Briefly, on Cinderella.

Because writing doesn’t exactly pay the bills, I work in a toy store.

Yesterday:

“My daughter wants to have a Cinderella themed birthday party, what do you suggest?”

Assuming that a pile of lentils and a severed toe aren’t what she’s after, I suggest the toy brooms we sell.

It would be funny, I say. You know, Cinderella. She cleans, and is rewarded with cake.

The woman stares blankly.

“I thought maybe you’d have headbands?”

Headbands? I think. Then I get it. THAT Cinderella. You know, the one who wears a headband. No other one exists.

I liked my idea better, but hey, it’s not my world.

I posted this anecdote on Facebook last night, and two of my cleverest friends immediately suggested I read Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which is probably the best book recommendation/toy-store princess overdose antidote I can think of. Readers, I’ll get right on it. I will report back.

But what I already know of Orenstein’s book (and its concerns with ultra-feminine princess marketing towards young girls in what we might hope is a more progressive era) can be confirmed with a simple Google image search.

Go ahead, image search “Cinderella.” I’ll wait.

You may notice, there are no severed toes.

Nearly every single image on the first, oh, twenty pages of Google-sourced pictoral overload are of one version of Cinderella (guess which), and they all, interestingly enough, depict the proverbial After. The blue dress, the updo, the headband, the prince. Occasionally, as you skim, you’ll see Cindy in the pink rags of her mouse-crafted dress, the first one that the stepsisters tore to shreds before leaving in their carriage for the ball. But even these images show the Fairy Grandmother already present, ready to make everything shiny and well. There is no suffering in the most popular images of Cinderella–only the pretty pretty princess. One might wonder whether all those little girls out there having Cinderella themed parties, complete with headbands, would even recognize Cindy before her prime. Because the pre-marriage suffering in fairy tales is not what interests consumers at all–results are key, and the results must be pretty. What’s that quote from The Prestige? “No one cares about the man in the box,” they care about the one who comes out on the other side? Well, in Cinderella’s case, no one cares about the girl with the broom. They care about the girl in the blue dress who comes out on the other side.

I found only one image in ten pages of Google images that shows the Before–Cinderella at work, pre-makeover. And what I immediately noticed was that this was the only image not from the same version as all the others. It was this:

“Cinderella” by John Everett Millais

Nice broom.

Many-Fur, Lost Among the Sculptures

Ah, readers. I missed you too. I know, I know, it’s been a while. But MAN WHAT A COUPLE OF WEEKS.

Don’t worry, all these seats filled up later…

Many of you know already that I live in strange little city at the end of the Metro North Hudson line called Poughkeepsie. Vassar’s at one end, Marist’s at the other, and in between is a very run-down no man’s land, a Main Street that is home to many closed and empty storefronts, grass-covered lots, and, in hiding, a ton of artists.

I’ve been lucky to get to know many of the artists of Poughkeepsie via a weekly meeting where we network and discuss projects that could help revitalize the area of Poughkeepsie known as Middle Main, which happens to be where I live.

Three weeks ago (yes only three), we learned that the sculptures in the Poughkeepsie Sculpture Park were slated to be dismantled. Now, this in and of itself is sad, but not the biggest tragedy. The sculptures there have been allowed to be taken over by nature, and some of them are literally falling apart. Beyond the normal oxidization process or aging, these sculptures were practically abandoned by the city. So their leaving isn’t so much a tragedy as an opportunity to call attention to a green space in need of community involvement.

At that meeting, someone brought up the idea of a performance, and my friend Linda, who happens to be the President Benevolent Queen of the Dutchess County Arts Council, looked right at me and said “Cate, you can put that together, right?”

This is what I get for going to community arts meetings and speaking up about “theater that disturbs the everyday” and “putting the arts right in front of the people who need to see it” or whatever it was that I’d said…

SO in a slam-bang-boom TWO AND A HALF WEEKS, we had authors of fiction and poetry ready to take over the park, actors en route from NYC and from Poughkeepsie’s finest companies, the help of curators and activists Sovereign Nation, 32 chairs, tons of PR and a permit thanks to the Arts Council, and a dandy top hat.

And guess what, readers?

IT WAS AWESOME.

