0:00

Before we begin, I want to tell you that we're going to

0:02

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0:05

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love to hear your suggestions by Monday,

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August 7th. The first episode

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For fans, it can feel like a breakup,

0:17

but without the closure. Tell

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us which shows left you permanently hanging

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and why it was hard to let go.

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soon, to contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

0:36

The next episode is going to be called Unsung

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Gems. Hollywood is at a

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virtual standstill.

0:42

New content is going to get very scarce soon.

0:45

But there is a wealth of movies and shows

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and we look forward to reading your emails.

1:16

Sous-titres

1:25

par Eric Molenski Whoo.

1:29

Okay, so those of you who

1:31

subscribe to the show's newsletter know that I'm learning

1:34

French or I'm trying to learn French. I

1:36

had to look up some of those words. To

1:38

help me learn, I've been watching American

1:41

movies in French with English subtitles. And

1:43

I thought it'd be fun to watch the Disney cartoons

1:46

that take place in France in French, like

1:48

the Aristocats. Which

1:53

I actually think is kind of a better movie in

1:55

French.

1:56

Beauty and

1:58

the Beast is great in French. I

2:00

also watched

2:02

Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

2:15

Now I saw Sleeping Beauty when I was studying

2:17

animation a long time ago, and

2:20

back then I was only focusing on the animation.

2:23

This time I was struck by the story.

2:27

The film has been criticized for having a passive

2:29

protagonist, but I

2:31

realize that Sleeping Beauty or Briar

2:33

Rose or Aurora is not

2:35

really the protagonist.

2:37

She doesn't have a lot of dialogue or screen

2:39

time. For much of the movie, she's either

2:41

a baby or she's asleep. The

2:44

real protagonists are her fairy godmothers,

2:47

Meriwether, Flora, and Fauna.

2:50

They temporarily suspend their powers

2:52

to protect this girl. At first it's

2:54

a tactical choice. They know that Maleficent

2:57

would never imagine them doing something so good as

2:59

a self-sacrifice for somebody they barely

3:01

know. But they grow to

3:04

love Aurora, and that love

3:06

makes them more human.

3:08

In fact, the story becomes a proxy war

3:10

between the good fairies and Maleficent. In

3:13

the final battle, the prince has no dialogue.

3:16

The fairies just hand him weapons and tell him

3:18

what to do. They're

3:20

kinda badass.

3:22

Gail Carson Levine wrote Ella

3:25

Enchanted, which is one of her many novels

3:27

that reimagine fairy tales with a modern

3:29

perspective. And she agrees.

3:32

Because in fairy tales very often,

3:35

the main characters are pawns. They

3:38

just move where the story wants

3:40

them to go. And all the agency

3:42

belongs to the magical creatures. And

3:45

sometimes the villains. I

3:47

came away with a newfound respect for fairy

3:49

godmothers. And I started to

3:52

wonder,

3:52

have we not given them enough respect?

3:55

Why don't we put them in the same category

3:57

as other mentor characters like Gandalf?

3:59

Dumbledore, or Yoda. And

4:02

where did this archetype of the fairy

4:04

godmother come from?

4:08

To answer that, we need to stick with our

4:10

French theme and go back to France in

4:13

the late 17th century. Jenna

4:15

Jorgensen teaches fairy tales and folklore

4:18

at Butler University.

4:20

There was a vogue in the court of Louis

4:22

XIV during his reign for

4:24

writing fairy tales. The intellectual

4:27

educated people would write fairy tales

4:29

and present them to one another at salons,

4:31

along with poetry, music, and so on.

4:34

That's really where we see the figure of the fairy godmother

4:37

emerging.

4:38

The term fairy tale comes from a writer

4:40

known as Madame Donois. I

4:43

assume they called her Madame Donois because her

4:45

full name is actually very long. Madame

4:48

Donois came up with the term conte

4:50

fait, or fairy tales. She

4:53

was part of a group of women in these writing salons,

4:56

and their stories had...

