Revised Essay 3/4

Striving For Evermoore

They came to the isolated Boy Scout camp in the middle of the winter wearing jeans, and business suits and thick woolen coats. Their ages ranged from 16 to well into their fifties, and what struck me the first time I came to one of the events is how normal everyone seemed. The schoolteacher with her husband the banker stroll up to the kitchen house of the small campground, still dressed in their work attire and carrying large duffle bags. The college kids, in jeans and converse sneakers, all with backpacks packed to bursting with the necessities for the weekend slung over their shoulders, poured out of cars five or six at to a vehicle, since they tended to carpool to save money.

They all made their way through to the kitchen house in the back of the campground, through the complex of six wooden cabins and a larger troop house with an open, sandy area in front of it and past the carved totem pole. It was cold, but many of the people didn’t even seem to notice the weather as they stood outside chatting with friends they hadn’t seen in the month since the last time they’d all gathered here. They caught up on stories and gossip from around the state of New Jersey. They hugged and joked and laughed like any large group of friends would. To an onlooker, it would just be a normal, if large, group of friends getting ready for a weekend of camping. The comfortable air between everyone showed just how familiar they were with each other.

Earlier that month, I’d heard my friends talking about how much fun they’d had at the last event. I had just started hanging out with them when I’d started taking classes at the local community college. I’d always had a kind of amazing nerd radar, and my first day of classes I’d met a few of these people in the game room that used to be on that campus. I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, that my friends all played this game. They all played Mystic Realms, a live action roleplaying game, or LARP, that’s held events all over the state of New Jersey for over ten years, which is a long life for one of these games.

All of my friends sat around one person’s computer pointing at pictures of people in masks and felt tabards holding log pieces of foam and duct tape. They all pointed at people and made comments like “What about that time Rose cut off Asha’s tail and he turned into like Satan’s weetle for a moment. I’ve never heard Charlie’s voice that low even outside the game!” I was starting to feel out of place when a few of them turned to me and asked if I wanted to come to the next event.

“Sure, as long as I don’t have to paint my face.”

In an hour, this ordinary campground would become the remnants of the crystal city of Evermoore, a once great city at the center of the Realm of the Five. Crumbled crystal spires that stood thousands of years earlier, in the Age of Life, would surround the wooden structures. These ordinary people would put away their street clothes and would don the garb of the magical characters that they would become for the weekend. The costumes were colorful, many handmade, chainmail and boots, the symbols of their orders, or groups of players that worked together and received bonuses for their cooperation, displayed proudly on cloth tabards over their chests. The gypsy women wore skirts and colorful scarves tied about their waists, their every step jingling with the loud jewelry they wore. The druids adorned themselves with brightly colored flowers. The necromancers wore black. Elves had facial markings denoting what culture they came from, the rakish, pirate-like sea elves with blue spirals about their eyes, proclaiming their connection to the sea and the great ships built from fallen trees which housed whole communities. The haughty, flamboyant high elves wore silver spiraled marks and dressed in regal finery that proclaimed the status they had in their home in the Elder Tree Valley. The low elves dressed plainly, with brown markings about their eyes and a quieter demeanor. Deep elves, the rebels who had been banished to intricate underground tunnels among the roots of the old trees, wore black tattoos about their eyes and shouldered crossbows. Green orcs and the cat-like rakkarins mingled with the many races of elf and human. All about ran the mouse-like weetles, many of whom followed the gypsies, entranced by the shiny coins at their waists.

“You should play a gypsy, Erin! That’s what I play, it’ll be a lot of fun,” my friend Jill had taken it upon herself to help me get ready for the event in two weeks. She was a plump, short girl who was about a year older than me. She took classes for nursing and I bet she would have made a great one, if she hadn’t changed her major a year later. Her ex-boyfriend, a guy named Charles, had made me a saber out of the PVC pipe, insulation foam, and duct tape that was regulation for the game. He wrapped the hilt of the sword in purple tape, telling me that I’d always know which weapon was mine because of it. It seemed big and clunky, and I had a hard time using it at first when we practiced in Charlie’s large backyard.