Here’s a video from our rehearsal that we used as a teaser, shot and edited by Tom and Tammie at Sovereign Nation:

Authors reading at the event included Nora Olsen, Karen Michel, Peter Van Aken, Tom Winchester, Tom Wanning, and myself. And I’m so grateful to the actors who read my two short plays, Michele McNally, JD Whitt, Mark Stochmal, and the Judi Dench of the Hudson Valley, Linda Roper.

My two plays that were performed as staged readings were “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur” and “Baba Yaga and the Five Stages of Hypothetical Grief,” both based on fairy tales and fairy tale characters. Because description does no good, I’ll just leave you with some pictures, and some brief excerpts from the text too. Text is mine, so please don’t post anywhere else! Enjoy!

Cate Fricke, Mark Stochmal, JD Whitt and Linda Roper in “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur”

GIRL. Do you think if the cat died while he was sleeping, he is still dreaming?

NANA. Most assuredly. Let us imagine what the cat is dreaming at this moment.

(They are silent, facing downstage: both are imagining. Upstage behind them, a deep rust color bleeds onto the scrim. A MAN IN AN OVERCOAT comes on stage with a bucket of fish. He sets the bucket down center stage, then picks up a length of rope that is already tied at one end of the stage. He ties the other end at the opposite side, creating a wash line. He fiddles in his pockets for clothespins and hangs the fish, one by one, up to dry like laundry. Somewhere we cannot see, a violin is playing scales, then a light and lively jig as the man hangs all the fish, picks up his bucket, and leaves. The lights upstage go down.)

GIRL. (Nodding precociously:) That’s what I thought he was dreaming all along.

Michele McNally in “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur”

MANY-FUR. What are you eating?

NANA. (Holding out a piece of lebkuchen:) Want some?

(MANY-FUR comes downstage and takes the cookie from NANA. She is wary of this encounter—she’s only just been conjured up. What now? But the taste of the cookie is familiar, even to her, a figment of someone’s imagination.)

MANY-FUR. I know this. My grandpa’s been trying to make this for years, but he always gets it wrong.

NANA. Does he? I must have hidden the recipe somewhere. We were trying to recall the end of the story.

Cate Fricke, Michele McNally, and Mark Stochmal in “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur”

(The tune ends, and the MAN nods to MANY-FUR, who is really GIRL AT 19, and then GIRL, 6. He then picks up MANY-FUR’S cloak of many furs and slings it over his shoulder as he exits. MANY-FUR remains silhouetted against the moon, watching him go.)

GIRL. I don’t get it. Is she still lost in the woods?

NANA. That’s hardly the right question. (Pause.) Yes.

GIRL. And now she’s cold.

NANA. Perhaps. But she doesn’t itch.

JD Whitt and Linda Roper in “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur”

Stay tuned for pics from “Baba Yaga and the Five Stages of Hypothetical Grief,” to be posted soon!

Cool Stuff is Happening in Poughkeepsie

Vestibule/Bertha’s Funeral–Artists & community come together to say goodbye to the Poughkeepsie Sculpture Park: a collaboration between Cate Fricke, Sovereign Nation and the Dutchess County Arts Council.

On Sunday, May 20th, two sister events will be taking place on Poughkeepsie’s Main Street!

One, Vestibule: a pop-up gallery exhibition in the hallways of 303 Main St., featuring work by both local and international artists. The work will be on display from 5-8pm.

Two, Bertha’s Funeral: Authors and actors present work by Hudson Valley writers in a site-specific reading–fiction by Tom Westchester and Nora Olsen, Poetry by Karen Michel, Peter Van Aken, and the late Jeanne Fitzgerald, and two short plays by Cate Fricke. Actors include Michele McNally, Mark Stochmal, JD Whitt, and Linda Roper. Performance begins at 6pm in the Poughkeepsie Sculpture Park.

 

That’s the info, but on a more personal note…

If any of you readers are in the Hudson Valley area, please consider coming to support the artists of Poughkeepsie–there are many of us, and we have plans to help our city become a more art-friendly community.

Or, if you don’t give a hoot about the arts but you like me, you’ll come and hear my two plays, “A Girl and Her Nana Remember the Story of Many-Fur” and “Baba Yaga and the Five Stages of Hypothetical Grief,” read by some of the finest actors I know.