4:58

Fairy godmothers all over the place.

5:00

Lots of fairies. Good fairies, bad fairies. They

5:02

played a lot of the supporting roles in the story,

5:05

who would be, you know, helper figures,

5:07

sometimes antagonists, and so on, that

5:09

in other folk tale and fairy tale

5:12

traditions across the world, you wouldn't necessarily

5:14

have a fairy. You might have a sorceress or

5:16

an ogre or someone else fulfilling

5:19

the same structural role in the story.

5:21

So really we can blame this one on France.

5:24

Years ago I did an episode called Don't Mess

5:26

With the Fairies, which focused on fairies

5:29

in British and Irish culture. Those

5:31

fairies were not into helping people, quite

5:34

the opposite. But in the fairy

5:36

tales that Madame Donois and her colleagues were writing...

5:39

They had a lot of fairies and fairy

5:41

godmothers within their

5:43

tales, and these fairies

5:46

were very powerful women. And so in a way

5:48

they acted as stand-ins for

5:51

the female writers who were

5:53

creating this literary fairy tale genre.

5:56

That is Abigail Fine. She

5:58

is a PhD student.

5:59

Jenna recommended that we get in

6:02

touch with her because Abigail is running her

6:04

dissertation on fairy godmothers. She

6:06

has an encyclopedic knowledge of the

6:08

subject. Abigail says these

6:11

writers were not only using fairy godmothers

6:13

as stand-ins for themselves,

6:15

they were part of a larger culture war. There

6:19

is this big thing happening

6:21

in France at the time called the battle

6:23

between the ancients and moderns. Mostly

6:26

men in this era were saying, like,

6:28

we can never exceed or excel

6:31

the ancient literature. And

6:34

women were saying, yes, we can. They're the moderns. And

6:37

they're saying, we can do this because there are very few

6:39

women represented in classical ancient

6:41

literature.

6:43

They did have a male writer on their side, Charles

6:45

Perrault. He was one of the

6:47

few men who were doing literary

6:49

fairy tales in this milieu at the time.

6:54

If his name sounds familiar, it's because

6:56

Charles Perrault wrote the definitive

6:59

version of Cinderella. And like

7:01

many folk tales, Cinderella had been told

7:03

in different ways, in different cultures around the

7:05

world for a long time. But Perrault

7:08

set the template that we know today,

7:10

and his story had a fairy godmother.

7:13

Madame de Noire and other female writers like

7:15

Catherine Bernard were just as popular as

7:17

Perrault. But his stories prevailed

7:20

over time. He had the advantage

7:22

of being a male writer, and he was

7:24

well established in the royal court.

7:27

The women had more scandalous lives. They were definitely

7:29

being more socially transgressive by

7:31

participating in written literature and so

7:33

on.

7:34

And Genesis, in terms of his stories, they

7:37

were also very compact. Like, Perrault's stories are,

7:40

like, short.

7:40

And a lot of the tales by the female contemporaries

7:43

like Donois and Bernard and so on, they're

7:45

long. They're convoluted, complex,

7:47

like, tons of, like, very eloquent

7:50

description, a bit of, like, sarcasm and

7:52

snark here and there. They don't have morals at the end. They

7:54

don't all have happy endings. So stylistically,

7:57

they're quite different as well.

