There are pix of me in my Raggedy Ann-themed bedroom and at my Raggedy Ann-themed birthday party -- but I don't remember any of it. My mother kind of imposed the whole thing, I guess.
Does "mini golf" count as a theme?
Why do you hate our freedoms, Stanley? And what makes alleged parents unable to say "no" to their rug-rats?
My little sister requested a pirate themed party for her 8th birthday. All attendees were equipped with eye patches, plastic cutlasses, and treasure maps and sent out on the town square to find the treasures (a pinata, boxes of party favors, and the birthday presents). Then they reconvened in the back room of our local children's book store for grog, cake, and pirate stories.
Why do you hate our freedoms, Stanley?
I sneer at titles of nobility, including princess.
This fantastic Something Awful thread (and accompanying MeFi post) by a comic book artist whose day job is "party princess" was really great.
If Matt Weiner were still around he would surely have corrected Stanley for 6.
Something Awful apparently requires registration.
Scenes from last night's dinner: kid has finished eating, head rested on fist, deep in intense thought. Me: "what are you thinking about?" Her: "Lion King 1 1/2". Me:"does that even exist?" Her: "YES. Now be quiet, I need to remember a scene."
This morning: "What are you thinking about?" Her: "Pocohontas II."
Is this going to cause you to have a change of heart like if a tobacco attorney has a kid who starts smoking?
I just want her to be thinking about the REVENUE from Pocohontas II, creative is for suckers.
My kids watching Mulan - Kid A said, hey, this is the same actress as in Pocohontas!
Can't be doing with over the top parties.
Didn't we discuss the Something Awful/MeFi thing here? Or was that at the other place?
In any case, it is still the case that I have friends who have been doing costumed character work, including princessing, for years and years now. They are pretty blase about it. The boss in the SA thread sounded like a real jackal -- a level of labor discipline that would have made a 19th-century mill owner blanch.
If I remember correctly, many birthdays between say 5 and 9 were "themed" to the extent of having matching plates, cups and napkins emblazoned with some kind of pop culture character(s). I did not mix enough with the quality that I ever saw someone hired to entertain children at a party (of course in those days most of your choices were really squicky clowns).
The quote in the post title really is retchingly terrific.
Hawaii once received one of those musical birthday cards that featured all the princesses, and sang something like:
"Every girl can be a princess.
Close your eyes and dreams really do come true...."
She'd just hypnotically open that card again and again and again. I thought it was funny to sing it to Jammies in the bedroom but it was also sort of a boner-killer.
Oh, and I just remembered that I sang "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" in a school play. 5th grade?
18.last: Of course it is. Doing things like that? That shit's just wrong.
Come on, TJ, who doesn't want to close his eyes and imagine he's boning a princess?
I call Jammies "my sparkling wand".
The quote in the post title really is retchingly terrific.
Err. That was supposed to be: Would you prefer "sex is a promise your body makes"?
My favorite themed party was for my thirteenth birthday. A bunch of my girlfriends came over to watch the annual Miami/FSU game (back when that rivalry still meant something). All of my friends cheered for the 'noles, I cheered for the 'canes, and my team won. (I think that was the 'wide right II' game, though it also might have been 'wide left,' now that I think it about it). Everyone gave me UM shirts as gifts, and I wore them until they started disintegrating sometime in college.
We would have been nice to any princesses who had shown up, though--unless they were Gators fans.
Miami and FSU are both evil, for the record.
Hawaii once received one of those musical birthday cards that featured all the princesses
All of them?
re: 28
There's a canonical Disney set. A friend's daughter is nearly 5 and semi-obsessed. She has a princess box her Daddy made to keep all the princess tat in.
them: 'I don't know where she gets it from.'
me: 'From all the Disney princess tat you buy her.'
They claim they buy her the stuff to feed her antecedent obsession, but I'm pretty sure that's not the causally correct story.
Said child is lovely, and I'm sure it's just a phase, mind.
I think I'm going to have to go with "noise is a thing the street makes," but that's just because I'm getting sick of the goddamn bikers. Sorry, motorcycle enthusiasts.
To turn this slightly positive, one of my favorite memories was somewhat randomly ending up at Cafe Flore on Market/Castro after some event (Pride?) I missed because I was too busy being carnally involved with a new girlfriend. One of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence came in and asked to share our table. Among other things, she sang "San Francisco, Open your Golden Gates" for us after remarking on my bed-head, and gave [ex] her card - Sister Homocycle Motorsexual.
I know, but I tend to think about that when motorcycles come up.
"noise is a thing the street makes,"
"More noise please" (text).
Quite good.
I didn't particularly dislike or like Brave but I'm glad my oldest niece seems to like it more than any of the other princess stuff she's seen.
Each girl has a Princess Tiana (Princess and the Frog) doll, Nia's a baby from her former foster family and Mara's a toddler that my mom found at the thrift store. Other than that, no princess movies or toys, though they've been given a few story books. I have let them watch the Princess and the Frog and Brave, which I guess is supposed to count as a princess movie. But that's it and they're not going to get more.