I’m so thrilled to be putting this event together with Sovereign Nation, a team of artists and curators who really know how to make an impact in their community. We’re doing it to pay homage to the sculptures of the Poughkeepsie Sculpture Park (one of which is, in fact, named Bertha), which are slated to be taken down at the end of the month. They have been neglected by the city government, and have fallen into disrepair. Our hope is that the city decides to keep the parcel a green space for the community, even after the sculptures have been taken away.

So come, enjoy some powerful art and some beautiful words, and take advantage of seeing a truly unique urban space before it’s lost. Plus, I hear the Arts Council scored some cheese plates.

My Letter to Maurice

In November 2010, we were hearing, almost every day, that “Things Get Better.” Dan Savage’s campaign to empower and comfort homosexual teens had taken off, and around the world, people were taking to the web to reach out and tell children, essentially, that their fears and their anxieties were founded, but that who they were–and are–is worth fighting through those fears for.

I don’t remember why, specifically, Sendak was on my mind then. But Sendak has often been on my mind. Somehow the whole “It Gets Better” phenomenon made me think of him, and his partner, Eugene, who had recently passed away. Sendak’s parents, of course, had also passed away some time earlier, and Sendak had, in the years since, let it be known that he was gay, and always had been. He and Eugene, whom his parents had never known to be Sendak’s partner, had been together for decades. Sendak had never come out to them.

So, in November 2010, I wrote him a letter.

I sent it.

I never heard back from him, but I hope he read it. This is what I hope he read:

 

Dear Mr. Sendak,

I’m sure you receive many “personal” letters to this address that turn out to be anything but—people who have just discovered Where the Wild Things Are for the first time, people who have studied your work for years, people who want to know why, oh, why, did Nickelodeon ever get its hands on Little Bear?

Although it’s likely that my interest in you and my praise for you falls into a similar category, I hope that you read this. I hope that you read it, and aren’t too terrifically annoyed. I read about the death of your partner two years ago in the New York Times with deep sadness. Some might say that it’s surprising for someone who has brought such joy to children to experience such loss, and to have lived so long without the release of coming out to one’s parents. How ironic, some people might say. But I don’t see the same irony that those people might—your work, to me, has always contained that sadness, and an acknowledgment that loss is a part of who we are, and of our lot. Your work has always spoken to me of the extreme loneliness of being a child in an unsure world; and that’s what we still are, in the end, always children in an unsure world.

This sounds silly, I know—but for the past several years, since I began to look at your work as an adult, and not as a child, I have wanted to give you a hug. I don’t want to shake your hand, or to purchase a signed copy of Dear Mili. Because that idea only makes me feel momentarily thrilled, and doesn’t do a thing for anyone else. What I have wanted, when I’ve looked at your characters who struggle with who they are in a frightening world, is to comfort you in some way. Bake you cookies. Tell you that you’re a hell of a guy. Send you a hokey singing Christmas card.

I suppose all I can do is to tell you what many people probably already have—that you’ve inspired a generation of not only young readers, but beautiful human beings. Although media hype has its ways of skewing a situation, I hope that the current focus on empowering young people who feel that they are “different” gives you hope as well. I can’t imagine having to deny, for so many decades, a part of your life as important as who you love. You surely had your reasons for keeping your parents unaware of your sexuality, and far be it from anyone to judge those reasons, or you. But I hope that you can see your influence in the generation of young people who are choosing not to hide who they are. Despite your insistence that you “hate people,” you show in your books a profound connection to them, by telling them that it’s understandable to be lonely and afraid, and also by allowing your characters to confront that loneliness and fear as themselves, and no one else. Were it not for Max, or Ida, or Mickey, or Jack and Guy, or Jenny—characters who overcome their fear or their apathy or their surroundings in order to become their best selves—I don’t think that we would be seeing a generation of people so insistent that others love them for who they are. I can only wish that that gives you hope, and fulfillment. You are one of their heroes, and you are certainly mine.

On a lighter note, I share your love for Mozart, and an enthralled by the idea of the wigged little man waiting for you in the afterlife.

That’s pretty much all I had to say. I will simply close by saying Happy Holidays, and thanks.

 

I remain

Respectfully yours,

Cate Fricke

 

 

 

 

Maurice Sendak Has Died

Maurice Sendak died this morning of complications from a recent stroke.

In 1981, he’d written in his journal that “death has the face of Mozart, and is my waiting friend.”

You can read the entire obit at the New York Times here.

