A fractured fairy tale

When I was a little girl, there used to be a cartoon called “Fractured Fairy Tales.” It was a series of animated stories that took classic Grimm or Anderson folklore, and made them into little comedies. Those of my 1960s1970s vintage will remember them, and hopefully smile at the memory. I miss them, in this age of digitized, homogenized, politically sanitized pap.

So I decided to write my own Fractured Fairy Tale, taking as my heroine a woman who has become well-known to conservatives and beloved of liberals, a pretty, effervescent little thing who went from dancing and bartending to tweeting and greeting (her constituents.)

I am of course referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the newest representatives in Washington. Much has been written about AOC, as she likes to call herself, and some of it is even true.

But no one has had the inclination to make her the protagonist of her own twisted fable, until now. I present: The Story of Princess Greenderella:

Once Upon a Time, there was a little girl named Alexandria.

She lived in a nice split level house in an affluent part of New York, but promised herself that when she grew up, she would forget all about the indoor plumbing and the manicured front lawn and only remember that she had grown up poor, like the people she pretended to be in her attempt to present a stereotypical view of the life of a Latina.

She was a serious child, a precocious one who played with an old copy of Mein Kampf until a friend who read German explained that this wasn’t the guy who established the idea of socialism, and so she then went out looking for the book by Groucho Marx and, well, it was a long summer.

Alexandria had big, inquisitive eyes and teeth that would have put the fear of God in the guy who arranged Stonehenge.

She was always told that she was smart, by that lady in the mirror, and so she kind of believed it.

But one day she said, you know, it’s not enough for me to be smart. Lots of women are smart. In fact, most women are very, very smart. I don’t want to be smart. I want to be famous.

And the idea took hold in her mind, the one filled with other ideas like the fact that you change your brake fluid and that unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs and that we need to factor in the funeral costs of all the dead people in order to figure out the real cost of health care, and other stuff.

The idea was this: maybe, instead of being the smartest lady in public office, I could become the dumbest.

She remembered how much attention Sarah Palin had gotten, someone who had actually run a state and a city before the media tried to destroy her and said, “damn, I could be much stupider than her!”

So she ran for office in New York, aided by a lot of rich people who needed a face to front for their socialist ideals (because they knew which Marx had actually written the book,) and poured a lot of money into Little Alexandria’s campaign.

But still, people told her she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be that woman in Congress.

It was a really, really high bar, what with the women like Kirsten Gillibrand who couldn’t remember if she liked immigrants or hated them, or Maisie Hirono who forgot that lynching men (even white prep school boys) had been outlawed, or Dianne Feinstein. Yes, a high bar indeed. But Little Alexandria had a dream, and she fought hard for it, and danced, and danced and like the little Train that Could kept tweeting out things that got crazier and crazier and crazier on the campaign trail, until finally, the train ran out of all that crazy gas.

So since she was actually smart, and not stupid, Little Alexandria found a cow, and voila, there was enough gas to get her to that finish line in one piece.

And we all know the end of the story. It’s kind of what happens to the princess on her wedding night ... only let’s just say the American people married the prince.