week prior I specifically pointed out that I did not own a hula skirt, much less the 12 extra ones we are required to bring to share with the party guests. “Don’t worry about it!” The “Castle” employee reassured me,” We just won’t schedule you for hula parties!”

“Sorry we made a mistake,” was their apologetic reply when I called them friday afternoon, the day before my gig. They suggested that I go downtown before my 12 pm gig the next day and get the costumes from a retiring princess who worked at a costume store. I rolled my eyes and accepted.

Keep Calm, Carry on.

The thing that sets me apart from all the other Princesses currently employed is not my rad face painting skills( they are wet and barely recognizable at best) but rather the fact that I don’t own a car. Instead I have to schlep to all over the bay area to gigs on public transit. Luckily in a city like San Francisco that has more weirdos per square foot than a Star Trek convention I am rarely the most oddly dressed person on the bus.

Long story short I had to haul my glittery ass downtown an hour before my gig to meet this princess and do a handoff.

I was floored.

Most Princesses, myself whole heartedly included, look like normal people when we aren’t dressed up for a gig. In my case I look like a less than normal person but I digress. Princess Bryce was a different story.

As soon as I walked into the store I could tell which one she was.

She was gorgeous, blonde with blue eyes that had tiny aqua gems glued to the corners of them.  Her skin was perfect Cinderella white and sparkly , seemingly on it’s own accord. It was clear from one glance that I was in the presence of an uber Princess.

I swear to God I almost bowed.

From what she told me while rummaging through the piles of costumes in the back seat of her car ( insider tidbit, Princess’s cars are ALWAYS messy, glittery but messy) Bryce had been working as a Princess for 3 years. Closer inspection of our company website reveals that she is featured prominently on almost every page. As she dug out an enormous plastic bag from her trunk she told me that her future plans included moving to Los Angeles in a month. I asked her if she would continue Princessing there.

“Maybe , who knows,” she chirped ” want to get some balloons? I have a rad employee discount!”

2 bags of hula skirts and a bag of discounted( and truth be told, really fucking sick) neon balloons later I left the shop and made my way to the gig.

It was awesome! The bus dropped me off an inch from the door and as soon as I got inside the mom hugged me. Hugged me. Most parties I go to are populated with ladies who lunch mommies  who are gorgeous and annoyed that Ariel won’t give her 2 year old the red balloon animal she insists on.

I won’t lie, the hug felt nice.

The rest of the party went on without a hitch, including the super hokey hula dance I made up on the spot. I left the party well tipped and well fed with an army of 8 year olds yelling ” bye Princess Molly” at the gate.

That is the memory I think of as I scrape melted plastic off of my heating vent.

Princess Lesson: A Princess takes care of her clothes because they are gorgeous and often flammable.