Baba Yaga, My Love

If you just heard a loud, resounding “sweet!” echoing across the mountains and valleys of upstate New York and wondered what just happened—it was me. Sorry if I scared your dog.

But that’s how excited I am to learn that Catherynne M. Valente has sold a companion book to 2011′s Deathless, a dark, sexy take on the Russian tale of Koschei the Deathless, set during the siege of Leningrad (you can read my full review of that here). In 2014, we’ll be treated to Matroyshka, a companion novel, which I can only hope means more dark Russian folklore, more sexy-times with undead men, and more of my favorite fairy tale character OF ALL TIME.

Readers, it’s time to tell you about my love affair with Baba Yaga.

There’s been much talk (and much writing on my end, which I hope to share with you soon) on the subject of the fairy tale figure of the Evil Queen/Stepmother, who is the permeating witch figure in German and English folklore. Thanks to our full helping of Snow White-related entertainment this year, we’re getting to see a lot of her, in all of her complex, mysterious dumbed-down glory. But as fascinating as the wicked stepmother/evil queen trope is in Grimm (if not in Hollywood), even more fascinating, even more dangerous, and even more chock full of contradiction is Baba Yaga the Bony-Legged, of Slavic folklore fame.

She is the witch of all witches, and she appears, by name, in countless tales of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish origin. Her name, roughly translated, means such delectable things as “Grandmother Lazybones,” “Grandmother Grief,” and “Grandmother Death.”

In Russian folklore (which is where most of my experience with Baba Yaga comes from, particularly the tales collected by Afanasyev), she lives in the woods in a hut that stands—or dances—on chicken legs and is surrounded by a fence made of bones, with fire-lit skulls at each corner. She rides in a mortar, steers with the pestle, and uses a broom to erase her tracks.

And unlike the Eskimo folk woman Sermerssuaq, whose physical appearance remains up for debate, let me tell you: Baba Yaga is ugly as sin.

Take a look:

Illustration by Ivan Bilibin

Illustration by Marianna Meyer

Yikes, right? So why am I so obsessed?

At first—and by “at first,” I mean when I was five or something—Baba Yaga scared the pirozhki out of me. It was the hut on chicken legs that did it, really. I’m not sure what book it was that we owned that had such terrifying pictures of Baba Yaga’s hut in it, but I can still see the picture in my mind, and remember how dark and odd and frightening it seemed to me.

illustration by DMantz at Deviant Art

But never one to cast things that frighten me out of sight and mind, I grew up, put on my big girl pants, and took a seminar on Russian Folklore with OSU professor and reknowned Slavic Studies scholar Helena Goscilo, who introduced herself on the first day of class as “your own personal Baba Yaga”). It was in that class that I began to fall in love, not with Helena (who was awesome, but you know what I mean), but with Baba Yaga herself. Despite the lack of dental hygene.

She is terrifying, yes—not only do many illustrations out there make great use of her sagging, swinging lady-bits (shudder), but she also has a reputation, in stories, for eating children, cooking people alive, and using body parts as architectural adornments.

But read the Russian tales, and you’ll begin to notice that Baba Yaga only acts on this reputation in very few stories, and these are usually the more crude, shorter, humorous tales, such as “Baba Yaga and the Brave Youth,” in which we get the bizarre line, “Baba Yaga, don’t touch my spoon!”

In longer works that have become more critically noticed by folklore scholars—”Vasilisa the Brave,” a sort of Russian “Cinderella,” being the most prominent example—Baba Yaga’s reputation for cannibalism is merely a vague threat, adding dimension and gravity to her role as helper and protector—often reluctantly—to the heroine or hero. In these stories, she’s the one you want to have on your side–the payoff for being brave when faced with three days in Baba Yaga’s hut is a flaming skull that sets your mean stepsisters on fire.

Illustration by Ivan Bilibin

Which is awesome, I think we can all agree.

She’s a complicated woman, as capable of helping a young girl or youth overcome adversity and find his or her own power as she is of roasting a human leg and using the bone as a toothpick.