“You should definitely be a magic user,” he said after a laughably lame attempt to get a hit on him, “because you can’t do this stuff to save your life.”

The Inn of Evermoore, the central meeting place for the Tradesmen, or people capable of manipulating magic and performing amazing feats because of it, was the campground’s troop house draped with colorful banners and the symbols of the many religions of the realm. Many of those banners had been painted or stitched by players who played clerics, or the holy healers who rallied troops around the symbols of their gods and kept the fighting forces able to battle through healing magic. I played a cleric.

Before the campground could be fully transformed, however, there were speeches made in the troop house. Tony, the man who had created the game, gave the speech my first event. He stood on the hearth of the large stone fireplace, already dressed as his character Deadalus, the bloodthirsty necromancer well known for stabbing first and asking questions after they’re zombies. Tony explained the rules of the game, emphasizing the importance of staying in character for the experience of the other players. Then his voice lowered as he began to tell us a story intended to capture our imaginations, “the veil between worlds is thin this night, and perhaps we may see echoes of the past. The old souls that have been reborn in some of the heroes of Guildhall will take the form of the protectors of the Five, the gods who created this realm. Tonight, we may see history replayed in the mists. So, with no further ado, let the event begin. Three, two, one, GAME ON!”

From that moment on, the people at that campground truly were the tradesmen of Evermoore, the most respected protectors of a troubled world. I knew nothing that weekend, and so as I sat out on the steps of the Inn, listening to people talk, I didn’t know what to expect. Fog began to roll in, produced by machines placed just in the woods around the buildings. From the thick fog figures started to emerge, men and women in white rags, their faces painted. One wore a colorful jester’s cap. The people around fell silent and watched as the people approached. I grabbed the nearest man, who was adjusting the part of his kilt that was thrown over his shoulder, “Excuse me sir, but what’s happening, I just came from the Isle of Lore and I’m confused.” That was what I was taught by my friends to say, code for “I’m a newbie, and I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Ah lass, those are the spirits of the old souls. They will lead us to the Realmspire. We will finally close this realm off from those who wish to invade from outside! The Nexus will not be able to swallow this world,” he said and I tilted my head to the side, still unsure of what was going on. “What trade are you and what’s your name? I’m Cloud’ku, you can come with me.”

“Tana,” I said, giving him the name I’d chosen earlier that month for the character I was playing, “I’m a cleric.” I followed Cloud’ku, whose real name is Pat, for that whole night, talking to the “old souls,” who believed that they were fighting the hoards that had destroyed the crystal city that once stood where the town of Evermoore was. That night we were lead out into the woods in search of a mystical item that would keep the Realm of the Five safe from something that I didn’t understand. Throughout the entire night, I was fighting the urge to laugh at the ridiculous situation and the enemies that wore felt masks and wielded weapons like mine, just painted white, to symbolize claws.

Everyone’s first event they are outside their characters, but the longer they play, the more likely it is that they can look at the campground and see the spires. It became easier each month for me to see hounds where there are really people in felt masks, little mouse people when it was really my friends from school with whiskers painted on their noses. Every month it became easier to step out of reality for a few days and live in a fantasy. All fantasies, however, come to the end in their time.

At the end of the weekend, all the tired, sore, elated people clean, pack up their stuff, and once again they leave in their jeans and tee shirts. The town of Evermoore again becomes just a Boy Scout camp in southern New Jersey, and the people are no longer rogues, rangers, wizards and warriors, and instead are schoolteachers, college students, lawyers, and bankers. The next month, they will return, ready for the next Evermoore market day and once again make a world come alive for the few people who know how to look at it.

Handout for analysis of "Blackbird"

What they say they’re looking for:

- The submission page states that they primarily look for personal essays and occasional memoir excerpts.

- Blackbird does not publish previously published essays/stories.

- From the Editorial Policy section of the website: “excellent writing challenges traditions in profound ways, and is radical insofar as it is aware of its own origins in tradition and seeks to expand the boundaries of the realm of discourse of which it is a part.”

o This means that they are looking for work that does not stay safely within the confines of genre, I guess.

What the selected works tell us:

- The majority of nonfiction in the journals are book reviews, however, and they do not except unsolicited reviews. There are usually 3 essays and 5-8 reviews.

