|
Rapunzel
by Scott Teel
Once, there lived a man and a woman who were poor. But there were people who were more poor, so let’s talk about them instead.
Once, there lived a man and a woman who were more poor than other men and women. They lived in a little house and tried to make do, but they were very bad do makers.
The house they lived in had a window at the back that looked out onto a beautiful garden, full of the nicest things and some slugs, which you just can’t get rid of completely no matter how much you try.
But it was owned by a nasty fairy who was actually named Nasty McNasty. She had the whole garden walled off, and no one dared go inside it, for fear that the fairy would do unspeakable things to them, actual unspeakable things, like making them say “I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit,” It’s hell. Try it.
The poor woman would look at the beautiful garden every day, and became so infatuated with a plant called “rapunzel” that she told her husband if she didn’t get some, she would die. Talk about melodramatic. What they didn’t realize yet was that she was pregnant and craving rapunzel, not to mention pickles and Devil Dogs.
So the poor husband went over the wall to get some rapunzel, but the fairy was there, just a’ waitin’ for him. She was going to make him say “a black baby buggy with rubber baby buggy bumpers” three times fast, but he begged for mercy.
“Please,” he wailed, “my wife really needed this crap. Hey, you don’t grow Devil Dogs in here do you?”
The old fairy decided to let him go, but first he and the wife had to promise to give her their first-born child. It was a win-win situation, what with the couple having spent their last pittance of money on Devil Dogs.
So when the baby came, the fairy took her, and she was a wonderful little girl. The fairy named her Rapunzel. To keep track of Rapunzel, she put her in a tower with no door or entry, just a window 30-feet up. Since there was no way to get in, the fairy had to spend years teaching Rapunzel pole-vaulting, until one day, Rapunzel was able to vault right into the window. Of course, it wasn’t her first try; she’d broken her nose twice and cracked five ribs in previous attempts when she smacked the wall.
 Now that she was in the tower, there was no way out. Over the years, Rapunzel had grown hair, like some children do, but hers was never cut, and it was, coincidentally, about 30 feet long. When the fairy wanted to get up to see Rapunzel, she would yell “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” And Rapunzel would toss her hair out for the fairy to climb up. This was leading to some serious split ends, and the fairy only brought her the cheap generic store-brand shampoo, not Prell, which was what Rapunzel really wanted.
So the fairy would climb up (the hair was wrapped around a bed post, of course, Rapunzel couldn’t support a whole fairy with her head) and putz around, clean Rapunzel’s litter box, and then leave.
One day, a prince was walking through the woods and saw the tower, and who do you think was at the window singing? Yes, it was none other than Rod Stewart, who was such a bad singer that he had to find audiences that had no way of fleeing, like Rapunzel. Before the Prince got too close (he’d stayed back a bit, waiting for “Maggie” to end) the fairy came along. She turned Rod Stewart into a frog, and his voice immediately sounded better that way. Then the fairy yelled, “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” and down came the hair, and up went the fairy, and the Rod Stewart frog left to attend the Grammys.
After the fairy left, the prince waited a few hours in the woods, wondering if he should approach the beautiful maiden in the tower. Finally, he went to the foot of the tower and yelled “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair!”
Rapunzel looked out the window and saw the prince. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Do you know how long it took me to get it in this bun?”
I’ll have to win her over with a smooth line, the prince thought. “Hey baby,” he called. “if I told you you had a nice body, would you hold it against me?”
“God that’s old,” Rapunzel replied.
“Uh...you must be Jamaican, ‘cause Jamaican me crazy?”
“Oh please.”
“I fell into a pile of you and got love all over me.”
“All right, all right, I’ll let down my hair.”
 So she let down her hair, and the prince started up. He got a few inches up but in his gym classes when he was younger, he never was one of the kids who could get to the top of the rope. As he struggled to climb the hair, the memories of taunting children in gym class flooded back, and he began to cry.
“Are you crying?” Rapunzel asked.
“No,” he sniffled.
“You can’t climb it, can you?”
“I can so too. I just need a little time to rest my hands.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Rapunzel said, and she hauled him up herself.
Once inside, the prince regained his composure. “Now, I shall kiss you and you will be free of this tower,” he said.
“Um, no, this isn’t a curse, it’s just a really tall tower.”
“Then I shall do the next best thing.” And instead of kissing her, he knocked her up.
After that, the prince would return each night to tell her stories of his kingdom, and also because he liked doing it with her.
One morning, the fairy noticed that Rapunzel had really developed biceps for someone who sat around in a tower all day.
“You’ve been hauling a prince up here every night, haven’t you!” she snapped.
“Of course not...don’t be silly,” Rapunzel said, and then threw up.
“A lie! And you’re pregnant! Give me back those E.L. Fudge cookies!”
The fairy sent Rapunzel to the desert, where she eventually had twins. As for the prince, the next time he arrived, the fairy poked him in the eyes while saying “nyuk nyuk nyuk.” The blind prince stumbled around the woods for years, eating grubs and poison ivy, unable to find his way home.
Eventually, he stumbled into the desert, and came upon Rapunzel, whose voice he recognized. Rapunzel cried with joy, and when her tears hit his eyes, he could see again; a loophole the fairy hadn’t realized. And now that he could see her...oof. Boy, having two kids had really taken a toll on her. She looked like the Michelin Man, only sunburned.
“Um, I’m not the prince you’re looking for,” he said. “Have a nice life in the desert here.”
And the shallow prince left. One day, Rapunzel realized that maybe she could just walk out of the desert. But the kids complained that they would miss their friends, the gila monsters, if they moved. So they stayed, and a few months later, the gila monsters moved away.
The Moral of the Story is : the Rod Stewart frog won four Grammys.
© 2005 Scott Teel |
