Growing up I didn’t care much for fairy tales.   I didn’t see how those stories were really relevant to my day-to-day life in the South Bronx. Sure, I wanted to get out of the burned down neighborhood but I didn’t see that living in a remote castle in some far away land was the answer.  Nor were glass slippers or pumpkin carriages. Where would I take such a carriage to anyway?  I rather liked New York City. For me, the fairy tales would be cooler if they ended up with the girl living in a Manhattan Penthouse with a 1,000 square feet of shoes.

As I grew older, I came to like the John Hughes’ movies such as Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink.  Of course, those movies themselves were modern day fairy tales wrapped up in teen angst. If only the cute, good yet somewhat unaware cute guy could only see the beauty of the drummer girl!

One of Hughes’ last films was Maid in Manhattan, which finally featured my beloved New York City as a fairy tale locale. The movie was fairly bad and just made me think how crappy it is to think that fairy tales can be a career path.  Why do we collectively peddle such dribble to our young children. Now before I go down the path of badmouthing all fairy tales, I admit, I do occasionally like one or two.  For me, it is all about the Dirty Dancing movie.   That was the ultimate fairy tale. But does that movie really count as a fairy tale?   It has the quintessential fairy tale parts. For instance, boy meets girl, boy and girl face challenges and boy and girl are happy at the end. Well, sort of. I always imagined that after that last dance, they hung out for another week and then just lost touch with each other. They probably grew to love Journey’s Separate Ways song thinking that they at least would always have the Catskills. I suppose the fairy tale was just having the ability to overcome those challenges and have that great last dance.

This past year, some people have been hoping that all this craziness would just go away and there would be a happy ending. Nope, its just been non-stop wackiness and angst for people. Perhaps there will be a happy ending. However, we’ve been so steeped in a series of horror stories, I am not too sure we will recognize a fairy tale come true should it actually happen.  Why have we been subjected to non-stop horror this year?

Ironically, the United Nations designated 2016 as the year of the pulses where we celebrate the role of beans, chickpeas, lentils and other pulses in feeding the world.  I know the whole pulse thing is about health, nutrition, and sustainability. However, these other pulses they allude to seem to be about evil forces in the world. There have been some dark, dark times this past year.   Am I making things up or exaggerating? How do you explain the evil clowns taking over the world?   I bet many individuals out there have felt that they have been caught in the middle of a Saw movie where what appears to be a dead body in the middle of the room turns out to be the evil mastermind of all the horrors.  Oh, by the way, spoiler alert.

I’m tired of the grotesque. I think I am ready for the little drummer girl who gets the earrings in the end. Oops, spoiler alert again.