To Keep Them With You

The best compliment I can receive from a guest is something along the lines of, "You made it so special for her!" This makes me prouder than any specific praise of my hair or my stories or my general perky demeanor.  To have made something so special for someone else is simply the most satisfying and gratifying thing one can do and to have a guest tell me I have accomplished this for their princess means more than all my GSF cards combined (13, by the way.) This compliment sums up absolutely everything a Fairy Godmother in Training is supposed to do and, as this is my final post, I thought I should too.

We are supposed to make our princesses feel welcome.  We greet them warmly and excitedly, welcome them in to our chair, and immediately make them feel like there is nothing more interesting in the whole world to us than them.  When I moved in to my apartment I was hesitant for less than an hour about my living arrangements.  As a person who has had nothing but terrible roommates since moving out of my parent's house when I first left for college this is a tremendous amount of confidence.  I have never felt welcome or felt that I was safe and with people like me outside of my own family home. But my roommates, my Floridian family, made me feel welcome.  These five women and I created a home together that made us all feel safe, welcome, cared for, and infinitely important to one another.  I made friends.  I made friends with complete strangers from all over the country and I can safely say that leaving them will be one of the hardest partings in my life.  These girls are the friends I was meant to have all along and in the short time we have spent together we have formed a bond that will no doubt continue throughout our lives. Our princesses are in our chairs for 30 minutes and we make them feel like it has always been and always will be their chair.  I have known Sam, Andi, Courtney, and Melissa for 4 months and I feel that they have always been and will always be my real friends.

We are supposed to give our princesses magic.  From my first day at the Boutique I loved what I did.  From our beautiful dresses to the constant swirl of Pixie Dust there was nothing more wonderfully magical than being a Fairy Godmother in Training.  Pixie Dust aside, what truly made the Boutique magical were my fellow FGITs.  These amazing women brought the stories to life, made each day fun, and created the magical memories that aren't just for the princesses.  I have had the distinct privilege of working with some of the most charming, smart, funny, and genuinely kind people in the world.  I suppose everyone eventually encounters a group of people so very like you where you fit just perfectly and for me this group was my FGITs.  There is a type of person who is a truly good Fairy Godmother.  They are kind, gentle, open minded, funny, loud, creative, quick witted, fast talking, dramatic, selfless, and beautiful and I can think of no greater honor than to be counted among their ranks.

We are supposed to create something that lasts.  It is not enough for our princesses to feel pretty for a few minutes as they stare at themselves in the mirror.  As a Fairy Godmother our job is to transform our princess so completely that she feels beautiful from the inside out for years to come.  When a princess leaves my chair, and I am certain I am not the only FGIT who feels this way, I want her to feel so beautiful she can't stop smiling.  I want her to feel so perfect that her joy just bursts from her in squeals of delight and peels of laughter.  I want her to keep that feeling with her when she goes.

I had a princess recently who's mother asked me about the college program while I was doing her hair.  I explained how it worked and that I only had a brief amount of time left before I had to turn in my gown and my wand and move on.  I returned to my usual princess performance and had a truly wonderful time with one of my more delightful princesses.  I turned the chair, she gasped in delight, hugged me, and toddled off with her mom to check out and purchase more accessories.  It was when I was cleaning my station a few moments later that she returned.

"Princess, you've got a beautiful purse now!"

"I have something for you!" She opened her little, blue, satin bag and fished around until she pulled out a large, clear plastic gem.  "This is my magic jewel. It's for you."

I bent down and held the shiny plastic in my hand.  "Thank you, princess. That's so very nice of you!"

"It's for you for when you leave.  You have to give back your dress and your wand but this is for your powers.  To keep them with you when you go."  She looked at me with the utmost sincerity.

"Thank you, princess.  I was so very worried I would have to leave them behind."



To my friends, my family, my FGITs, to the Royal Photographers, to every Pittsburgh guest, to my Make a Wish princesses, to my Sleeping Beauty, to the entire nation of Brazil, to Princess Rose, every reluctant princess, brave knights, to the story tellers, singers, and goofy face makers,  to every princess who ever just sat down for a chat with me and every family who laughed at my jokes, to my readers who I know and love and those who only know me through my words, and to every princess, every Hannah, Sara, Elizabeth and Isabella, every Sophia, Ashley, Ashleigh, and Ashlee, to every Bailey, Hailey, and my ever perfect Emmas, to everyone:



You made it so very special.