7:59

But then in terms of the fairy godmother is

8:02

he still the one though that gets the credit? I

8:04

don't know that anyone like thinks about this often

8:06

enough to say who gets the credit like

8:09

in the general public I Mean

8:12

yeah Like Don Juan pro were basically

8:14

writing at the same time for the most part and

8:17

she has very godmothers and he has very godmother So

8:19

they just kind of sort of like contemporaneous thing

8:21

that everybody was it was is in the air,

8:23

but it was writing it at the time

8:25

These writers were also drawing on something else

8:27

in the air Today we understand

8:30

the concept of a godmother in terms

8:32

of religious education or extended

8:35

family

8:36

But in 17th century France,

8:38

especially in high society The

8:40

fairy godmother was reflecting a very

8:43

specific role for older women

8:46

for social advancement You needed a godmother

8:49

or a patroness or a patron or someone

8:51

who could help you navigate the

8:53

social world as an up-and-coming young

8:56

person and that role ended

8:58

up merging with that of the Fairy

9:01

and in some cases which and midwife

9:03

like there was this whole sense of Female

9:06

figures who had some kind of power sometimes

9:09

otherworldly sometimes medicinal and

9:11

it just kind of got all rolled into one

9:13

thing such that fairies became

9:16

Someone that you would look up to and ask for help

9:18

Abigail says this is the

9:20

same role that male mentors typically

9:22

play in the hero's journey

9:25

like in Perot's version of Cinderella

9:28

Cinderella when the fairy godmother shows

9:30

up is so distraught that she can barely

9:32

speak and of course in France at this time

9:35

Conversation is a big part of how you

9:38

show that you are civilized civility

9:40

the fairy godmother Really guides

9:43

Cinderella along it's not she does

9:45

just give her things But she

9:48

sort of makes Cinderella think like what

9:50

could we use for coachmen? Oh,

9:52

let me go get these lizards and

9:54

then the first time that Cinderella really

9:57

strongly uses her voice

9:58

is when she is advocating

10:01

for getting her ball gown.

10:03

Here's the actress Eliza Pearl reading

10:06

from the Perot tale. The

10:08

fairy then said to Cinderella, well

10:11

you see here an equipage fit

10:13

to go to the ball with, are you not

10:15

pleased with it? Oh yes,

10:18

she cried, but must

10:20

I go in these nasty rags?

10:23

Her godmother then touched her with her wand

10:25

and at the same instant her

10:28

clothes turned into cloth of gold

10:30

and silver all beset with jewels.

10:33

This done, she gave her a pair

10:35

of glass slippers, the prettiest

10:38

in the whole world.

10:41

The whole thing you can read as sort of

10:43

the fairy godmother guiding her towards thinking

10:46

for herself, towards creative problem

10:48

solving, and towards being able to use her voice.

10:52

Jenna thinks that that's gotten lost in translation

10:54

today. I

10:56

feel like some of the invisibility

10:59

of fairy godmothers as mentor figures

11:01

might be due to how American

11:04

and Western culture in general doesn't

11:06

have a lot of use for older women. They're

11:08

just kind of like set aside, disregarded

11:10

a little bit. So yeah, I do

11:12

think that the fairy godmother could be an older

11:15

mentor role. And again, in

11:17

17th century France, my sense is that the

11:20

actual godmother or the social patroness,

11:22

she would have done that. She would have had a very

11:25

important advisory role for any

11:28

younger women under her care.

11:31

There's another reason why the fairy godmother doesn't quite

11:33

get that level of cultural respect. A

11:36

lot of people have argued that she helps the protagonists

11:39

too much.

11:41

Gail Carson Levine thinks that

11:43

made sense in the 17th century.

11:45

Imagine you're not in high society, you

11:47

don't have access to a patroness, and

11:50

then you read fairy tales like Cinderella.

11:53

problem

12:01

that you can't figure out like you're starving,

12:04

that you can't figure out how to solve. The

12:06

fairy sweeps in. But

12:09

today, wishing for a fairy godmother

12:11

might send the wrong message. And

12:14

when you wish upon a story you don't do

12:16

the work. When you give the characters

12:18

agency, things start to happen.

12:22

Abigail says the fairy godmother

12:24

has gotten swept up in a backlash

12:26

against damsel and distress stories.

12:29

The fairy godmother becomes an extension of that.

12:31

If she's not waiting for the prince to rescue her, then

12:34

she's just sitting around waiting for a fairy godmother

12:36

and she does nothing and she doesn't lift a finger

12:38

to help herself.

12:40

That hasn't stopped people from telling

12:42

stories about fairy godmothers. In

12:44

fact, there have been a lot of retellings of Cinderella

12:47

and other classic tales in recent years which

12:49

take into account this criticism.

