The Sleeping Beauty Experience

I don’t know how many of you know all this….  Several have gotten pieces of the story, but I don’t think I’ve ever laid the whole thing out.  I’m going to get a little rambly, I can tell, but you really have to know the whole story to get the full effect.  (That’s not even true—I’m just feeling rambly and making up excuses for it.  You know it’s bad when you have to go back and put in headings.)

Sleeping Beauty as Fascination

Sleeping Beauty has been a big deal at our house for a long time.  She was Elaina’s favorite, favorite princess for quite a while, and she still holds a place that’s a little apart from the other princesses, who rise and fall in favor like companies on some glittery, pastel stock exchange. 

Elaina will happily explain that Sleeping Beauty is Aurora, the daughter of King Stefan and…”hey, Daddy, why doesn’t the queen have a name?”, and that she was called Briar Rose while she was living with the three fairies. 

Sleeping Beauty and Movie Night

The other thing that’s very big at our house is “Movie Night”.  This is our Saturday night movie, which involves popcorn (more recently Doritos) and “magic potion”.  

Oddly, Elaina’s never once believed it was anything other than Sprite and food coloring, even though I hid it from her at first.  I didn’t try to maintain that particular fiction for very long, because she was singularly unimpressed.  Don’t get me wrong—she loves magic potion. We couldn’t have movie night without it.  She just never bought into the whole “magic” part of it.  Very early on, her question was, “Can I put the coloring in next time?”  So, we do that—first she got to pick the colors (oh yeah—”colors”, plural.  We mix colors—it’s super wild around here on movie nights).  Soon thereafter, she was putting in the colors herself.

So, we have Movie Night with snacks and magic potion, and while we mix it up a bit now, for months and months…and months, it was Sleeping Beauty every time.

Sleeping Beauty as Participatory Theater

Finally, we come to the point:  It’s not that we just watch Sleeping Beauty.  No, no, no.  Sleeping Beauty is not some mere bit of light entertainment to be consumed passively, sitting on the couch.  Sleeping Beauty is a full-participation experience. 

We start at Elaina’s plastic, Playskool picnic table for Doritos and magic potion, but those run out by the end of baby Aurora’s birthday celebration (because, you know, moderation and all that).  We clear the glasses (real glass on movie night), wash the pungent, orange Dorito dust off our hands, and remove the table…because things are about to get crazy (well, 4-year old princess crazy). 

Elaina knows this movie so well that she won’t just watch it.  She acts it out, virtually every scene that involves Aurora.  To the untrained eye, she might look like she can’t sit still.  That’s not what’s going on.  When she runs behind the couch to get her Halloween pumpkin?  That’s not a pumpkin—that’s a basket.  Aurora’s picking berries.  When she’s shuffling around with her back to the grey armchair, reaching her arms back behind her?  That’s a tree.  Aurora’s backing up to that tree’s counterpart on-screen.  When she’s walking in circles (on pillows if I’m not paying attention)?  That’s a spiral staircase, and Aurora’s on her way up to the room with the spinning wheel. 

When she reaches the room at the top of the tower, Elaina touches a screw head on the TV cabinet—pricking her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel!—and falls into a deathlike slumber, a victim Maleficent’s evil curse.

 

Here the Sleeping Beauty lies, not in death, but only sleep, to be awakened by True Love’s Kiss.

She’s in full costume during all this, by the way.  And not just one costume.  She has to change between scenes.  She has a dress she wears when picking berries as Briar Rose, and another dress she wears upon her return to the castle as Aurora.  (A quick aside about Elaina’s Sleeping Beauty garb: She has worn her Aurora dress so much that it’s started to wear out. Heidi’s had to cut away the sheer sleeves, turning it into a sleeveless gown, rather than have her look like a pink Goth girl with ripped fishnet sleeves.  When Elaina was younger, there were several weeks during which she greeted me at the door every night when I came home from work, always wearing her Sleeping Beauty gown and refusing to call me anything but “Prince Philip”.)

Sleeping Beauty’s Ensemble Cast

Elaina’s reenactment of Sleeping Beauty isn’t just a solo effort, though.  Elaina insists that I join her during certain scenes. (I like to say “insists” because that provides more cover for my image, but I don’t actually remember the last time she had to insist—I know my part in this story.)

There’s the scene in the forest, where Elaina-as-Aurora-as-Briar-Rose first meets and dances with Prince Philip. 

Later, the scene where I/Prince Philip climbs the castle stairs to awaken Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, and finally, the scene in which Aurora and Philip descend the staircase, reunite Aurora with her parents, and dance together. 

Heidi is Aurora’s mother, the queen in the final scene.  Aurora/Elaina runs to and embraces her, with the exclamation, “Mother!”, equally breathless and heartfelt on-screen and off.

Sleeping Beauty Rocks Out

After the movie is over—and by the way, don’t think you’re going to stop dancing before Aurora and Philip turn to static figures on a storybook page—there’s a short bonus feature, a pop rendition of “Once Upon a Dream” (the Sleeping Beauty song) by a young Disney channel girl, Emily Osment. 

Elaina loves this song, and long ago, our dance as Aurora and Philip began to carry over into this song at the end.  Since it’s more modern and up-tempo, our um…waltz…is somewhat modified.  There’s a good bit more spinning and flying through the air in the Elaina/Daddy dance than occurs during the more stately Aurora/Philip dance.  During the chorus, I pick her up and whirl her around, which she absolutely loves.

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