- The essays selected are personal, but with an additional focus on something outside of the author such as another writer’s work or something in society (football teams, other people).

- Essays tend to be non-linear.

- The majority of the authors have been published elsewhere and have extensive careers as writers.

- The essays are obviously personal, with an introspective tone.

- Eloquent, poetic language.

- Length range: 2,500 – 3,000 words seems to be the average.

Reading Period:

Nov. 1^st – April 15^th

Submissions:

Double-spaced manuscripts for nonfiction and fiction. Email submissions preferred (email submissions to transom@vcu.edu all queries go to blackbird@vcu.edu ). Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but if the piece is excepted elsewhere you must inform Blackbird.

Essay 3: Mystic Realms

Mystic Realms

They came to the isolated Boy Scout camp in the middle of the winter wearing jeans, and business suits and thick woolen coats. Their ages ranged from 16 to well into their fifties, and what strikes many people when they come to their first event is just how normal everyone seems. The school teacher with her husband the banker stroll up to the kitchen house of the small campground, still dressed in their work attire and carrying large duffle bags. The college kids, in jeans and converse sneakers, all with backpacks slung over their shoulders packed to bursting with the necessities for the weekend poured out of cars five or six at to a vehicle, since they tended to carpool to save money.

They all made their way though to the kitchen house in the back of the campground, through the complex of six wooden cabins and a larger troop house with a large sandy open area in front of it. It was cold, but many of the people didn’t even seem to notice the weather, as they stood outside chatting with people they hadn’t seen in the month since the last time they’d all gathered here. They caught up on stories and gossip from around the state of New Jersey. They hugged and joked and laughed like any large group of friends gathering.

In a few hours, however, this campground would be transformed for these people into the magical town of Evermoore, and they would all step out of their lives for two days of being a citizen of this town, and the protectors of the magical Realm of the Five, where it was located. These people would spend the next two days playing out the next chapter in a dramatic adventure that had been going on for years. The event that all these people had gathered to participate in was a Live Action Roleplaying, or LARPing, event.

After they settled all their luggage, these people would shed their buisiness suits in favor of chain mail shirts and leather armor. Jeans and tees hirts would be replaced with skirts and bodices. The large wooden troop house would be transformed with colorful banners and garlands into the Inn of Evermoore, where these people would gather to gossip much as they had in their real-life personas. They would all spend their time fighting the hoards of darkness, which in reality were really just their friends playing the enemies for the weekend.

People who come to these events have to have amazing powers of imagination to transform the man in the felt mask into the slobbering hound jumping at them, or the goblin shooting poison darts. They have to see fireballs where there are really only cloth pouches full of birdseed. They confidently stride around the campground, hanging banners and pitching colorful tents to make the place look like the festive “market day” for the town of Evermoore rather than just a bunch of silly people in the woods fighting with birdseed spells and swords made out of foam and duct tape.

The man who created this game is called Tony, and in real life he is a lawyer. He is a calm, well-spoken man with an easy smile and a good sense of humor. During the weekends however, he is Deadalus, the bloodthirsty and angry necromancer who attacks first and asks questions later. He walks around with a large staff with a skull atop it and gets into theological arguments with a cleric, who in reality is a young medical student.

When Tony was studying for his bar exam, he still came to the events of another game, and paid people in in-game money to guard him as he studied what he said were mystical tomes rather than miss the opportunity to enjoy himself during a hectic time.

The people who come to these events all know the reputation that LARPing has gotten in other circles. Those who know about LARPing who have never been to an event see LARPers as somehow outside society and detached from reality. In the movie “Vampire Clan,” brutal murders are blamed on a vampire-based live action roleplaying game rather than on the actions of one sick individual, and in “Mazes and Monsters” the character played by Tom Hanks goes insane and begins to believe he is the character he portrayed in the Dungeons and Dragons-esque LARP that they played in that movie. Popular culture abounds with images of LARPers as somehow dangerously unstable, when they are really normal people with an unusual hobby.