12:52

In fact, they've given the fairy godmother

12:55

her own magic makeover.

13:05

I think for a lot of people when you say fairy godmother,

13:08

the first thing they might think of is the

13:10

character from the 1950 Disney animated

13:13

film Cinderella. And

13:15

for good reason, Abigail says there weren't

13:17

a lot of depictions of fairy godmothers in movies

13:19

before then.

13:21

Then the fairy godmother sort of

13:23

solidifies as this elderly

13:25

woman who is kindly, maybe

13:27

a little bit absent-minded

13:30

and nonsense languagey. What in

13:33

the world did I do with that magic wand?

13:36

I was sure I wanted that. Strange.

13:40

Why then you must be your fairy

13:42

godmother? Of course.

13:46

And that's how the character stayed in the popular

13:48

imagination for decades.

13:51

One of the first major reinterpretations came

13:53

in 1997 with the novel Ella Enchanted by Gail

13:56

Carson Levine.

13:57

It's a reimagining of Cinderella. now

14:00

called Ella. And when she was

14:02

a kid, Gail loved fairy tales

14:04

like Cinderella.

14:25

Jump

14:30

ahead several decades. She's

14:32

starting her career running

14:44

children's

15:00

books. And she decides to

15:02

go back and look at those fairy tales she loved

15:04

as a kid. What she found

15:07

was weird.

15:09

You know, like the prince in Snow White

15:11

falls in love with Snow White when he thinks she's dead.

15:14

But that opens up a world of narrative

15:17

possibilities. I

15:19

love fooling around with the

15:22

illogist in fairy tales. And

15:25

when she reread Cinderella for the first time as

15:27

an adult. I didn't

15:30

understand why she's so kind

15:32

and sweet to the step-family.

15:34

That's nothing but mean to her. You

15:36

know, I couldn't imagine her as anything

15:39

but saccharine and

15:42

false. So I needed some

15:44

reason that I could like her. So

15:47

in her novel Ella Enchanted, a fairy

15:50

named Lucinda shows up and casts

15:52

a spell on Ella when she's a baby to make

15:55

her compliant.

15:56

Lucinda's intentions are good. Ella's

15:58

a fussy baby and and she's trying to help Ella's

16:01

mother. But after

16:03

Ella's mother dies, the spell of

16:05

obedience becomes a curse because

16:08

anyone can tell Ella what to do. This

16:11

is from the 2004 film version with Anne

16:13

Hathaway. Ella is trying

16:15

to get through a school lesson.

16:17

Just admit you're stupid and don't know what you're

16:19

talking about. I'm stupid and I don't know what I'm

16:21

talking about. Ella?

16:24

In conclusion. Hold your tongue, Ella. Ella.

16:30

But if Lucinda's spell is the cause of

16:32

Ella's problems, Gail needed to

16:34

create another fairy godmother to help

16:36

her. That's how she came up

16:38

with the character of Mandy.

16:40

Unlike Lucinda, Mandy doesn't just suddenly

16:43

appear out of nowhere.

16:44

She is actually the family cook who

16:47

had been keeping her fairy powers secret

16:49

until Ella really needed her.

16:52

Ella has no help. Once her

16:54

mother dies, there's nobody. So

16:56

Mandy can be in her corner. And

17:00

Lucinda is so crazy that

17:03

she couldn't be the fairy godmother. She

17:05

couldn't be the support. And I wanted

17:08

her to have somebody.

17:10

Mandy can't take on Lucinda. Otherwise,

17:12

the story would be a battle of the fairies and

17:15

Ella wouldn't be an active protagonist.

17:18

That's why I made up the idea of small

17:20

magic and big magic. And actually,

17:23

it's something I love because

17:25

there are obviously unseen

17:27

consequences with every act. Mandy

17:31

uses it to make her cooking better and

17:34

to make healing soup. And the

17:37

fairies make these trifles that do

17:39

little magical things that are charming,

17:42

but they don't step in and

17:44

ride the ship or end a

17:46

drought. That's the example that Mandy

17:48

uses.

