Queen of the princesses

Every little girl wants to be a princess — and my five-year-old niece is no exception. If she had her way (which she often does), she'd wear a fancy dress and a tiara every day. It goes without saying that she'd always be the center of attention.

There's something deep in the female psyche that responds to fairy tales — at least to the modern sanitized versions — and to pageantry.

As kids, my sister and I watched the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer in 1981. I think we felt a connection to the British royal family because our grandmother looked exactly like Queen Elizabeth. But we had very different impressions of the ceremony itself. I saw it as an arranged marriage between an awkward millionaire and an androgynous noblewoman, carefully choreographed according to ancient custom and spoken about in very stilted English. My sister, instead, was spellbound by the length of Diana's wedding dress, the size of St Paul's Cathedral and the number of guests who had been invited.

I'll be interested to hear what her daughter thinks of real-life royalty if they watch the current royal wedding together. The Disney company has given her enough opportunities to practice.

At a Cinderella-themed event at a Disney hotel, for example, she met a man dressed as Prince Charming. He bowed and said, "How do you do?"

My niece responded: "How do you do what?" (Note to would-be princesses: the correct answer is to repeat "How do you do?")

Cinderella herself was there as well. She's one of the "Disney princesses", a growing franchise aimed at very young girls and their parents' pocketbooks. The "princesses" are models who are hired to represent the princess figures in various legends that Disney has made into animated films — Pocahontas, Mulan, Snow White and six others.

Once you find the Disney princesses, it's hard not to find them. They appear at the Disney theme parks — you can have breakfast with them in Cinderella's castle in Orlando. They greet passengers and pose for photos on Disney cruise ships in the Caribbean. They stroll along the beach on a private island owned by Disney. And in a very expensive shopping area at Walt Disney World, "fairy godmothers" create the next generation of princesses by styling little girls' hair, giving them little crowns, applying light make-up and glitter and painting their fingernails.

I think this might be crossing some boundaries, given that some of the kids are only three years old, but my sister put it into context: "It's sort of like Halloween," she explained.

My niece takes it more seriously than that, though. She wears her Cinderella dress whenever she can. Asked by one of the Disney staffers whether she'd like to be a princess, however, she said no.

No?

"No. I want to be queen of the princesses," she said primly.