Tony gave the opening speech at the beginning of the event, where he welcomed everyone to another weekend of fantasy adventure and gave a quick primer on the rules of the game. One of the players, dressed in furs since she played a barbarian character, stood up and told everyone that she was an EMT and that if anything were to go wrong, she was the one that they should seek out. After all that, Tony told everyone what had been going on in the world they were about to be entering, and the people in the room started fidgeting, excited to start the game. Finally, Tony called his customary “Three, two, one, GAME ON” and everyone cheered. From that moment on, they were their characters.

The people who had been playing the game for years will tell any new player that the game is only as good as what they players bring to it. It’s harder to believe in the world that the game is built around when there are people talking on their cellular phones or listening to their iPods right next to them. To these people, this weekend was also a way to get away from the constant connected nature of the world now. People who normally wouldn’t be seen without their Blackberry phone in hand were suddenly able to pack that phone away and just socialize with people, albeit while in character as heroes of a magical realm.

Many of the people who started playing this game were familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, while for some the only games they’d ever played before were video games. LARPing was much more about acting than it was about actually playing a game. For the game to really work, they characters had to seem as real as possible in the situations, and that was up to the players. It’s easy to see why many people think that LARPers have a difficult time discerning fantasy from reality when they work so hard to make their fantasy real when they are at these game events.

While at the event, players go on “trails,’ or little adventures designed by player/writers and aided by NPCs, or non-player characters (the friends in felt masks from earlier), on these trails, the people have to make choices and interact with each other as their characters, they have to fight the enemies and receive the rewards. They work together and solve the problems put forth to them. There are always multiple ways to solve a conflict. One group might fight the stubborn Orc who won’t leave a helpless farmer alone, some might bribe him, others might try and reasons with him. These options are sometimes complex and difficult and may change the entire outcome of a weekend or even a story that has stretched out for five or six years.

At the end of the weekend, all the tired, sore, elated people clean, pack up their stuff, and once again they leave in the jeans and teeshirts. The town of Evermoore again becomes just a Boy Scout camp in southern New Jersey, and the people are no longer rogues, rangers, wizards and warriors, and instead are school teachers, college students, lawyers, and bankers. The next month, they will return, ready for the next Evermoore market and once again make a fantasy world come alive for the few people who know how to look at it.

Blog # 13: Problems

Alright, so I'm having some problems coming up with an idea for my "eye" essay, so I'm just going to list some of the ones I have:

LARPing, being a LARPer.
-LARPing stands for Live Action Roleplaying, and quite frankly I want to write about my experiences with LARPers because I'm so sick of everybody being like "Oh, like that lightening bolt! dork?" when I tell them that I used to LARP. There are a lot of really nice, intelligent, interesting people who LARP. Like did you know that I've met teachers, lawyers, cops, paramedics, college professors and all other kinds of people at LARPing events? Yeah, it's not all dudes that live in their parents basements.

EEO
-I think this would be interesting because I'm both an insider and an outsider in this group. I'm an EEO student, but I don't fit the normal profile (I didn't come from a "disadvantaged" area,I'm just ridiculously broke), so I think I can look at it more objectively than most of the people in that program.

A New Hope Hacker Convention
-Over the summer I went to this convention and had a blast! It's interesting to see nerds in their natural environment, and I was in the epicenter of dorkdom. I got to talk to people who didn't use their real names about things like the pros and cons of copyrights, race around on a segue, help rebuild a MAC from the 1980s and dance to music made entirely on a computer at a rave-type activity. It was an interesting look into a very misunderstood culture (not all hackers are black hats!!).

A typical Rocky Horror Friday night
-There are a lot of interesting people that go to the midnight showings of Rocky Horror, and it's always interesting to see what people are dressed as and the kinds of things people do. There's a certain draw to that kind of thing when you aren't accepted by mainstream people, and so the characters you see at Rocky tend to be really nice and also really different and fun.

Second I Essay Draft (I hate the Title!)

Strength and Love

My grandmother once punched a neighborhood boy and knocked him from our front porch into the street because he was saying raunchy things to my aunt. Four years later that same boy was in the army and he was trying to enter army intelligence. Two men in full uniform came knocking on the front door of the big old house and asked my grandmother, “Would you trust David DeAmore with the secrets of our nation?”