17:51

We don't do big magic. Lucinda's

17:53

the only one. It's too dangerous. Here's

17:56

Eliza Pearl reading from the book. dangerous

18:00

about ending a storm. Maybe

18:03

nothing, maybe something. Use

18:05

your imagination. I thought,

18:08

the grass needs rain. The crops

18:11

need rain. More, Mandy

18:13

said. Maybe a bandit

18:17

was gonna rob someone and he isn't doing

18:19

it because of the weather. That's right. Or

18:22

maybe I'd start a drought and then I'd have

18:24

to fix that because I started it. And

18:26

then maybe the rain I sent would knock down

18:28

a branch and smash in the roof of a house

18:30

and I'd have to fix that too. That wouldn't

18:33

be your fault. The owner should have built a

18:35

stronger roof. Maybe, maybe

18:37

not. Or maybe

18:40

I'd cause a flood and people would

18:42

be killed. That's the problem with

18:44

big

18:44

magic. I only do little

18:46

magic. Good cooking, my

18:49

curing soup, my tonic.

18:52

When Lucinda cast the spell on me, was that

18:55

big magic? Of course

18:57

it was, the numbskull. Mandy

18:59

scoured a pot so hard that it clattered

19:01

in, banged against the copper sink. Tell

19:04

me how to break the spell. Please,

19:06

Mandy. I don't know

19:09

how. I only know

19:11

it can be done. A

19:14

lot of modern interpretations have gone even further

19:17

in exploring whether fairy godmothers are careless

19:20

with their powers.

19:21

In Disney's 2014 live action

19:24

film, Maleficent, the three

19:26

fairies from Sleeping Beauty are depicted as

19:28

selfish and incompetent.

19:30

You're cheating. I saw

19:33

that. We're starting again. Suit

19:35

yourself, greedy, bloated

19:38

goat. Ha ha ha

19:40

ha ha ha

19:41

ha. Maleficent ends up blurring the lines

19:43

between witch and fairy. I

19:46

know who you are.

19:49

Do you?

19:52

You're my fairy godmother. In

19:56

some versions, the fairy godmother is the

19:59

actual villain.

19:59

like in Shrek 2.

20:02

If you remember, I helped you

20:04

with your happily ever after, and

20:06

I can take it away just

20:08

as easily. Is that what

20:10

you want? Is it? No.

20:15

Good boy.

20:17

Jenna Jorgensen likes stories about

20:19

evil fairy godmothers. Yeah,

20:22

the first thing that interests me is that the fairy

20:24

godmother gets enough of a backstory

20:26

and a personality to be a villain in the

20:28

first place, that she gets to have

20:30

a vendetta or a goal

20:33

or something like that, that again, we don't see that

20:35

in traditional fairy tales as often

20:37

they just kind of show up, test the

20:39

protagonist to offer magical aid, or maybe

20:42

punish the antagonist if they're being selfish

20:45

and terrible, and then they go on their

20:47

way. So the fact that we're getting an insight

20:50

into the psychology of a character

20:52

that's very rarely explored, I

20:54

find that really interesting.

20:56

In contemporary literature, there have been a lot

20:58

of dark fairy godmothers. Like

21:00

in the novel, Cinderella is Dead by

21:02

Kalan Bayran.

21:04

To explain why this character is so unique,

21:07

I have to give away a major spoiler.

21:10

So if you don't want to know what it is, skip

21:12

ahead a few minutes.

21:14

The novel takes place 200 years

21:17

after Cinderella's death.

21:18

The kingdom has become a dystopian world, kind

21:21

of like the Handmaid's Tale.

21:22

The character of Amina seems

21:25

to be playing the role of the fairy godmother to

21:27

our heroine, Sophia. In

21:29

fact, Amina claims that she was Cinderella's

21:31

fairy godmother years earlier. Now

21:34

she's helping Sophia confront the king to

21:36

convince him to change the laws so

21:39

Sophia can marry a woman instead

21:41

of a man.

