A Royal Obsession
by Ashley Mondale, English Teacher
April 11, 2011
I have a new obsession – the Royal Wedding. I just can’t get enough. It takes all of my willpower not to buy the Kate Middleton knock-off engagement ring for just $19.95 or the Kate Middleton bridal doll I see advertised in the ads of the Sunday paper. I spend hours looking at pictures of Kate Middleton on the Internet; I think I have a girl crush on her. I find myself in the middle of the magazine section at the store flipping through different Royal Wedding publications. In fact, this past weekend I bought the US Magazine version, and I’ve already looked at it about a hundred times.
So why the obsession? I think we can blame it on Disney. Like many little girls, I grew up watching the Disney Princess movies, and I pretended that I was a princess. When my mom made me doing some work around the house, I was Cinderella slaving away waiting for an invitation to the ball. When she punished me, I was Snow White dealing with that horrible step-mother. When I went to bed, I pretended I was Sleeping Beauty and wished to be woken with a kiss from Princes Charming instead of my alarm clock.
As I grew up, I realized that becoming a princess was almost impossible for me – almost impossible. Even though I am American, even though I live in a nowhere place, even though there was pretty much no way I would ever be anywhere a prince would be, I still dreamed. Grace Kelly was just an ordinary American girl from Philadelphia who became an actress which led her to meet Prince Rainier of Monaco (a teeny tiny country on the French Rivera). Grace and Rainier fell in love, they married and she became Princess Grace. See, it could happen. And let us not forget movies like The Princess Diaries or The Prince and Me. Once again these were ordinary girls whose fate made them princesses.
In my life there has been one Prince Charming, which leads us back to the Royal Wedding. My ideal Prince Charming is Prince William. You see, until he announced his engagement to Kate Middleton (by the way, she is just an ordinary girl, a commoner in fact), I thought that William and I were fated to be together. Our birthdays are a mere 10 days apart. We are both blonde and blue-eyed. How good would we look together? I have a head made for a tiara. I can even do that silly little royal wave.
Sure there is no way we would ever meet. I’ve never been to England and I can’t imagine why he would come to Pittsburgh, but if you think about The Prince and Me, it’s improbable that the prince of Denmark would choose to go to college in Wisconsin. So maybe there was a slim chance that William would decide he wanted to see what life in America is like which would have led him to enroll at Westminster College. Why wouldn’t a prince want to give up a high-brow, posh English education to study at the tiny little college in the heart of an Amish community in northwestern Pennsylvania? It could happen.
While I have come to grips with the knowledge that William and I are not going to get married, I’m still in love with the whole idea of a Royal Wedding. William and Kate have a great love story. They met in college (see, it does happen for some girls) and became good friends before they fell in love. Sure, some members of the press has given them some heat for not getting engaged and married sooner, and they even nicknamed Kate “Waity Katie,” but I think that in the eight years the couple have been together, they’ve really had the chance to get to know each other. William has said that he didn’t want to rush things and wanted to grow up before getting married. And who can blame him? His parents, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, knew each other for only a short time before marrying, and his mother was just 20 years old. They divorced 15 years later, and William saw how devastating that event was for his mother, so it is safe to say he wants to avoid that pain himself.
There is also the beautiful pomp and circumstance and history behind this wedding. William and Kate will ride in a carriage like all princes and princesses do at the end of a fairy tale. They will be married in the historical Westminster Abbey where other royals have been married. The ceremony will full of formality and tradition.
And then there is the fashion. One of the best kept secrets of the world right now isn’t where Osama Bin Laden is hiding but who designed Kate’s wedding dress. It’s so top secret even WikiLeaks hasn’t been able to spoil the surprise. Top fashion designers around the globe have been asked what they would design for Kate, and yet we still don’t know what she will wear. I can’t wait to see because whatever it is will become copied for the masses and will be a fashion icon.
So you can bet that on Friday, April 29, while you are all resting up for Prom, I’ll be up at 4:30 (yes, 4:30 in the morning – England is five hours ahead of us), glued to the TV to watch the pageantry and history unfold hoping William and Kate live happily ever after.
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