My grandmother’s answer is what got him the job, because they knew she wasn’t lying. She looked that soldier in the eye, her back as straight as his military posture, and said confidently “Absolutely, but I wouldn’t trust him with my daughters.”


I wasn’t alive when that happened, but I’ve been told it so many times that I started believing that I can remember it. I can almost see the shocked look on David DeAmore’s face as he stood in the middle of Conover street, halfway between his family’s house and mine, looking at my grandmother with a bruise starting to darken on his cheek. Though she died when I was younger, I get the feeling that I did get to know the woman from stories like this. Barbara Krieg was not someone that you messed with, ever.

Sometimes I wonder if the woman that was willing to clock a boy half her age in the jaw was the same woman I remember from the misty fog of youthful recollection. The memories I have of my grandmother are of a thin, white haired woman who walked with a slight limp because of the missing part of her foot from diabetes. She smelled of musk perfume and the hypoallergenic fabric softener we all used. Her arms were thin but strong whenever she picked me up or hugged me. I never knew she was sick.

She was my advocate and protector, the woman who bought me dolls and clothes and hugged me when I was upset. She sang to me when I was little, that song “You are my Sunshine” as she hugged me every time the neighborhood kids kicked me in the shins at preschool. It wasn’t until I was much older that my aunt Barbara told me just how much she cared for me, the child of her failure daughter.


In 1987, my grandmother made her eldest daughter promise something. My aunt Barbara was sitting with her outside our family home, in the large backyard full of fruit trees. Spring had passed and I can imagine the way the yard must have looked. The cherries were starting to ripen on the tree in the back of the yard. Green apples hung heavily on another tree. The yard wouldn’t have been quite as overgrown and wild as it was a few years later, when I would play in the tall grass, but it would be getting there.

I had just been born early that morning, and my mother had not told a soul she was pregnant until that day. Grandma and Aunt Barbara were taking a break from rushing to find all the basics an infant would need. They sat in silence for a while, and then my grandmother spoke, “Barbara, you have to promise me something, promise me that that little girl will have a place to live. Peggy can’t do it herself and I might not be around much longer.”

That promise made sure that me and my mother would have a place to live for ten years after my grandmother’s death when I was four. I lived in the family home, an old brown two-story house surrounded by more modern cottage type rental homes. There were memories in every corner of the house, which my mother hadn’t changed a bit since my grandmother lived there. All the same pictures hung on the wall, and the couches still had the same awful 1970s orange upholstery. Scratched onto one of the doorframes was a height chart for all eight of my grandmother’s children and the beginnings of one for myself. By the time I was eight, I was as tall as my mother was at thirteen. Pictures of my grandfather, whom I’d never met since he died of cancer three years before I was born, were up on the walls. I have his blue eyes. Hidden throughout the house were the remnants of family history.

Once when I was exploring my house on a rainy day, something I would do often because there were always little surprises in the closets, I found my grandmother’s jewelry box. In that box I found a beautiful rosary, the beads worn from rubbing. I was amazed at how beautiful it was. There weren’t any other religious icons in the house, and even the little gold cross I wore was a gift from someone rather than something I’d been taught to believe in. I felt like I shouldn’t have even been holding that little rosary, fearing that perhaps it wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know until later why Grandma had that rosary and no other religious items.


Grandma apparently was once a devout Catholic. She would go to church every Sunday, dressed up in her nicest dress with her head covered modestly with a little pillbox hat. There was bible study every Wednesday, and she would attend those too. Her faith was something that was just part of who she was for a long time, like it was with most of the other branches of my family. Then came the difficult pregnancies.
She was a small woman, not particularly built for childbearing, unlike her children would be later, as they all had the sturdier build of her husband, and her multiple pregnancies were starting to take their toll. By her fifth child, the gestational diabetes that my grandmother had suffered simply stuck around as type 2. Now, after having her seventh child, my Aunt Mickey, Grandma didn’t want to have anymore. She went to her priest and told him that she was thinking about using birth control. The priest responded in the typical way, implying that Grandma would be disobeying the will of the Lord.