Fairy Throws a Fiesta (and Other Accomplishments)

I am a really excellent planner. I can create a plan for about anything but the trouble comes in the execution.  My myriad attempts at gourmet cooking provide an excellent example of this.  I can read a recipe, prepare every last ingredient, but, inevitably, something goes terribly, oven-wreckingly, wrong.  I don't mean to imply that I am a bad cook because that would be misleading. I am a pretty good cook, actually, as long as I stick to what I refer to as "real food." These being foods found in my mom's recipe box and old Betty Crocker cookbooks and other commonplace sources.  I have trouble when I, unwisely, venture in to the world of "picture food," that is foods I find in magazines and fancy food blogs.  I once attempted what appeared to be a simple salmon cake recipe.  The result was a glob of salmon meat and various mix-ins that was burnt black on the outside but still disgustingly squishy inside and all the doors and windows thrown open to allow the smoke to escape.  The point is I am really good at making plans but they rarely go exactly as expected.  So I was thrilled when a plan I made recently came together so smoothly.

My roommate Andi turned 23 on the 27th of April and we decided to put together a little day to celebrate.  Because this was Sam and me planning this quickly escalated in to an all day, pull out all the stops, bash.  Our day began on a formal note with breakfast with the princesses.  We dressed up and enjoyed a rather expensive but delicious meal with our girls Belle, Ariel, Aurora, Snow White, and Cinderella.

And I was like, "Oh, hey there, Cin." And she was all like, " Fairy Godmother Morgan, that dress is faaaantastic." And I was like, "Oh, you..."

We said our adieus to the royal family and headed out to the next portion of our ever more ridiculous day but not before stopping for a brief photo session in front of Spaceship Earth. The results were delightful.

Look how chill we are while Mickey commands a broom army behind us. That's Cast Member Confidence.

It was at this point that things got decidedly mas Mexicano. Andi (short for Andreina) is of Mexican decent and we think this is delightful.  I personally, have no interesting or scholarship worthy ethnicity to speak of and so I enjoy commandeering other people's cultures for the sake of a good tiempo.  So that is why we spent the rest of the day wearing tshirts with Andi's face printed across the front which boldly shouted "HOY ES EL CUMPLEANOS DE ANDREINA" and featuring a beautiful representation of cross cultural understanding on the back.

I think I honestly represented our level of understanding.

We spent our day at the Magic Kingdom which, in the opinion of people who matter, is the best place possible to celebrate a birthday this side of... no wait, it's just the best. We laughed overly hard at the jokes on the Jungle Cruise, shrieked with delight on the Magic Carpets, threw our hands in the air as we picked up speed to a whopping 6 miles per hour on the TTA and generally behaved like the children we secretly are.  Pause for obligatory castle picture (with a touch of fiesta flare.)

We chose the sombrero with the diameter closest to her height as is the Mexican tradition, I assume.

We returned to Epcot for our traditional Mexican feast but first we had to pay a quick visit to our amigo and my character favorito.  Fortunately, he got the memo about our fiesta-wear dress code.  

He gusta'd our sombreros.

We had our dinner at the Mexican pavilion in Epcot which is shaped like the pyramid at Chitzen Itza and, inexplicably, has another pyramid at Chitzen Itza inside it along with a volcano and a river with a charming barco ride.  Of course it was muy delicioso and we capped it off with a fantastico chocolate cake and a boat ride around tiny little Mexico.  Andi also got to purchase some Mexican candy she loves which, I kid you not, consisted of lemon flavor powder and salt because, apparently, Mexican candy companies hate children.  Have you ever played that game where you open a bunch of sugar packets and fill one with salt and then make everyone down theirs and wait to see who's face scrunches up and tries to crawl in to their nose? That is essentially what happened when she had us taste this candy except everyone lost.  There are no winners in Mexican candy eating. Montezuma has spread his wrath beyond the water supply.  

I arranged for a massive fireworks display to occur at the exact same time the normal fireworks go off. Many people did not realize that they were special birthday addition fireworks but I assure you, despite them being in no way different from the normal Illuminations show, these were special fireworks that I totally arranged to cap off the night because I am such. a. good. friend. 

Moral of the story: I planned a giant, multi-step, multi-reservation, craft making, themed birthday extravaganza and absolutely nothing caught on fire.  

In other accomplishment news (for those of you playing along at home pull out your score cards) I reached what I thought was a completely unrealistic goal of earning 10 GSF cards.  My final cards were for story telling which just goes to show you that there are now rewards for being Irish. 

All I'm saying is my boss is named Mickey...