In stories like “The Maiden Tsar,” she’s capable of multiplying herself, too, and the hero meets Baba Yaga doppelgangers littered throughout the proverbial woods. In most of the Russian tales, interestingly enough, she makes a point of separating herself from Russia by saying things like “I smell a Russian smell,” when a human enters her domain by asking the hut on chicken legs to open itself to them; or “I am going to Russia,” when she’s heading out to make room for the other characters to make mischief in her hut. Lines like this seem to imply that though Baba Yaga might be of Russia, she is somehow separate—she’s other. But, as Andreas Johns points out in Baba Yaga: the Ambiguous Witch and Mother of the Russian Folktale, Baba Yaga is “truly national, such as Ivan the Fool or Koschei the Immortal” (both characters, I’ll add, who share the pages of Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless).

This notion of Baba Yaga being both intensely tied to Russian folk culture, yet somehow not Russian, was taken to new levels during the Soviet Era, when Baba Yaga’s role as the Arch-witch was shifted, and used to symbolize a bygone, unhealthy, and unproductive era. This anti-religion propaganda poster has a distinctly Yaga-esque flavor to it, especially when compared to the famous Vasnetsov painting of her:

“But I want to leeaarn!”

Illustration by Victor Vasnetsov

Baba Yaga made sense as a negatively symbolic character—she’s ugly. She’s ancient. She represents the old ways, folk logic, and–instead of new life–death. She became a different kind of villain, not just within the confines of her own stories, but as a story—to enjoy stories about Baba Yaga was to be entertained by the past, something that didn’t exactly adhere to party values. Though she didn’t exactly disappear from popular culture, Baba Yaga became a sort of trickster figure—except that she never quite succeeded in her trickery, unlike in the old stories. She became an object of ridicule, less terrifying and more like Elmer Fudd. Which is a sad fate for an ancient hag who once set people’s skulls on fire.

The example par excellence: the 1979 film Baba Yaga Against!, a short cartoon film that shows Baba Yaga vying to replace Misha the Bear as the 1980 Olympic mascot. Not going to happen, Granny. Not in Soviet Russia. In Soviet Russia, the unicycle pedals you.

In case you’re wondering, that’s Koschei the Deathless as her hapless companion–another terrifying and complex figure reduced to a bumbling Boris-and-Natasha-esque villain.

Not even Baba’s sassy boots and adorable pre-lift-off glare can keep me from sighing when I watch this, just a little. It’s hard to see one’s homegirl, one’s patron saint, you might say, acting the fool. Because there’s something about Baba Yaga that keeps me coming back to her in my own writing, that keeps me searching the webs and libraries for illustrations of her and her crazy abode. It’s partly that she continues to terrify me, in a very satisfying way. But that terror comes with a recognition. Maybe it’s because, while Baba Yaga is not exactly a woman, there’s something of the feminine primeval about her, an archetype that lives in the recesses of every woman’s brain. Certain synapses fire, and despite our blanket desires to age gracefully, be well liked, and wear floral patterns, we find ourselves just wanting to say–pardon my Russian–fuck it all. Fuck it all, I’m building a fence made of the skulls of men who have crossed me.

Don’t you be next.

For more Baba Yaga (because who can ever get enough?), head over to my Pinterest page. This is what I do instead of planning my dream wedding.

Published!

One of my stories will be published in the Sycamore Review this summer–not only that, it won a dandy prize.

Aimee Bender, whose short stories have delighted me since good friends in grad school first introduced them to me, was the judge for the Wabash Prize in Fiction, and she chose my story! I’m honored and thrilled to be published in such a gorgeous review, and to have caught the eye of an author I truly admire. Here’s a bit from the Sycamore Review’s site:

After careful reading, guest judge Aimee Bender has selected Cate Fricke’s story “Fox and Girl: A Bestial Romance” as the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2012 Wabash Fiction Prize. Aimee Bender said of the prize winning story: “First off, this story charmed me completely, gloriously. The author has a beautiful sense of the visual; each time I could picture perfectly the scene described, as if it were an illustration by an artist of a children’s book that is really not at all a children’s book.  But the writing is sly, like a fox, because yes, it’s full of wonder and charm and delight, but underneath there’s real depth here, and a genuine exploration of a relationship and the two struggling characters in it.  Both Fox and Girl, iconic as they are, feel real, dimensional, sympathetic, flawed.  So it’s utterly freshly told, but never sacrifices substance.  What a pleasure to read!”

And I didn’t even have to suck up by telling her that I taught two of her stories as an instructor at OSU–”The Rememberer” and “Americca” thrilled my students as much as they thrilled me on my first read.