We gave Mara's older sister a toddler Tiana doll when she turned six and it was apparently the first black doll anyone in the household had had, meaning for at least 15 years. All the Family Dollar-type stores here seem to only stock white dolls. So I have no shame about perpetuating that princess thing. (Oh, and I'm reminded that Nia's bathtub Barbie is a Tiana too, but I don't think she recognizes that and I'm pretty sure she's never seen the movie since it stopped streaming on Netflix before she moved in.)
Lego for girls ad, 1981.
And now there is Lego specifically for girls, which is all pink and purple hearts and butterflies, and French poodles, and ponies.
I mean, when even Lego has been Barbie-fied, I think this princess theming has gone too far.
29 -- you'd be surprised. There's enough stuff at school, friends, etc, especially if you don't have an ultra-draconian total prohibition on movie watching, so that it's totally plausible that the parents had to decide between not expressly not buying the kid the toys she's asked for and wants or ending up with princess stuff. I've gotten a little lucky in that my kid, while obsessed with movies/tv, doesn't seem to care particularly about princesses, though she likes Merida from Brave.
What pisses me off about Legos isn't so much Legos for girls but that the vast majority of Legos are now so intensely branded as boy toys. We've had fun with a few Lego sets but its pretty clear that Legos are a boy thing and that's because it's all about Star Wars characters and space death monsters blowing things up.
38: not true! There are Lego farm sets. There are Lego vet clinics. There are all the Lego city sets. There's the Lego egyptology stuff. And so on. I will not have you blaspheming in the Church of Lego.
The Church of Lego is more fun when you add gun turrets to the minarets.
37: I don't know from princesses, but my son knew what McDonald's was before we'd ever mentioned it or let him watch commercial TV.
Although I was born and raised in 'Merica, my parents did their best to make sure their kids were freakishly out of touch with American pop culture. Not on purpose, like the "we don't own a TV" people, but more like all their attempts to make us fit in were all kind of off a little, in ways that are pretty meaningless now but a Big Deal for conformist 8 year olds. But anyways, the the Coolest Thing you could do in elementary school was go to Disney Land. We begged and begged my parents, and finally they relented and took us to...Lego Land. While I know Lego Land is in every way way cooler than Disney Land, I indeed loved it at the time, and I greatly appreciate my parents' decision in retrospect, it in no way took the place of Disney Land for a 7 year old who wanted to fit in with her peers.
One of the things Zulily has for sale today is a pink t-shirt, available in toddler sizes, that says "Keep calm and be a princess."
|| So my phone started making a very loud alarming noise -- not a tone I've ever heard -- and I go look, and it's telling me about an Amber Alert. A one year old 120 miles from here has apparently been taken from home by his non-custodial father. If this becomes a thing, a lot of phone will be ringing in the larger metro areas . . . |>
||
Why Pride has no legitimacy in the radical scene:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/27/san-francisco-gay-pride-bradley-manning
||>
My heart apparently wishes for sour cherries.
here's a thing that pisses me off, something which is likely not true, but now we must assume is true to engage with my otherwise banal thoughts.
44: There's usually a setting you can change for the severity of the alerts a phone gives you. Mine is set for the maximum and mandatory "WW3 has started, kiss your ass good-bye" alert status.
Oh, text. Your thoughts would be banal either way.
here is a thing that pisses me off, my thoughts would be banal either way.
And my daughter has no interest in Legos, which pisses me off because otherwise I would have to accept that I brought about that situation and enjoy it.
I fondly remember when bitchphd referred to Basil Liddell-Hart's theory of the expanding torrent with regard to Disney princesses on her blog. Unfortunately I can't link to it.
It may have been the pinnacle of blogging.
Those girl gendered lego sets are super popular. It seems to be a byproduct of legos being sold as the components of a single design, rather than as general building sets, that they be gendered for boys or girls. They probably sell more legos that way.
"Now be quiet, I need to remember a scene" is lovely.
54: I'm pretty sure that, while it's perfectly profitable, what we're really seeing is a feedback loop: Legos started doing theme sets 40+ years ago, but those theme sets were pretty lame, because they were basically made from the universal pieces - to the extent that castles were made with yellow bricks (I guess because yellow was closer to stone-colored than red, blue, white, or green). Soon, a handful of specialized pieces came in, most being multipurpose - one piece can be an antenna, or a laser gun, or a sword. Soon theme sets became more realistic - castles were now gray - and sold better, and Lego launched down this path of selling more theme sets than universal sets, and once you're on that path, licensed sets and sets that tie into generalized gender norms (like that Bionicle crap that is clearly targeting a demographic of a certain kind of boy, even though it's not "gendered" the way that pink sets or Manly Adventure sets are) are almost inevitable. I think the only way Lego would have taken a different path would be if it were run by people with an ideological commitment to forego profits for the sake of not feeding the Beast.
More broadly, modern fabrication tech allows ever greater specialization - even wooden block sets are more specialized than ever before - but our culture is at a place where we lack the imagination to specialize in a non-gendered way. As VW notes, Lego has some awesome themes (or universes or whatever you want to call them) that are totally gender-neutral, but most of them slip pretty quickly into problematic gender norms because society.
Didn't we discuss the Something Awful/MeFi thing here?
I think I might've nicked it from here to post at MeFi, to be honest.