When I was in my junior year of high school, I moved from a place where I’d known everyone since an infant to a whole new state, a whole new community. On my 16th birthday, I (like Sam in “Sixteen Candles”) found out the hard way that my parents had forgotten my birthday. Worse than that, that was the day they told me I wouldn’t be finishing high school in my home town, but instead I’d be moving to North Andover, MA, shortly. Needless to say, that wasn’t a great birthday.
After the move, I think I struggled through my depression & anxiety by listening to Disney soundtracks. This was the era of Columbia Music House subscriptions, so you could get a stack of “free” CDs for signing up for a membership. This led to my acquisition of a number of 90’s Disney soundtracks, including “Beauty & the Beast.”
As you might imagine, one of my favorite Disney heroines as a brunette (at the time) bookworm was, of course, Belle. I’d been primed for this already, thanks to the Ron Perlman TV series with Linda Hamilton, which I’d watch ritualistically with my mother. Looking back as a feminist lit scholar, I can see the flaws in stories that tell girls to put up with brooding, moody, even brutish behavior from a male. The message that women would be able to see beyond tantrums & low physical appeal to see the heart of gold lying beneath is still hardly palatable.
Are there fairy tales that send a similar message to straight men about women? If there are, I didn’t hear them as a child or tween.
Please don’t get me wrong. I still love the story. I really do. Despite its problematic message about gender roles & desirability. Which leads me to visiting the Beast’s Castle for dinner at the Be My Guest restaurant at Magic Kingdom with my family.
How strange to revisit a story, film, music that affected me so much as a teenager now as a middle-aged adult. And to be there with my son, how life had changed. Strange how those late afternoons of lying on my bed in that condo bedroom as a teenager, shades closed, listening to the soundtrack would result in a fine dining experience at Beast’s Castle at a park I’d been promised I’d visit as a child but never taken. I didn’t feel sad, just numb.
Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a melancholic story. It’s a happy thing to take something once sad & transform it into something newer, better. Like the Beast’s own transubstantiation, so too did those painful remembrances shift into so something so much more beautiful. I’m grateful that a simple dinner & visit with family could feel so healing to me.
That’s not to tie everything up with some nice neat bow here. Rather, I’m reflecting on how certain struggles can prepare us for greater gratitude, greater joy when we do feel amazed by experiences we didn’t think we’d ever have, far off like twinkling stars… Visible to the eye but always out of reach.
