Saturday, April 09, 2005

11:50 PM | There Goes the Fairy Tale

[Sitting down, clicks TV on for The Tonight Show]

I get such great satisfaction from breathing in the air of a newly-cleaned apartment. I like the smell of Lysol and roses everywhere. I feel so clean, it's almost sinful to feel this way, because it somehow approximates -- for a lack of a better comparison -- a huge orgasm. I cleaned the pad from five o'clock in the afternoon till now, and it's almost midnight. Watched the whole Royal Wedding all throughout.

Which made me think: why is it that the media crucifies Camilla Parker-Bowles -- now Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall -- too much?

Two things, I think: First, Princess Diana, who had a master's degree in public relations savvy, had publicly decried Parker-Bowles as The Other Woman, the breaker of everyone's favorite fairy tale marriage. People still imagine that iconic 1980s wedding (with Diana in her cake of a gown) and they sigh, because Diana as Princess of Wales fulfilled some kind of unfulfillable longing in their souls, perhaps brought about by too much Grimm Brother tales. That Diana died a tragic death makes her the martyr, transcending even the reality of her. Who can compete with a legend? As Sidney Pollack's version of Sabrina once put it: "Illusions are dangerous things, because they are always perfect." Second, Camilla Parker-Bowles does not exactly have the face of a princess. Jay Leno and the rest of the world even enjoys calling her a horse. A favorite joke goes this way, that Charles first met her in Ascot, for the horse races. Where else? (Cue laughter.) And we indeed laugh, because our idea of a princess has always been someone with the sweet-faced demeanor of a Snow White, or a Cinderella -- the Walt Disney versions.

While cleaning, however, I thought: Camilla has always been Prince Charles's first love. She was there before Diana was even there. In a sense, Diana was...

[Hey, they just let Paul Newman car-race with Leno! Now that's something you don't see everyday.]

... Diana was the interloper, the bride of an arranged marriage. So now, Charles and Camilla have somehow demonstrated to all of us that icky concept of "love conquering all," of "love being triumphant in the end."

Isn't that the more regular kind of fairy tale?

Oh, bollocks. I don't know why I am even talking about this.

[Signs off. Settles down to read a book.]

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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