Hypothermically Ever After
- Mar 20
- 17 min read
By Joy Mossheart
In 2021, I was pretty good at being a princess.
As close to professional as I’d probably ever get. I’d racked up six years of experience being a princess for private parties, charity fundraisers, and children’s hospital visits. I could apply false eyelashes like a pro, and shove my Merida-esque curls into a wig cap in less than two minutes. I knew all the lingo: every little girl is “Princess,” pictures are “portraits,” cars are “carriages,” cell phones are “magic mirrors.” I’d perfected my “princess voice”—basically my own, but with the cracks and lumps smoothed out and with a jazz radio announcer’s floating cadence.
“You should work at Disney!” every friend, acquaintance, and great-aunt said when they saw me clad in a ballgown on my way to one birthday party or another.
Well, first of all, I’m 5’10”—about 6’ with any substantial heels—and Disney cuts off princess candidates at 5’8”. A Florida native, I’d also never consent to live in the overcrowded, overpriced Disney dystopia of Orlando. Blech. And besides, I wanted to go to med school, not get paid minimum wage to stand in high heels all day. I liked being a princess because it was on my own terms. I could inhabit the character for a few hours, make some children happy, get paid a decent amount, then become Joy again.
Yes, I was a homegrown princess. Wigs off Amazon, never more than $50 in value. My costumes sewn from scratch or altered from thrifted cast-offs. Performance skills were picked up from YouTube videos, along with my own common sense and mistakes (don’t break character and thus break the magic; bring a character handler to avoid situations with creeps; never agree to an event longer than three hours).
For most of my royal career, however, I never considered that being a princess could be a competition.
“It’s been two hours,” my brother complained.
I held my dad’s hand as we stood in line at a now-defunct character meet-and-greet area of Disney World. My parents assured my brother that we’d do something he wanted to do next, and he sulked off somewhere.
My hometown of Sarasota was only three hours west of Orlando, but we’d never been to Disney World since I’d been born. The 2008 recession hit my family relatively hard, and tickets for Disney were a luxury we couldn’t afford. It was a lovely coincidence, then, when a Disney coupon-promotional-program for homeschoolers lined up with my ninth birthday.
We inched forward in the line, and it diverged into two paths: one to meet the princesses, one to meet the fairies. I clutched the notebook I had bought at Dollar Tree to use as an autograph album and watched the little girls in the other line with wide eyes. They had obviously just come from the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique—Disney’s multi-hundred dollar makeover experience—with hair slicked and yanked back into tight buns with globs of glitter gel. Their plastic crowns and wands were massive, and lit up incessantly in flashing colors. Within seconds, however, I got distracted by a TV screen playing animated clips of Tinker Bell working in her garden. I didn’t dislike the princess characters, but they held no significant interest for me—not compared to the fairies, anyway.
It was a bit chilly in Florida that December, so I pulled on my white sweatshirt, being careful not to knock off the tiny rhinestone tiara nestled in my frizzy, red curls. Even if my parents could have afforded it, I wouldn’t have wanted the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique’s swirly face paint that looked remarkably like horns to me, or the stiff, plasticy, glitter-saturated princess dresses. Even if I had wanted those things, my brother would have wasted no time in telling me how silly they looked. If I could have, I would have asked for what the fairies in the Tinker Bell movies and books wore: dresses made of leaves and flower petals and jewelry made from acorns and dewdrops. And of course, lots and lots of sparkly pixie dust (the glitter itself was never my point of contention with the princess dresses). A castle was cool, you see, but a tiny home in a mushroom or upside-down teapot was cooler.
My breath caught when we finally walked through a darkened tunnel into the fairy room with a burst of twinkling sound effects. I spun around, taking in the oversized set pieces and soft, Celtic folk music. Acorns, mushrooms, and giant orange sunflowers sparkled in shafts of golden light, and upside-down teacups formed little tables at which each fairy stood.
“Happy Arrival Day!” Fawn, the animal fairy, greeted me, noticing my birthday button. “Are you going to have some butternut acorn cake later?”
For the fairies, you see, “arrival day” means “birthday.”
“I’m not sure,” I giggled, so thrilled to be immersed in Pixie Hollow. At nine years old, I knew they weren’t the real characters, and I knew I hadn’t actually shrunk to three inches tall, as the decorations would have me believe. But I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief for a few precious minutes.
