Cinderella Sleeps

Cinderella in the city works behind a bar
Snow White washes dishes there the pay does not go far
Drunken dwarves and plastic princes
give away their false pretenses
Snow White rubs her dishpan hands and Cinderella weeps

Cinderella soaks her aching feet when she gets home
Snow White takes a bubble bath and makes a tower out of foam
Every night it's just the same television rummy game
Snow White runs the phone bill up while Cinderella sleeps

Cinderella sleeps and dreams of strawberries and cold whipped cream
And Destiny steps in from out of the blue
Where do all the dreamy girls go when the story's through
To the world all wide-eyed with the dreams they never outgrew

In the middle of the night a knock comes on the door
Beauty's Beastly boyfriend doesn't want her anymore
Cinderella makes the couch up
Snow White overfills the coffee cups
Beauty snores to beat the band and Snow White lies awake

Snow White's got a boyfriend he's two thousand miles away
She met him in a chatroom they're an Internet cliche
Emailed poems, love long distance
It's a virtual Gothic romance
Cindy smirks behind her hand at Snow White's big mistake

Snow White types a blue streak as she bares her soul to some unseen geek
And Destiny's the bump on her enter key
Where do all the quiet girls go when dreams cut them free
Through the gates to cyberland there are no guarantees

Beauty's in a quandary doesn't know which way to turn
This life is a lesson that she never seems to learn
It's always the same old story
Her role seems obligatory
Waiting for her latest jerk to morph into a prince

Cinderella sleeps in fitful spurts of toss and turn
Snow White loves in cyberspace until her fingers burn
Beauty's a translucent shadow
the lonely couch is long and narrow
Hope flew when she lost her Beast and hasn't been back since
Next week it's another tale of broken dreams and love grown stale
And Destiny's like twilight as she creeps
Where the girls from fairytales go when the plotline leaps
To the world of lives unlived where Cinderella sleeps

Notes: I've always been fascinated by fairy tales, particularly their darker sides. I have been particularly fascinated with the thought of how a fairy tale might enact itself in our contemporary world, or in this case, how fairy tale people would handle life in present-day America (or any industrialized nation, I guess). There actually is characterization here; Snow White is much more active than Cinderella and Beauty, who are nearly completely reactive. Yes, this song is a downer. Stop laughing.

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