Notes on My Snow White

If you somehow landed here without reading My Snow White, please read it first, then come back. The story is much more important and interesting than these musings.

When I was a very little kid, no more than ten years old, my class did a performance of "Snow White" for our parents and all the other kids in the school. I didn't really have much of a part: the class was big and I was in the chorus that sang some of the songs.

I remember that I was on stage for nearly the whole play, especially the part of the play where Snow White eats the poisoned apple, the dwarves discover her, and, soon enough, the prince wakes her.

I forgot the name of the girl who played Snow White, but I remember seeing her drop down "dead" time after time in rehearsal, and on occasion we got a little peek at her underwear beneath her skirt as she lay there. I was very young, so I didn't feel much more than a sense of embarrassed excitement, but I started really loving that story from then on.

I imagined myself the dwarf who found her, and imagined myself checking to see if she was all right. I imagined myself the prince who rescued her. I imagined that, back in the castle, I, the prince, and Snow White, my princess, would re-enact their story from time to time. I kind of wished I could be both the dwarf, and the hero who'd defend her honor. Dopey, I guess...

Anyway, moving forward a number of years, I came across some web sites about Snow White a while back, only to discover that there were three death scenes for Snow White in some of the oldest versions of the story!

All this sloshed around in my gray matter for a few months, maybe even years.

As I write this, I am working on a very ambitious story for this site (tentatively called "The Game"). As is often the case when someone with limited writing time (and, perhaps, limited writing talent) tries something ambitious, I got bogged down in details. However, I wanted to write something good for this site, but it needed to be quite a bit shorter than "The Game."

So, I decided to write a twisted version of the Snow White story that would give the dwarfs more fun, make fun of the ditsy "princesses" that seem to abound in certain kid's fiction nowadays (not mentioning any motion picture studios by name, mind you), and write down a few ideas about what to do with an unconscious beauty without doing her harm. It is very important to me that Snow White was in no real danger from my dwarves, even though it is a story.

Please write me if you have any comments about this, or if you'd like to share your own memories.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.