“What’s your talent?” Tinker Bell inquired, taking my autograph book and covering a page with a swooping signature and loads of doodled stars.
For the fairies, you see, a “talent” is one’s profession.
“I like to draw,” I said shyly.
“Well, then, you’re an artist talent!” Tinker Bell said matter-of-factly.
After nearly ten minutes with the fairies, I floated for the rest of the day—even when my brother made me go on Space Mountain and I cried.
“Joy, we need to leave in five minutes,” my mom called into the bathroom as I peppered even more glitter highlighter on my cheekbones. Like in theatre, makeup has to be bolder than usual for parades, since you’re farther from the kids.
I studied my reflection for a final few seconds before flicking off the bathroom light and stepping over the pile of biomed textbooks I’d brought home from school for Thanksgiving break. I felt the prettiest as Cinderella. Of course, I would have felt even prettier as one of the fairies, but Disney stopped making those movies in 2014, so by 2021, most kids didn’t know Tinker Bell’s friends. Princesses it was, then. The classic princesses were the best to play at gigs, though. When I was Anna or Rapunzel, I was a ramped-up version of myself: bubbly, giggly, sweetly awkward. But the classic princesses were so elegant and refined. To get to be a sweeping, gloriously alto-voiced 1950’s-style lady was a treat.
I’d made a Cinderella dress once before from a bundle of pale blue silk. The kids had always loved that dress—in princess work, textures are good. For a shy or sensory-challenged child, holding up a scrap of soft skirt or bumpy trim for them to touch can mean the difference between a tender moment of connection and a comedically tearful interaction. But that dress had its downsides. I’m taller than standard sewing patterns allow for, so the skirt, when laid over even a small petticoat, crept up awkwardly short to be worn with high-heeled glass slippers. And it just didn’t seem spectacular enough, somehow.
The Cinderella dress I ran to step into and zip up on this particular morning was birthed from a $10 thrifted wedding dress I painstakingly dyed with watered down acrylic paint. I know, I don’t know what I was thinking, either—it took almost a year of on-and-off work during COVID. It had a massive train that could bustle up rather well, and it was long and full enough to accommodate an enormous hoop-petticoat combination. It was the most impressive monstrosity I’d ever created, by far.
In short, I was a Giant Blue Cupcake.
But the dress itself was nicely minimalistic, with only a bit of beading around the waist, so the iridescent organza I had draped and sewn around the straps and the top of the skirt was the only real decoration.
So I suppose I was a relatively elegant Giant Blue Cupcake, at least.
My mother (dressed as an Elf on the Shelf) and I drove downtown in the typical princess party frenzy, my colossal berth filling the entire front half of the car. As we stepped out into the parking garage and I instinctually moved to smooth my bustle, I knew that something had gone wrong.
It was freezing—more than freezing—it was arctic.
“Joy, it’s 27°,” my mom said with wide eyes, checking the car thermometer we somehow hadn’t bothered to look at during the drive.
I swallowed my pain at the frigid air and tried to take a princess-like view on the situation.
“Well, I’ll warm up once I start walking in the parade.”
We made our way to the parade line-up, and I immediately heard distant, shrill screams of “Cinderella!!”
I guess being a Giant Blue Cupcake has its visibility advantages.
I curtseyed and blew kisses to distant children before yanking up my slouching elbow-length gloves as we approached our own group. I’d been happy to find a new charity costume group after our move to North Carolina during my senior year of high school. There had certainly been more groups of the sort in Florida, close to Disney, but this group had been around long enough to get invited to fairly high-profile charity fundraisers, which was cool. And of course, a massive parade event with TV coverage like this one wasn’t too shabby, either.
“Hi, Cinderella!” the princesses of the group greeted me with sugary smiles and hugs.
“You look gorgeous!” I exclaimed to Rapunzel, an actual former Disney World character performer.
“Thanks,” she replied, looking me up and down. The last time I was Cinderella at an event with this group, I’d been wearing Cinderella 1.0—this was the Giant Blue Cupcake’s debut.
“I like your hair clip,” she said breezily as she walked away, and I blinked and reached up to touch the sprig of Dollar Tree holly berries I had shoved onto a bobby pin.
