Cinderella Book

Cinderella, Hallmark Movies and Finding a Good Man

I walked into the living room the other day, and my husband was watching the end of a Hallmark movie. "What are you watching?" "I am watching a movie about a woman who is in love with a prince." Ever since American politics has grown ugly, we sometimes sit and watch Hallmark movies, but this? At least it was the end of the movie, and the next one I watched with him.

I thought then of the book Cinderella. Every child in America must have been given this book, just like they get Barbie Dolls now. I didn't have Barbie Dolls, I had baby dolls and paper dolls of movie stars.

Maybe Mom's do give kids this book to make children aim high. And so I read this book as a child, and yet I never aimed high enough to want to marry a prince. I knew they were scalawags. It didn't help kids that Shirley Temple grew up and married what's his face from wherever. That was so romantic when we reached our teens.. And it didn't help that Americans were and still are enthralled with kings and queens from England. And then there were those mothers who wanted us to marry doctors or lawyers.

Me, I just wanted a handsome man. I grew up on Westerns; I knew what a man was supposed to be like. I also knew that they should be tall, dark, and handsome. I wanted a cowboy, but I didn't know that then, so I married my high school sweetheart who was an American Indian. How ironic. But being Native American myself, but more white than he, my mother thought that he was too dark for me. Well, he was a lot of things, but not too dark.
Ten years later we were divorced, and I was living in Berkeley looking for a doctor or a lawyer. I met a few of each, and I was so bored with these guys, not that all doctors and lawyers are boring. Then I tried dating a teacher, and he was neurotic like Woody Allen. I couldn't take that kind of craziness, so I tried a dating a psychologist and almost married a psychiatric social worker. Nothing was working out for me.

Then one day I walked into Café Med down on Telegraph Avenue, and I ran into an acquaintance, an aspiring writer named John Ratcliff. I sat down at his table and during our conversation I said, "I want a macho man."
He was shocked and replied, "What do you women want? I thought that you wanted us to change. What was all that in the 60s and 70s, a temper tantum?" He began to take notes when I said, "I want a man who can ride a Brahma bull." He gave me his notes:

Perfect Stallion Obeys the Rider yet Remains so Handsomely Male
1. man, macho, stronger
2. a tough, muscular, rides Brahma bulls
3. "Yes, yes ma'am" to her and doesn't sult when he loses
4. a cake winnder who doesn't talk too much and agree with the boss.
What a Woman Must be to Cause a Man to be Macho
1. shy, blushing
2. never say "no'
4. serve
5. rule by asking him if suh and such isn't just what he was thinking of
6. think everything he does is great

Sometime after this I went out and bought myself a pair of cowboy boots, I knew then that I wasn't long for Berkeley. So I moved back to my home town of Paso Robles, CA, a cow town, and it was there that I met my macho man, a liberated one, and so we got hitched. He was a plumber, carpenter, electrician, Jack-of-all-trades, but mainly as a construction worker he built homes and plumbed them. While he wasn't a real cowboy, he wore the hats and boots. Furthermore he never bossed me around. We worked on our house together. The most fun of living in the country outside of remodeling was gathering up wood, cutting it and stacking it. I have no idea why I enjoyed this.The least fun was when I drove my Berkeley purchased VW bug into a corral and had to keep the horses in until help came, and then we rebuilt the corral for our neighbor. Never pick anything up off the floorboard and hope to stay on the road.

The moral of this story is this: What you like as a child you may possibly like as an adult. I loved westerns and have always hated doctor and lawyer TV programs. What was that old saying, "You can take the girl out of the country, but you can never take the country out of the girl. Then there is that saying, "Mamas don't let your girls to grow up to be cowgirls."

As for me, I met the man that I wanted, and we have been married for 30 years.