In our childhood, we become captivated by a magical world that elaborate fairy tales create. As children, we eagerly listened to our mothers or fathers vividly recite to us a delicately woven story of a fairy princess and her prince. Even as adults, we can sometimes lose ourselves in that elegant and fragile world of a fairy tale. As we progress into adulthood, we forget the initial enchantment we experienced as children when we heard our first real fairy tale. However, we don’t have to forget the wonder and magic from our childhood.
Having a mother whose name was Belle, and sharing that name with me, didn’t ever strike me as anything significant. It wasn’t until I was eight and saw Disney’s Beauty and the Beast that I became captivated with the magic of the French farm girl who shared my name and sang about a quiet village. That summer, my grandmother had somehow procured a copy of the VHS. She set me down in front of the television one afternoon, no doubt when I was begging for her to help me draw a mural with sidewalk chalk. As an eight year old growing up in the nineties, I was instantly hypnotized by the opening Disney logo. This was all mystifying to me: the ancient looking styling of the beginning cartoon sequence, the whispery story of the prince and the rose, and the introduction to a strange girl who lived in a world beyond this one. Read the rest of this entry »