I never knew quite how to react to the girls in this group. They were older than me and way out of my league—cosplayers who spent hundreds, if not thousands, to make or buy pristine costumes and wigs. Sometimes they were nice, saying I was cute and even doting on me a little. I did my best to find camaraderie where I could; we laughed over silly things children said, and posted pictures together on Instagram. But I couldn’t help but feel as though I was in some bizarre sort of beauty pageant, even though we weren’t trying to look like ourselves.
I shook off my confused dismay and waved to the Fairy Godmother. I assumed we’d take some pictures together, since our characters were from the same movie, and ham it up at least a bit for the children during the parade, like they do at Disney. She managed a smile, but kept her distance for the entire parade, and Elsa sulked beside her.
My elf mother and I looked at each other and went to stand near Anna, one of the only ones in the group who tended to actually talk to me. I pasted on a smile of my own and resolved to make the best of it, but the intense cold was starting to really hurt. Maybe it was hurting the others, too, I thought. Maybe that was why they were so cold (pun not intended).
A welcome distraction came in the form of the parade group behind us: jolly, golden guide dogs, wagging their tails vigorously. But with the arrival of the dogs also came children—bystanders and members of nearby floats—and it’s pretty hard to miss a well-costumed gaggle of the most popular characters in the Disney Princess franchise (Giant Blue Cupcake for the win). The little ones gathered in shy clumps with their parents and stared, and I knelt and waved and offered to take portraits.
“They’re not even talking to the kids,” my mother muttered. I looked over—sure enough, the other princesses were huddled in a knot, backs to the children.
I frowned. We were, in Disney terms, “on stage.” Why were they ignoring their audience?
“Anna!” a little girl hailed me.
I dropped to my knees to get on her level. My skirt was a flimsy, thrifted one I had painted with Norwegian flowers, and I had sewn my vest out of a recycled tank top (my freshman princess year was a low-budget one). My own red hair—rather thin at 14 years old due to a protein deficiency—was on full display in braided pigtails, and the overall look was instantly recognizable but janky as all get out.
“Hello, Princess!” I greeted her with a hug.
I’m sure I asked what her name was. I probably complimented her Frozen t-shirt, or something of the like. Probably joked about how Olaf would love winter here in Florida.
“You’re my favorite princess!” she exclaimed.
I laughed. “Wow, thank you! Most people say my sister is their favorite, because, you know, she’s the queen, and she’s got the ice powers, and the sparkly dress, and the—”
“But—you’re so kind,” the little girl cut in.
I smiled, swallowed, and realized how small I felt in my animated character’s golden swirl-painted boots.
After taking a quick portrait with my mom to send to my dad, I checked the time. Parade line-up was taking triple the time it was supposed to. But just then, a newcomer approached, wearing a Belle gown and wig so far beyond Disney World quality that they could have been in the live-action Beauty and the Beast film.
“You look amazing!” I said after covertly introducing myself with my real name.
She squinted at me analytically, and I squirmed. I don’t think she could tell that my dress was a $10 acrylic-painted one, could she? I hadn’t told anyone that it was. I’d accepted the tense compliments I received but not offered any additional information. Why not let them believe this was some special sort of matte-dyed silk I’d bought on Etsy and sewn into a perfectly tailored dress from scratch? It wasn’t like lying, really. I was just trying to hold my own.
“Thanks, but I feel like [censored],” Belle finally answered. “Oh my God, I’m so f---ing tired. And it’s f---ing cold out!!”
My eyes widened in mortification under my false eyelashes, and I stifled a giggle.
I knew we were only at the parade line-up, but there were children passing by in a constant stream. I didn’t particularly want to witness a toddler sucking on a free candy cane and being scarred for life by hearing Princess Belle cussing like a sailor.
“Um, yeah,” I replied with a crooked smile, shivering in my sleeveless ballgown.
I internally kicked myself as I wondered yet again why I hadn’t grabbed a coat of some sort when we left the house. I guess I hadn’t thought anything I owned was in-character enough. Knowing that the other princesses had perfectly canonical reproductions of Disney World performer winter wear, I must have decided in a 5:30 AM stupor that my Cinderella would never betray character integrity by shopping at the Burlington Coat Factory.
Well, now Cinderella had hypothermia—very canon.
My elf mother and I embraced one other for warmth, shaking and checking the time again. If we could just get briskly moving in the actual parade, surely we’d warm up. In the meantime, our teeth chattered while the other princesses discussed their Instagram follower counts. Eventually, Alice in Wonderland took pity on me and loaned me a hand warmer packet, and my mother and I passed it back and forth like a hot potato. My mind drifted to the mile-long list of biomed homework I had to do when we got home—after I thawed out, that is.
