There are many who might consider that there are fewer lovelier activities than granting a deserving four-year-old child the opportunity to meet Cinderella.
What could be more noble than to wait your turn in the heat of the midday sun for over two hours so that they might know five minutes of joy?
After all, this fairytale heroine is full of admirable qualities such as grace, elegance and self-control. She is hard-working, submits to authority and bears up under terrible mistreatment. When she is given good things, she is grateful and forgives those who have wronged her.
Prepared to wait
We said goodbye to the boys and positioned ourselves in the queue about 20 minutes before Cinderella was scheduled to appear on the stage in front of us. About 40 hopeful little groups separated us from the front. We were under no illusions about the length of our wait. We were prepared. We sat on our macs and ate our lunch and a little girl in front of us, dressed in a Belle outfit (from Beauty and the Beast) looked hungrily at our grapes.
I asked the adults with her if we could give her a couple. ‘Oh, she’s not with us’, they replied with disinterest. ‘Where’s your Mum?’ I asked the girl. ‘She went off to get a coffee’, she said. ‘That was a long time ago. I might have to go and find her soon.’ Soon afterwards, Cinderella appeared and the queue began to move.
If I had cause to steal a small child, I could have done it, I thought. I turned to the woman behind me who had caught up with what had happened and was articulating the outrage that I was feeling. We began to roundly slander any woman who would leave her four-year-old daughter unattended for a whole 30 minutes while she went off for coffee. We went quiet when the mother returned, carrying an overfull drinks carton slopping coca-cola. ‘There you go’, she said to Belle, breathlessly, ‘take that’. The lady behind and I gave each other raised eyebrows and then recomposed our features as though the past 30 minutes had never happened. She was wearing an expensive looking bling necklace with matching earrings. She was from Dubai.
Queue jumpers?
We got level with the stage and we propped the girls up so that they could get a proper look at Cinderella. There was still easily 45 minutes to go. Belle’s mother began to look sour. ‘Who are those people, going to the front of the queue? They weren’t there five minutes ago!’ Children with disabilities rightly gain special treatment at Disney, but this can slow things down for everyone else. She shouted out to one of the stewards, ‘Why do they get to go first? These small children here have been waiting two hours on their feet! It’s not fair! Can’t you arrange something else for them?’ I looked down and away in disgust. Who did this woman think she was? It was outrageously embarrassing. I had exchanged some pleasantries with her but now I turned away, resolving not to look her in the eye again. I gave Dubai lady a silent look of horror. She reciprocated in kind.
Wail of outrage
It was at the moment that Cinderella gave a wave and disappeared, to be replaced by the character of Belle, that the peace was conclusively shattered. A wail of outrage met my ears, led by Dubai lady. ‘Nooooo! Where’s she going? We came to see Cinderella! Not Belle!’ She lent up close and whispered loudly in my ear, ‘Do you know, if those people hadn’t pushed in, we’d have been there by now!’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did they have no respect for other people? Or patience? Was I the only one caring about what the children thought when they listened to this?
Self-assessment
When we got to the head of the queue, the clouds lifted considerably. This was mainly because Cinderella magically returned just as we were ushered onto the stage. As we waited those final few minutes, Dubai lady leaned over and said sheepishly, ‘Do you know, this queue has brought out the evil in me. I’ve been saying all these things and really, does it matter who she meets? No.’ Belle’s mother looked pensive. ‘You know, I was really angry back there. It really got me going. I’m not usually like that.’ I stayed quiet, reviewing my own behaviour. I’d been comparing myself favourably to them all the way round. I hadn’t even thought to talk to them about Jesus.
All three of us were guilty of many thoughts, hidden and vocalised that showed our true natures that day. Jesus warned about this sort of thing when he talked to the Pharisees in Mark 7. He talked strongly to them about it: ‘Are you so dull?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean?’… Rather it is what comes out of a man that makes him “unclean”… For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man “unclean”‘ (Mark 7.18,21-23).
Afterwards, with photos of daughter meeting Cinderella safely in the camera, I thought again about Jesus and how it was that his death had made my heart clean. I also realised how much more important it was that I should help her to meet The Hero every day. With no queue.
