Next weekend in a kingdom across the sea, there will be a coronation. I’ll watch it. It comes on here in the middle of the night when I am usually in bed wide awake anyway.
No one much thinks monarchies are any use nowadays. Probably never were.
Still, Disney has created generations of little girls who fantasize about becoming princesses, either by being rescued by Prince Charming or by finding out that they were stolen at birth and have been living with the wrong, commoner parents all these years.
The only Disney princesses we had when I was a little girl were Snow White and Cinderella and I certainly did not want to be either one. Ghastly mother figures.
I did, however love to create royal trappings.
When I was ten-years-old, my grandfather died at a very young age. (The rest of my forebears lived for many decades.) Papa Harrison died the month Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. There was no TV in our town then, but we did have lots of magazines with lots of pictures. Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post, so I knew all about the royal trappings: The orb, the mace, the scepter, the crown.
Mama Harrison had received many potted plants in sympathy. The pots were all covered in colorful foil. We called it tin foil. Foil, whether it was tin or aluminum, was very special in those days. It was not that mylar stuff you get today. It was real thin sheets of malleable metal. You could smooth it out and shape it into anything. And I did. I was an odd child.
Charles’s and Camilla’s crowns won’t be made of crumpled foil but of metals and jewels so priceless they will only be brought out of the Tower of London for the occasion.
I can’t bring myself to say “King Charles,” or “Queen Camilla,” not that I’d ever need to. King Charles sounds like a spaniel to me. And Camilla will always sound like the woman who made that real princess’s life a nightmare. Or maybe that was Charles.
Amazing how Lady Diana, the Princess of Wales, survived for as long as she did. There must have been at least a couple of times when she “closed her eyes and thought of England.”
Her younger son, the heir-presumptive, determined not to neglect the mental health of his lady, ran away with her and their children to one of the colonies. I guess you can say they are shirking their duties. I mean, where are they getting the money to live in Montecito? That’s certainly where I would want to live if I lived in California. Would I marry a prince in order to do that?