What You Said, What I Heard, Vol.1

Bye bye money, you
will be missed

We took my daughter to Disney Princesses on Ice. This was reward for finally peeing on the potty. Yea! Potty training sucks. If you haven’t lived through it just wait, it is quite the experience. Anyways, we dropped eighty bucks on four frickin tickets. We get to the show, sit down, and there are carnie-folk selling stuff everywhere: princess hats, princess tiaras, princess cups of princess punch, princes swords (yes swords, they had to have something for the unlucky boys in the crowd), princess cotton candy, and so on…..there was princess crap everywhere. It wasn’t bad enough that there were these people selling this junk, but they were yelling all sorts of stuff. We heard a constant barrage of “Get your princess magic wands” and “Get your spinning princess light up thingies.” All I heard was “We are selling really cheap shit that will break as soon as you get it home, and your kids will scream like freaking maniacs because their junk no longer lights up because it is just junk.” Now of course there were all the parents who bought into the hype and bought their kids everything under the sun. We got an earful from our kids: “I want that! Can I have that? I’ve always wanted one of those, what is it?” The nagging went on for a while. The only thing I heard was “Dad, buy us this stuff so we can see how fast we can break it.” The show finally started, and we were OK until intermission. Intermission hit, and the army of “souvenir peddlers” made their advancement. We somehow made it through intermission and the remainder of the show unscathed. We got out to the parking lot and saw a kid screaming over a toy that broke when she dropped it on the asphalt. I looked over to see an angry parent looking to the sky waving to the twenty dollar bill that was flapping its princess fairy wings as it flew away to the land of “I should have never bought this crap.”  I walked away thinking “at least it wasn’t mine,” and realized we survived our first Princess on Ice show.