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| It was a country of benumbed people. |
Once upon a time, in a country nobody ever heard of, there
was a prince whose name was Julio: Julio
Prince. His parents were Marvin and
Gertrude King, who were the constitutional monarchs of the country. They had no power, but they looked good and they
had nice manners. Nobody wanted to get
rid of them because, well, they were the king and queen, and you couldn’t get
rid of a king or a queen unless you beheaded them. Nobody wanted to do that.
Julio was the crown prince.
He was single and available. This
was a cause for concern, because Julio caused a new royal scandal every month
with a different person. The people
loved him because his escapades made good tabloid reading, but the queen’s
blood pressure was getting dangerously high and the king had started to drink
large quantities of anisette. Even the
prime minister was not immune to the pressure.
She had taken up smoking Russian cigars again.
The king, the queen, the prime minister and the heads of all
10 parties in parliament held a meeting, after which the queen read the Riot
Act to the prince. Her voice was
quivering and she was shaking pretty hard.
“If you don’t get married, settle down and give us some
grandchildren, we are going to disown you.
Your idiot cousin Pippin Duke will become heir to the throne. You won’t get a title. You won’t even get an allowance. You’ll have to go to work! We mean it this time!”
Consideration of this horrible future caused Julio to agree
to their demands. He wasn’t about to
marry just anyone, though. He had
standards. The king had an idea. They would throw a humungous party with an orchestra,
a bar and a buffet, to which they would invite all the unmarried young women in
the country.
It was a small country and they had a big ballroom.
In the meantime, on the other end of town, lived a family of
women. The father of the family had
died, leaving behind his daughter, his wife and his two stepdaughters. Neighbors called their house the Bitch
Burrow. Nobody could figure out why the
man had married that old witch in the first place. She looked like an orangutan and she had the
personality of a Tasmanian devil on amphetamines. Neighborhood gossip held that he had married
her because she could bake a great double dark chocolate chip cake doused with
rum. Others theorized that she blackmailed
him about a body in the cellar. The cake
story was the most popular. The man had
weighed 300 pounds.
The Wicked Stepmother’s two daughters, Zelda and Imelda,
were even uglier than she was and almost as unpleasant. The one sweet, pretty member of the family
was the dead father’s daughter. Nobody
knew that she was pretty, though, because she was always covered with dirt and
grime. This was because the other three
made her do all the work around the house.
They were too poor to hire a maid and too lazy and stuck up to do any
housework themselves.
They called her Cinderella because she had ashes on her face
most of the time from sleeping on the floor next to the fireplace.[1] She didn’t mind the nickname. Her real name was Ethelgard, and she hated it. It reminded her of gasoline. It was also a boy’s name.
One sunny day, a special delivery letter from the palace
arrived at the house of the four poor women.
It was the king’s formal invitation to the party during which the crown
prince was expected to pick out the woman he wouldn’t mind marrying to keep his
parents off his back.
Zelda, Imelda and Wicked Stepmother made Cinderella’s life
miserable in the days before the party.
The three of them had to take their formal dresses out of moth balls,
and Cinderella had to hang them outside to make them smell better. After she persuaded the thieving neighbors to
return the dresses, Cinderella had to work like a slave doing alterations on
all of them. Cinderella had attended the
Elite Beauty College for a couple of semesters while her father was still
alive, so she also had to give everyone else a makeover on the day of the
party.
She shyly mentioned how nice it would be if she could go to
the party, too. The others looked at her
as if she had two heads, and Wicked Stepmother brought the subject to a
crashing close with, “Don’t be ridiculous!
You’re filthy!” Cinderella knew
better than to argue.
After they had left, Cinderella sat in front of the
fireplace and resigned herself to never going to a royal party and having to scrub
floors and clean the bathroom for the rest of her life. She sang a few verses of “Someday My Prince
Will Come,”[2]
then sighed and lay down on the floor in a fetal position.
Unbeknownst to Cinderella, she was being watched from
above. Three aliens from Planet Fair
were hovering in an invisible ship above the house. Because they were from Planet Fair, they
called themselves Fairies. They weren’t
particularly bright, but they had magical powers.
