I’ve been thinking about fairy tale princesses this week.
When I was a kid we had a recording of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, narrated by Danny Kaye. I used to listen to it a lot. Finding this image of the album cover gave me quite a pang of nostalgia, let me tell you! Anyway, my favorite story was The Princess and the Pea. You remember that one, right? The prince has all but given up his dream of finding a real princess, when all of a sudden in the middle of a dark & stormy night who should show up at the castle gates but a weary, bedraggled, alleged princess. They don’t believe her, so they put her to the test. All night long she tosses and turns atop twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds, unable to sleep because of the single pea underneath. And there is much rejoicing and a happy ending, because only a real princess would be sensitive and delicate enough to detect the pea.
