For she's a jolly good fellow.

Oh man, a friend just posted a clip of Disney's Fantasia on facebook, and it brought back some traumatising memories I thought I'd share!

It's nearly my eighth birthday. I'm not a kid anymore. Previous birthdays involved tea-parties with my mom and my dolls, mostly just my dolls. I really loved dolls. But not this year, I'm eight and I'm ready to have a real birthday party, with real friends! Or at least real kids my age. It's going to be a normal party, we're going to do the things normal kids do, there will be rice krispie buns and we'll watch movies and everyone will leave thinking "Amanda is so cool and normal!".

Being normal is important when you're eight.

So I invited about ten kids from my class, including two boys, which was kind of a big deal. Gerard was my on-off boyfriend all through primary school (I'm pretty sure we held hands once) and Podge had big brown eyes and the biggest mushroom-step haircut in the class, like woah.

So everyone comes, and they give me sparkly note pads and glitter glue pens and squishy bracelets, you know the typical neon fare for a birthday in the early nineties (apart from one girl who gave me this really unusual but pretty silk flower in a glass vase filled with water.. kind of like this. Which I liked so much I bought a similar one for a girl's birthday the following year who looked at it in disgust and said "Why are you giving me a grave ornament?")

Anyway, all is going well and then it's time for the movie. My mom had rented a video earlier, and when I asked what she'd gotten I hadn't heard of it, but she assured me she asked the clerk for something for a birthday and I figured it must just be a new release. What followed was the most embarrassing twenty minutes of my life at that stage. 

Have you ever seen Fantasia?!

 It's fucking weird as shit. All I really remember is that it was weird and creepy and there were no words, and there were hippos dancing in tutus and I couldn't decide if I thought it was for babies, or for grown ups (high grown ups) but it was definitely not appropriate viewing for a normal eight year old's birthday. Normal kids had normal moms who rented normal movies like Hook or the Goonies or the Neverending Story 2: The Next Chapter. What kind of bullshit was this?!  Oh god, and everyone was like  "Uh... what is this, Amanda?" and I'm all "Um... I think it gets better", thinking "It HAS to get better!" until I eventually  begged my mom to let me turn it off despite her telling me I was being silly and ungrateful and everyone probably wanted to see the end. No, mom, nobody wants to see the end!
 And that was the day I decided never to even try be cool ever again. I think it was the first time I truly experienced embarrassment. If I ever have a kid I will be force-screening Fantasia at it's eighth birthday for character building purposes, and for kicks.


UPDATE!
I found a couple old photographs from that particular birthday the other week, so I thought I'd add one. I'm in the pink and purple ensemble.