21:42

Here's Abigail. So the

21:45

protagonist is working with

21:47

the fairy godmother to try to take down the

21:49

king, and then in the end, you

21:51

find out that the fairy godmother is in

21:53

fact the king's biological

21:55

mother and is working with

21:58

him against the protagonist in this whole thing.

21:59

has been a setup. And I find that really fascinating

22:02

because it's this idea that

22:04

the fairy godmother engendered the patriarchy,

22:07

like quite literally as the

22:09

mother of this patriarchal society.

22:12

Traditionally, the fairy godmother

22:14

uses her powers to make the heroine into

22:17

the wife of the king and the mother of the

22:19

royal line, assuming

22:21

that's what she wants and that

22:23

will make her happy.

22:25

The fairy godmother can either be

22:27

this really feminist icon who's

22:30

helping another woman, who's helping somebody

22:32

out of an abusive situation, or

22:35

you could read her as somebody who is taking a

22:37

woman and putting her back into a very

22:39

heteronormative patriarchal

22:41

household structure.

22:43

In this selection from the book, Sophia,

22:46

in a character named Constance, who

22:48

is a descendant of one of Cinderella's

22:51

stepsisters,

22:52

confront the king together. His name is

22:54

King Manford.

22:56

To their surprise, Amina

22:58

shows up.

23:02

The king waltzes over and plants a kiss

23:04

on the top of Amina's head. Oh

23:07

mother, you never were a very good

23:09

liar. Mother?

23:12

No. It can't be

23:15

true. You've been working

23:17

with him the entire time, Constance

23:19

says.

23:20

I didn't have to do much, Amina

23:22

says. You were already planning

23:25

to come back to Lyle. I just

23:27

gave you a little push. She

23:29

turns to Manford. I must

23:31

admit the things you said to me when you came to visit

23:34

stung a little. He

23:36

puts his hand over his heart. My

23:39

temper got the better of me. I'm

23:41

sorry about that mother,

23:42

truly. He doesn't sound

23:44

sorry at all, but he smiles at her like

23:46

he adores her and my stomach turns

23:48

over. All this time,

23:51

I thought her hesitancy was because she

23:53

was ashamed, fearful, but

23:56

it was a lie. Like the Cinderella

23:58

story, like the ball, like every

23:59

Everything! Amina turns

24:02

to her son. Your

24:04

impatience nearly ruined everything,

24:07

showing up like that. I

24:09

told you I'd deliver her to you, but

24:11

you didn't want to wait."

24:15

And that's not the only book that challenges traditional

24:17

norms.

24:19

Kissing the Witch by Emma Donahue

24:21

is a collection of 13 interlocking

24:23

fairy tales starting with Cinderella.

24:26

And once again, in

24:28

order to explain what's groundbreaking about

24:30

the story, I have

24:31

to give away a big spoiler. So

24:34

you can skip ahead a little bit if you don't want to know anything. This

24:38

version of the Fairy Godmother is good, like

24:40

the original tale. At first, she

24:42

follows all the traditional rules.

24:45

The Fairy Godmother sends her to three

24:47

balls, which is more customary for early

24:49

Cinderella's what happens. And after

24:51

the last one, the prince is proposing

24:53

to the protagonist and she's like, what

24:56

am I doing? I don't want to be with the prince.

24:58

I realized actually who

25:00

I love is this woman that's been helping

25:02

me. And she runs out and the Fairy

25:05

Godmother is like, oh, what are you doing

25:07

here? You've got your prince, right? You've got what you want.

25:09

And she's like, no, no, I want you.

25:13

I had got the story all wrong. How

25:16

could I not have noticed? She was beautiful.

25:20

I must have dropped all my words in the bushes. I

25:22

reached out. I could hear surprise

25:25

on her breath.

25:27

What about the shoe? She asked.

25:30

It was digging into my heel. I told her.

25:33

What about the prince? She asked.