“I was fruitful! I multiplied! I’ve got kids everywhere in my house and I don’t even remember which ones aren’t mine anymore,” she told the priest, “and if that’s not good enough for God then I don’t know what else he wants.”

A few months later, my grandmother found out she was pregnant with my aunt Annie and she stopped going to church.

In a different closet, I found a picture of Grandma sitting at a table surrounded by the rest of my family. A baby boy was sitting in her lap, clapping with her help as my aunt Loretta brought out a big cake. In the corner of the picture a little girl with curly blond hair sulked, staring down the little boy with a glare that could cut diamonds. I don’t remember why I hated my little cousin so much, maybe because the little boy was taking my place as the one that Grandma would spoil. Whatever the reason was, it was lost in the events that followed. That picture was from the night Grandma died.


She had been in the hospital earlier that day, and still smelled a little like medicine and sickness, a distinctive hospital odor. She told the doctor that she was fine and that she knew her sugar was a little high, but she had somewhere she needed to be. My mother picked her up from the hospital and we drove as a family with my Aunt Annie, who was home from college just for this occasion, to my cousin’s first birthday party. I didn’t care much for Richard, and was actually frightened of his father’s family, so different from us. I thought that Richard smelled and told my mother that confidently. The adults in the car just laughed and said that that was just how babies smelled.

We helped Grandma up the stairs when we got to my aunt’s house. Her house was almost as old as the one I lived in, but it had hard wood floors that creaked with every step. My cousin Crissy was sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth and not responding to anyone, her blind, unseeing eyes crossing as she continued to rock and occasionally say a gibberish phrase. She tolerated Grandma’s hug for longer than she let anyone else touch her. Richard stumble-walked towards us with his hands held firmly in my uncle Ray’s. The whole room smelled like food and people. I wanted to go immediately.


I spent the night watching Grandma play with Richard and smiling from a spot on the couch next to my aunt Annie, who never liked crowds and had a lot of studying to do. I fell asleep on the car ride back, so I didn’t hear my Grandma complaining about her arm, and my mother thought nothing of it. Grandma helped Mom carry me up to bed and then went to bed herself.

That night she passed away, peacefully in her sleep.


I’ve always wondered if Grandma knew that Richard’s party would be the last time she’d see her whole family, that Richard would be the last of her grandchildren that she’d see. She was so adamant about going, even though she was sick. Her time of death is actually the next day, and my mother always says, with tears in her eyes the way there always are when she talks about grandma, that she didn’t want Richard’s birthday to be tainted like that, so she held on. I don’t know if that’s exactly what it is, but that’s what my family likes to believe.

I was fourteen, and my mother was at her night job, and anyway I hadn’t seen her in a few days anyway. I sat up awake, screaming, my voice hoarse like I’d been screaming in my sleep too. My body was covered in sweat and I looked around the room, the floor covered in garbage that my mother wouldn’t let me throw out. I saw a rat the size of a cat running across the floor away from the bed and shivered. The side of the bed dipped down and I heard something I hadn’t heard in ten years.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
Nothing was there, but somehow I felt safer than I had in years.

Blog 9: Very Late

So essay 2 is causing me a lot of problems, I don't know what to write at all. I had a couple of ideas that I'm not particularly fond of sharing on a blog, so I crossed those out. I don't think a drug story would be overly appropriate. I wanted to do the Tarot one, but I kind of lost steam when I was trying to think of an idea about it. One idea that I had was something about my family and the stories that we tell (like that journal entry we had). I think that one might work really well.

I Essay 1 Draft... and man does it suck

Not a Fairytale
I went to my eighth grade formal, the first formal dance that I’d ever been to, in a silver-blue dress and clear pumps, my glass slippers. My classmates all looked at me like I was insane, dressing up as a character for our first big school dance. I smiled the whole night and danced with anyone who asked. I accepted that my peers thought I was strange for my behavior because I was happy just doing whatever I felt like, and for some reason, I felt like Cinderella. I don’t know why I was so obsessed with everything that I’m not, or why I still have Cinderella dolls on shelves all around my room, but I do.