One of them, who called herself Fairy Godmother, said to the
others, “I want to go down there and help that poor loser. I hate those other three bitches.”
Fairy Godmother transported herself down to Cinderella, who
fainted in shock. Fairy Godmother threw
some water in Cinderella’s face. After
Cinderella stopped screaming, Fairy Godmother introduced herself and offered to
help her get to the party.
“I can make you look like Angelina Jolie, Selena Gomez and
Amber Heard together!”
This got Cinderella’s attention, and she agreed to be the
subject of Fairy Godmother’s extreme makeover.
The whole process took about 10 minutes.
Cinderella ended up looking like a bridesmaid at a 1950s wedding, but
that look was in fashion that season, so it was fine. The outfit was accessorized with a pair of size
10 transparent ballet flats made to look like glass and an evening bag to match.
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| Not bad! |
Cinderella couldn’t walk to the palace in those shoes, so
Fairy Godmother turned a pumpkin into a fancy carriage with two horses and
commandeered two frightened cats to drive it and ride shotgun. She warned Cinderella that her spells never
lasted very long, so if she was wise she would get out of the palace before
midnight, unless she wanted to end up really embarrassed.
Cinderella made it to the palace around 10:00 PM, in time to
get a drink at the bar and look for the prince.
She found him and he asked her to dance.
It turned out that she was the only woman in the room who knew how to do
dirty dancing, and she and the prince had a fine time together. All the other hopefuls thought it was
disgusting, including Zelda and Imelda, who did not recognize the interloper
but didn’t like her, anyway.
In the middle of some complicated erotic dance moves,
Cinderella heard a big clock going bong,
bong, bong. She stopped short with
one foot in the air, said, “Oops!” and charged out of the ballroom, elbowing
people out of the way and knocking down several ornamental plants. She lost one of her shoes at the front door,
but didn’t stop to retrieve it. She was
only halfway to the street when she turned back into her regular self. She had to walk home, because the carriage
and its drivers also changed back, and the two cats sped away like torpedoes.
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| The Prince and His Dance Instructor |
Prince Julio Prince was disturbed, to say the least. He had made up his mind that this woman with
size 10 feet who could dance like a stripper was the one he wanted to marry,
even though he didn’t know her name or anything about her, except that she was
hot. He found her shoe at the front door
and picked it up. He was going to find
the woman of his dreams if he had to try that shoe on the left foot of every
female in the kingdom. In the meantime,
he figured he’d get a decent night’s sleep, to be fresh for the ambulatory
excursions he would have to do the next day.
The prince got an early start at 11:00 AM the following
day. He made his way around every house
in the capital city without finding any foot big enough to fit the shoe. He finally came to the Bitch Burrow. Wicked Stepmother, Zelda and Imelda let him
in with a lot of bowing and scraping and flattery and any other kind of ass
kissing they could think of. By then he
was tired and in no mood for stupidity, so he snapped, “Alright, already! Take your freakin’ left shoes off and let’s
get this over with!”
Zelda and Imelda had small, dainty feet, so it was obvious
neither one of them was the woman of the prince’s daydreams. The fact that they were both ugly as dirt
sealed the verdict.
At that point, Cinderella, whose face was still clean after
her magical makeover of the night before, came out of the kitchen and announced
that she should try on the shoe, too.
Zelda and Imelda tried to push her back into the kitchen, apologizing to
the prince and complaining about how hard it was to find decent help.
The prince looked at Cinderella and felt the same stirring
he had felt the night before. He handed
the shoe to Cinderella, whose big foot fit it perfectly. She then brought out the shoe’s mate and put
IT on, too. Fairy Godmother had decided
to let her have it as a memento.
To make a long story short, Cinderella married the prince,
who retained his right to be heir to the throne. Zelda married a glazier. Imelda married a shoemaker. Wicked Stepmother became Wicked Mother-In-Law
and made life miserable for a whole new set of people
Cinderella and the prince lived happily ever after, or at
least until they both reached middle age and he had a midlife crisis. That’s a whole other story.
For more of my funny writing, go here.