25:35

He'll find someone to fit if he

25:37

looks long enough. What

25:39

about me? She asked very low.

25:43

I'm old enough to be your mother. You're

25:46

not my mother. I said, I'm

25:48

old enough to know that.

25:51

I threw the other shoe into the brambles where

25:53

it hung glinting. So

25:55

then she took me home or

25:58

I took her home.

25:59

we were both somehow taken to

26:02

the closest thing.

26:06

Even if writers stick with the classic version

26:08

of Cinderella where she gets her conventional

26:10

ending, the fairy godmother doesn't

26:12

have to be conventional.

26:14

In contemporary novels, there have been fairy godmother-type

26:17

characters who are male, queer-coded,

26:20

or transgender.

26:21

And in the live-action Disney remake

26:23

of Cinderella from 2021, the fairy godmother, or

26:26

the fab G,

26:29

is played by Billy Porter.

26:54

At a certain point after all these recontextualized

26:57

versions of fairy godmothers, I

26:59

began to wonder, do we even need

27:01

this character anymore?

27:03

She's just too problematic to keep

27:05

in her original version.

27:08

Abigail and Jenna think she still works,

27:11

even without the makeovers.

27:14

Something that I actually really like about the character is

27:16

that she

27:18

doesn't really have a motivation for helping

27:21

Cinderella besides just seeing

27:23

somebody who needs some help, which I think is a

27:25

pretty

27:26

interesting and almost revolutionary

27:28

idea that you can just help somebody for helping

27:30

them, for the sake of helping them, and

27:33

particularly when it is a female-female-help

27:36

relationship.

27:38

One of the reasons why fairy tales sometimes get

27:40

dinged as overly patriarchal is

27:42

that they show a lot of competition

27:44

between women. Within the godmother figure,

27:47

she is one of cooperation

27:50

and warmth and mentorship and guidance.

27:53

Without realizing it, Gail found herself

27:55

in that position just by writing

27:58

Ella Enchanted. In

28:00

a way, I was a fairy godmother for one

28:02

girl who did all the work. I

28:05

got a letter from a young

28:07

woman

28:08

who wrote to me and told me that

28:11

at the time she read Ella,

28:14

she was diagnosed with Tourette's.

28:17

She decided to use Ella

28:21

and consider the Tourette's

28:24

her curse. She worked

28:26

so hard that

28:29

people can't tell she has Tourette's.

28:31

And I thought that this

28:33

girl would have done something else, but

28:36

I was really happy to be the medium

28:38

for that. That

28:41

was handy at the time. And

28:44

what an achievement, it's really great. So

28:46

it's great to know that I've had an

28:49

effect.

28:52

To me, the story of the fairy godmother

28:55

is not just the story of a mentor, but

28:57

also a guardian, a caregiver,

29:00

somebody who understands that anyone can become part

29:02

of your family if they really

29:04

care about you. That's

29:07

it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special

29:09

thanks to Abigail Fine, Jenna Jorgensen,

29:12

Gail Carson-Levine, and Elisa

29:14

Pearl, who do the readings. I

29:16

put a list of all the books we mentioned and the ones

29:18

we didn't in the show notes. If

29:21

you liked this episode, you should check out my 2021 episode,

29:24

This Ain't No Fairy Tale, which was about

29:26

the Brothers Grimm. My assistant

29:29

producer is Stephanie Billman. The

29:31

best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon.

29:34

At different levels, you get either free imaginary

29:36

world stickers, a mug, a T-shirt,

29:39

and a link to a Dropbox, which has the full-length

29:41

interviews of every guest in every episode.

29:44

You can also get access to an ad-free version through

29:46

Patreon, or you can buy an ad-free

29:48

subscription on Apple Podcasts. You

29:51

can subscribe to the show's newsletter at

29:53

imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

29:56

They're glass? Anyway,

29:59

you can make them more comfortable. No. But

30:01

you're magic. Women's shoes are as they are.

30:04

Even magic has its limits. Mm.

30:08

Ow.