I used to be sure when I was a kid that I’d meet my own Prince Charming and that would make everything better, but that wasn’t exactly what happened. For Cinderella, she meets a man and all of her troubles are over, she just had to fit into a shoe. In real life, you go out with a guy and maybe, just maybe he’ll friend you on Facebook the next night if you ever hear from him again. The worst thing that could have happened to Cinderella’s love life was a blister on her foot, with real people, you’ve got stalkers, and crazies who threaten to kill themselves if you ever leave them. Prince Charming wouldn’t have done that.

Cinderella didn’t have to worry about if she’d fit into that pretty dress come time for the ball either. She didn’t spend weeks and months dieting in order to look like a waif, she just did.

When I was 12, I tried out for a children’s production of Rogers and Hammerstien’s Cinderella, which was a big deal for me, since I was sure that I would get the lead role. I thought I was born to play Cindrella, and that was why I felt such a connection to her. I wore out my VHS copy of the Leslie Ann Warren version of the musical trying to get ready. I was certain that I could sing “In my Own Little Corner” perfectly. I went to the audition dressed in a makeshift peasant costume and sang my song and read my lines. I was sure that I’d floored the middle-aged woman that was making the casting choices, knocked her right out of her silly tie-dyed blouse, but apparently I was dead wrong.

The next week I got a call saying that I was cast as one of the stepsisters, because I obviously didn’t have the body type to play Cinderella. I got to lament being a “solid girl” while the person they chose to play Cinderella got to wear the pretty silver dress that sparkled under the theater lighting and dance to “Ten Minutes Ago.” I got to wear a hideous frizzy red wig and complain about being fat and unloved. What did the stepsisters ever do to deserve the kinds of fates they get in those stories, anyway?

In the Brothers Grimm version of the story, the sisters mangle their feet and have their eyes pecked out by birds, all because they wanted to please their mother. In most of the other versions of the story that I’ve read, they just end up alone and unloved by the end. In “Ever After,” the fat one got a goofy sidekick for a love interest and got to have her own version of happily ever after, but that still supposes that the fat sister, who in that movie wasn’t even particularly fat, could only ever expect to be appreciated by a socially awkward, unattractive man, or that she even particularly needs a man.

I rejected most of the things I learned from Cinderella by the time I was in college. I talked a big game with most of the people I knew, swearing up and down that she was a symbol of the oppression of women, forced into domesticity and only freed by the acceptance of that role through marriage. My room was still filled with dolls, and a glass slipper ornament was on my shelf until Christmas, when it would have a place of honor on the plastic branches of our tree. I had started to realize just how little Cinderella did to help women like me, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still utterly obsessed.

The one thing that I had given up on was the idea that there was a magic solution to my problems. When I was a kid, I’d always pictured that one day there would be a handsome prince coming to rescue me from my own life. Every fight I had with my mother, every time the water in our house was turned off because she forgot to pay the bills, I would escape to a fantasy world where I was the waif-like beauty and there was a prince waiting for me.
The first “prince” I found wasn’t particularly charming. Billy was a quiet, awkward, big guy. At six foot five inches tall, he towered over everybody else he knew, including me. He wasn’t one to talk too much, and that suited me just fine, because I didn’t really particularly want to listen to the kinds of things that went on in his head, which mostly revolved around video games and football. I’d gone to high school with him, and he never went to college. I was nineteen when he proposed. I laughed in his face.

A year after we broke up, he followed me to a campground where I’d planned to spend a weekend with my friends. He pushed me up against a wall at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere where we’d stopped for gas. It took three of my friends to pull him off me. The rest all seemed to follow the same pattern. Obviously Prince Charming didn’t exist.

In the end, I stopped trying to find connections between myself and a silly old story. I worked hard with what I had, a brain and a loud, outspoken personality. I threw out half of my dolls, and put the rest up in storage. I think they’re still up in my aunt’s attic, collecting dust. I kept the glass slipper ornament though, sitting on my desk as a reminder of something I used to love. I’m not waiting for any prince now, and I’m certainly not attempting to be any kind of pillar of traditional femininity. I am just me, and that’s got to be enough because there are no Fairy Godmothers or Prince Charmings here.