About then, one of the guide dog puppies, having slipped out of his leash, trotted up to me, and I stooped to greet him. To be honest, I’ve never loved dogs, but it wasn’t as though one of the most canonically animal-loving Disney princesses could publicly snub a golden retriever service puppy (on-stage, remember?), so I put on more excitement than I felt.
That fake excitement promptly melted away when the puppy turned and lifted his leg to, ahem, do his business on my Giant Blue Cupcake. I half-shrieked and backed away just in time, adjusting my necklace to distract from my convulsions of silent laughter.
But he must have needed to go quite badly, because he made a beeline for the next giant cupcake he saw—a golden-yellow one, to be precise.
I watched as he sidled up to Belle, raised a leg, and incurred her wrath.
My elf mother and I turned away—we were both suddenly very interested in the middle school marching band group across the street—and tried to suppress laughter. Seeing Belle cuss out a puppy was not on my 2021 bingo card.
“I’m Captain America. It’s good to meet you.” Captain America (at his day job, a youth pastor) shook hands with the boy as solemnly as though he was the president.
I stood by the hospital bed quietly, clutching my frying pan prop and making an attempt at royal serenity while my throat stung. At sixteen, I had seldom set foot in a hospital, despite my aspirations of medical school. The eight-year-old boy hooked up to countless tubes and monitors barely moved, but I think he managed a smile for the guys, at least.
I was the only girl in our motley Tampa Shriners Hospital crew that day—Rapunzel, Captain America, Robin (Youth Pastor Cap’s son), Spider-Man, and a Ghostbuster—and illness or no, eight-year-old boys aren’t typically as excited to see princesses as they are to see Avengers and Teen Titans. As for the Ghostbuster, his blinking and flashing proton pack usually drew plenty of curious giggles on its own.
Pastor Cap and Spider-Man gingerly moved a monitor out of the way so they could draw a bit closer to their new friend. They made some jokes and tried to coax a laugh out of him, but he hardly responded.
It was probably a good thing that he didn’t give a fig about Rapunzel, because I wouldn’t have known what to do, anyway. The awkwardness was palpable. It wasn’t like in sentimental YouTube videos of characters and celebrities visiting children’s hospitals, where the kids light up and seem to gain all the strength needed to beat their illness in a matter of seconds.
What can a fictional character say to a child who may be dying?
Cap placed a hand on the cold, metal railing of the hospital bed, unfazed, and somehow kept finding words that were kind but not patronizing.
I studied the joyful faces of the presiding parents, doctors, and nurses, then looked back at the pair of warm, brown eyes glued unwaveringly to Captain America.
“You’re so strong,” Cap said to the boy before we left. “So strong.”
My head ached under my wig cap, and I was pretty sure I was actually getting frostbitten. The sleep deprivation of the last fourteen weeks of school had taken its toll, and I didn’t have the energy to be a princess any longer. I didn’t want to smile and I didn’t want to take portraits and I didn’t want to be elegant and magical.
I was close to tears, but neither my mother nor I wanted to abandon the parade. Our car was parked at the end of the parade route, so we’d have to walk there anyway. And we’d both put so much time and effort into our costumes and makeup. Why wouldn’t they just hurry up and start?
I didn’t much feel like a princess.
My wig that looked so elegant in the mirror this morning must have looked so dumb and fake next to the other girls’ multi-hundred dollar lace-fronts. My false eyelashes were starting to peel off at the edges, and I desperately tried to press them back on top of my smudged eyeliner. I hadn’t wanted to wear my actual, high-heeled “glass slippers” for a multi-mile parade, so I had coated a pair of flats in iridescent glitter the night before. But they had no straps, so I kept stepping out of them when I paced back and forth for warmth.
I felt like a Scattered Aching Frozen Giant Blue Cupcake.
“Daddy, she’s so pretty.”
I didn’t hear it at first, but my mother elbowed me and motioned that I should turn around.
A little girl in a lacy Victorian dress, hoisted in her dad’s arms, was watching me with enormous eyes. They must have been with the history reenactment group a few floats down.
“Daddy,” she insisted to her distracted father. “She’s so pretty.”
Well, she had trouble saying her s’s and r’s. More accurately, she insisted:
“She’s scho pwetty.”
