by Fredrika Sprengle
Free Press contributor
illustration by John Ambrosavage
On the news tonight, they said that an offer of $1 million had been made for the remains of the car in which Princess Diana died. In the mail, I got an invitation to subscribe to the Official International Tributes to Princess Diana which has something to do with stamps. Last week, the Royal Wardrobe Collection portrait doll was offered for a 14" doll complete with tiara and a designer red satin dress. A new outfit will come each month, some with shoes and a hat, for $31.95 each (which is about what I spend for my outfits). In fact, each week since Princess Di's death, there have been offers for dolls, collector plates, porcelain figurines.This Princess Diana thing scares me. While her wedding, so many years ago, was enough to make my young feminist self shudder and wonder despairingly about the future of womankind, nothing prepared me for these tokens and tributes on the event of her death. I am as stupified as I was by Reagan's second presidential race victory.
It was Labor Day weekend, and I had been invited to a women's retreat billed as a "Goddess Weekend." About twenty of us goddesses would be coming together at a lake-side cabin in the woods. I was a little nervous, partially because I was new to this group and also because although I have a passing knowledge of Venus and Ga'ai, I've done little more than cruise the New Age movement for good incense. I wasn't sure what to expect. Would we swim in the nude? Would there be ritual menstrual blood extraction? Would we declare men obsolete?
Well, the first day was spent watching refrigerator crescent rolls being stuffed and shaped in different variations, eating them, with lots of diet Coke, and talking Christmas quilt motifs. That night, a woman burst in and said, "Turn on the TV; Princess Diana has been in an accident." As one woman flipped through the channels, each blinking the same gruesome scenes of a crushed car in a tunnel, small cries went up through the cabin. "Oh god, Princess Di." "What happened?" And the women were drawn by the hushed, respectful, and shocked tones and came from the porch, the upstairs, the corners of the room, to watch the news unfold.
They huddled around the TV like WWII era children around the radio in a Norman Rockwell painting. As the reporters furiously conjectured about the details, the women responded: "She's dead, my god." "The Paparazzi, those fuckers." "It isn't right." Tears began to fall, and anger was passed amongst the women like a bottle of wine on a downtown street corner. Each took a breath, drank deeply from the paper bag, wiped her mouth, and turned to the next in line.
But wait a minute, I hoped, isn't this a time to burn sage? Run naked through the woods? Bare our breasts to the moon?
Before it was my turn to speak, I took my puzzled ass over to the couch, to watch the goings-on from a distance. Instead of speaking up, I waited for someone else to make a distasteful joke (come on, there's a million possiblities), to say something in blame, or at least say something slightly critical. Why wasn't she wearing a seat belt? But instead I skulked behind a book and watched face after face surge through all seven stages of grief in minutes.
This Princess shit is deep.
Here were smart working women, who had raised families, survived divorces and widowhood, were savvy politically and about men, all brought to quivering mush by the news of the demise of blond English royalty. "She was so graceful," they sighed, "like a swan." "A devoted mother," "She had charm and a sense of style." "Her sons, her poor sons." Moving as swiftly as the reporters, who were creating seas between themselves and the dangerous "non-legitimate press," these women were suddenly declaring themselves friends of the crown. It was as if twenty or even thirty years of adulthood had crumbled and blown away with the word of Paparazzi on motorcycles. Like Oz's flying monkeys, they had terrified and killed Dorothy, Barbie, and Mother Mary in one monstrous chase.
What made wealthy, stiff Di this holy icon of femininity? Was it her anorexia? Was it the haute couture? The undistinguished, yet pricey haircuts? The fact her ex had big ears?
Even Batman, George Clooney, came to her belated defense, and spoke with a quaking deep voice about injustice in Gotham. (Did that help his ranking when it came time to be named People magazine's "Sexiest Man of the Year?")
The whole thing reads like a romance novel: lovely princess, loveless marrriage, embarrassing daliances, affairs with horsemen. What's next? The Rose of England Fun house? Diana and Dodi Funeral Sites, complete with miniature sprays of gladiolus?
What do you suppose they'll do with that car?
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Contents this page were published in the January/February, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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