The Princess Diarist(40)
For the most part they’re kind and courteous, and as if that weren’t enough, they quite frequently appear before you in amazing homemade costumes whipped up by Alderaan-obsessed parents for their Forcefed children. Tiny Ben Kenobis, little Lukes, miniature Darth Vaders, and—my personal favorites—the teensiest of Princess Leias.
These smallest of small Leias are brought to me like tiny offerings, prize possessions held aloft for my blessings and my praise, both of which they receive in abundance. Do the children know that it’s “me” that they are dressed as? Of course not! Those under four—all they know is that they’re hot, that there are way too many people swarming around everywhere, and that they just want to go home, or anywhere other than standing in this line with similarly swaddled sorts spilling out of their sci-fi garb with no imminent sign of escape.
One little girl came by who’d been told she was going to meet Princess Leia; imagine her excitement, that is, until she saw the new me.
“No!” she wailed, squirming her head away from the sight of me. “I want the other Leia, not the old one.”
Her father flushed, then leaned apologetically toward my ear. “Well, no, you see she doesn’t mean that—we’ve just seen the first three films and loved you in them so much—”
“Please!” I interrupted. “You don’t have to apologize for my looking older to your daughter after forty years. I look older to me, too, and I don’t apologize to myself—though perhaps I should.”
Vast airwaves of awkwardness ensued, his daughter unable to look at me and confront what time had done. It all ended well though, with me promising to get plastic surgery (after I explained to the little girl what that was) and getting her father to promise to read his daughter bits of Wishful Drinking, and look at its pictures together, so she’d see what the actual Carrie was like and how pretty she could be once the endlessly extraordinary Leia was finished.
The youngest fans who do know where they are (and where they’re likely to be for quite some time) rarely seem happy, and when they finally reach their inexplicable destination they become paralyzed with shyness and hide behind whatever part of their parents they can access through their stormtrooper getups. The most desperate, confused, or hungry ones cry in fear or embarrassment or exasperation, or all three, while I do my best to soothe them. I bust my ass trying to soothe them, for their pain is palpable and I have rampant empathy.
And while the adults are unfailingly polite, there’s a certain lack of empathy among some of them for me. They know they might be bothering me with their requests—a selfie, a lengthy inscription, an extra few “for my friends, they love Star Wars as much as I do, one of them even more”—and they’re quick to acknowledge this and pretend that they could accept rejection. But fuck it, they know they’re not asking me to do anything that hard. They present their requests with the pretense that I have the option to refuse, but we’re all aware that the exchange could move very quickly to, “Well, you wanted to be in show business, and if you didn’t want people to want your autograph you should never have become an actress.”
They also frequently want you to write a piece of dialogue, and that is how I first came to understand who they thought Leia was. I knew who she was to the women, but the men really liked her unthreatening little bitchiness, which was probably even less intimidating because I’m short. All the lines they want me to write are like “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” The biggest favorite is “Why, you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder.” They can’t get enough of it.
? ? ?
i sit there in front of all of these different pictures of myself from a million years ago and attempt to make looking at images from other eras somehow interesting to me. I don’t remember when these photos were taken or who the photographers were. One picture in particular makes me feel happy and sad—it’s a very popular one, and in it I look high as a kite. I occasionally like to ask people, “How do I look in that shot?” The kinder people respond “sleepy” or “tired” or “almost available.”
I was signing my nude-ass picture a decade or so ago and I realized that I’d been—and I can’t believe I’m using this word about myself—a sex symbol. Only now the reaction I sometimes get is disappointment, occasionally bordering on resentment, for my having desecrated my body by letting my age increase so. It’s like I’ve TPed myself, thrown eggs at myself, defaced myself as if I were a rowdy trick-or-treater, and some of them are appalled. I wish I’d understood the kind of contract I signed by wearing something like that, insinuating I would and will always remain somewhere in the erotic ballpark appearance-wise, enabling fans to remain connected to their younger, yearning selves—longing to be with me without having to realize that we’re both long past all of this in any urgent sense, and accepting it as a memory rather than an ongoing reality.
It is truly an honor to have been the first crush of so many boys. It’s just difficult to get my head around having spent so much time in so many heads—and that time was of a certain quality. It occurred to me one day, as I finished affixing my flowery signature to yet another photograph of my long-ago young self wearing that slave bikini, that it could appear as though someone had convinced me that if I signed enough of these provocative images, I would at some point magically return to being young and slim.