My gloved hand flew to my heart, and I waved and blew her a kiss.
She tugged at her dad’s sleeve with new vigour.
“Daddy!” she began again.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he conceded with a laugh. “Cinderella is so pretty.”
I motioned that they could come over, and I greeted the starstruck little girl, taking her mittened hands and telling her I thought she was pretty, too.
Who would have thought that fairy godmothers could be so tiny? I swear, they recruit them younger and younger these days.
Like magic, she made the background of swearing Belle and mean girl princesses and incontinent dogs melt away. When the parade started soon after that, I found myself floating. Blood flowed into my blue limbs as I practically danced the route. A little girl from a dance studio saluted me with her giant lollipop prop. I curtseyed to some stormtroopers from the 501st Legion, and onlooking kids giggled as the armored men bowed back. I watched my elf mother kneel to talk to some children when the parade stalled. Had they been good this year? She’d make sure to tell Santa. A little boy replied in the form of a handstand (I don’t know how one can get much clearer than that). When I stepped out of my glass slipper, accidentally leaving it behind for a few feet, the children laughed, and I laughed, too—how poetically on-the-nose.
I didn’t know at the time that it would be my last ever princess event. Oh, I’ve certainly made and worn countless costumes since then—including the Giant Blue Cupcake—and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so. But I’ve never been officially on the clock as a princess since the day of the parade, simply because college and adult life caught up to my pumpkin carriage. On the whole, though, I don’t think the parade was a bad conclusion to my six-year stint as semi-professional royalty, especially in the clarity of a few years’ hindsight.
In her 1905 novel A Little Princess, Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s character Sara Crewe loses all semblance of her charmed life, including her clothing, wealth, prestige, and family. But she nevertheless persists in treating others with the kindness she seldom receives herself. During one of her darkest times of poverty and isolation, she says, “Whatever comes… cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.”
A highly romanticized view of princesses has saturated nearly all age demographics in nearly all forms of media for millennia. I’m not one to talk; clearly, princesses fueled both my teenage small business and my favorite charity outreach, despite my childhood insistence that fairies were cooler. I’ve run around my house in ballgowns to classical music an embarrassing number of times between the ages of four and twenty-four. I have five tiaras sitting on my dresser as I write this. But when I first read Burnett’s A Little Princess as a tween, I was floored by Sara’s radically grounded view on what it means to truly, actually be royalty. In the vast majority of princess-themed media for little girls, the characters preach being a “true princess” all the time—but it’s usually in a sparkly package of dress transformations and finale musical numbers wherein even the mean characters make it easy to be regally kind because their redemption arc is tied in a nice bow by the end of the adventure.
Being royalty in real life, as it turns out, actually looks a great deal more like Jesus graciously undertaking the unglamorous job of washing his disciples’ feet than it does like fairy-princess Barbie reconciling with her enemy (who inexplicably decided to become nice in Act II) while being rewarded with even bigger, pinker fairy wings. Admittedly, for most of my princess career, I never had to face this truth. I wore the dresses and the makeup and the wigs and showed up for audiences of thrilled children—and it was easy to be a princess while “dressed in cloth of gold.” Being a princess becomes a great deal more difficult, however, when all the other princesses have way fancier clothes of gold and are swearing and comparing and judging… and the urge to compare and judge and get mad myself feels insuppressible. And when my princess career shifted into my adult life as a grad student and teacher, I faced this truth over and over, as the mean girl princesses of my life morphed into petty professors and temperamental students, and I didn’t always feel like a princess at all. I had to pray many a night for God to give me the strength to remain kind and loving and princess-like when I very much did not want to—and like the generous king and father He is, He always answered.
For all my makeup obsessing and wig curling and Giant Blue Cupcake efforts over the years, I don’t think I ever was a Disney World-perfect princess. I think I was always more like what the characters would be in 80s live action TV specials where most of the budget went into getting big-name actors to play the villains—and maybe that was okay. Maybe, as Burnett wrote over a hundred years ago, being a princess isn’t about the costume or the wig or the makeup or the voice or the lingo or the shoes or the hair clip at all. Maybe it’s about the humility to serve with joyful grace, even in the dirt and the rags and the tatters and the awkwardness of decidedly un-magical real life. To their credit, I think the kids knew that all along. It just took a good dose of hypothermia to teach it to me.