You can read the full announcement and the list of winners here: http://www.sycamorereview.com/2012/04/2012-wabash-prize-for-fiction-results/

Aja! Strong Women

I’ve been thinking a lot about strong women lately.

I’ve been thinking a lot about women who are sexual, and have power. I’ve been thinking about the way they’re portrayed, both in contemporary media and in the stories that have been around as long as there have been storytellers.

I’m not the first to be thinking about these things. Second-wave feminism in the 1970′s sparked a slew of female critics who looked directly at fairy tales to explain conflicting views of a woman’s role in 20^th Century society. Karen E. Rowe, whose essay “Feminism and Fairy Tales” blended second wave feminism with intense literary criticism; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose book Madwoman in the Attic laid bare the angel vs. monster dichotomy used to depict most female characters in Victorian lit and beyond; Even now, freelance writers like Chloe Angyal are taking up the second-wave fairy tale critic torch in her essay “Snow Job That’s the Unfairest of The All,” published last week in the Sydney Morning Herald.

No, I’m not the first to be pondering the “strong female character” as she exists in fairy tales, and I probably won’t be the last. Nonetheless, readers, indulge me.

I’ve been working on an article about female archetypes and how they stand up in contemporary revisionist films—and also what that says about the ways in which archetypal views of women have (or haven’t) changed in popular culture, and society. What does beauty have to do with power? What does beauty have to do with innocence and virtue? And what does all this have to do with Rush Limbaugh, and the conflating of the abortion pill and Plan B?

But let’s not get too off track. As I said, that’s a different article.

In my research for said piece, I’ve come across a gem—Angela Carter’s Virago Book of Fairy Tales, which she edited with the purpose of sharing clever, strong, irreverent female fairy tale characters from all over the globe. The collection, published in 1990, shortly before Carter’s death in 1992 of lung cancer, was put together with the intention of showing “the extraordinary richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in ‘unofficial’ culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work.”

Carter begins her collection with this piece of fried gold, an Eskimo nugget:

Sermerssuaq was so powerful that she could lift a kayak on the tips of three fingers. She could kill a seal merely by drumming on its head with her fists. She could rip asunder a fox or hare. Once she arm-wrestled with Qasordlanguaq, another powerful woman, and beat her so easily that she said: Poor Qasordlanguaq could not even beat one of her own lice at arm-wrestling. Most men she could beat and then she would tell them: Where were you when the testicles were given out? Sometimes this Sermerssuaq would show off her clitoris. It was so big that the skin of a fox would not easily cover it. Aja, and she was the mother of nine children too!

I read this in the midst of my ponderings about strong women, evil queens, and what a woman is judged by in our society, and a question occurred to me. This question is not readily answered by the text itself, which doesn’t exactly address physicality aside from size.

So I ask you this question, oh ye products of your time, because I truly want to know:

As you read this piece, and undoubtedly formed a mental image in your mind of what you were reading, did you visualize Sermerssuaq?

Was she beautiful?

Vote for The Train in the Independent Book Blogger Awards!

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Once Upon a Time in Don Draper’s Office

A quick fix for your Monday:

Two of my favorite things (fairy tales and Christina Hendricks’s miraculous frontside) met briefly last night, before I conked out (really, AMC? Mad Men isn’t on until 10? I am getting old), and there was much rejoicing.

Creating a pitch to sell women’s shoes, Stan and Ginsberg mention using a Cinderella theme, which gets shot down as too cliche.

Don: “Sleeping Beauty? Snow White? Nothing worked?”

Stan: “They’re more about necrophilia than shoes.”

Right on, Stan.

And Ginsberg gets it too : later in the episode, the three men are selling the non-fairy-tale pitch they came up with to the client, but Ginsberg jumps in and steals it like the merry tramp he is, by tempting the client with the notion of “Cinderella” being “too dark” for them. He describes her running down a dark stone alleyway in her one fabulous shoe, being pursued by a strange man (in keeping with the violent Richard Speck theme of the episode). Finally she stops, turns, and there he is–handsome, and holding her other shoe.

“She wants to be caught,” Ginsberg says. “See? Too dark.”

The clients, of course, switch from Don’s pitch to Ginsberg’s, because who can resist the darkness of fairy tales? This episode was, after two weeks of duds, completely fabulous, reminding viewers of the dark, far-reaching violence that colors the way women were regarded and treated in the 1960′s… and have been in stories for centuries.