When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Shirley Temple and always looked forward to watching her movies on TV. I'm sure lots of readers, young and old, have heard her singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop" or seen her hoofing with Bill "Bojangles," one of the greatest tap dancers of all times. Shirley Temple made so many great movies and everybody has a favorite or two.
Mine is the 1939 film The Little Princess, where Temple proves that besides knowing how to sing and dance, she can be a great dramatic actress as well. In this movie, she plays a little rich girl, living at Miss Minchin's exclusive boarding school in Victorian London. Everyone adores her and the head mistress coddles her until she learns that her richest student's father, off searching for diamonds in Africa, has disappeared, leaving his motherless daughter alone and penniless.
Overnight the "little princess" is demoted from star pupil to scullery maid, transferred from a toasty, luxurious suite to an unheated garret room. Of course, in the end, resilient and ebullient Shirley comes out on top, finding her lost father and even meeting Queen Victoria, but in between times life gets pretty rough.
I have probably seen this movie dozens of times. I have also read and reread the story on which it is based, the 1905 novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who also wrote the children's classics A Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. In my Paris apartment, I have a first-edition copy of A Little Princess. It belonged to my great-aunt Annette Hartstein, who for many years was the principal of Jalapa School in Pottsville.
I treasure this book and like to page through it to admire the beautiful illustrations made by an artist more familiar with firelight than with electricity. The drawings are dark yet they glow like burning embers, projecting a warm and wavering light.
When I was fourteen years old, my father died. I wonder if that is why I have always been attracted to stories where daughters lose and sometimes find their fathers. In these stories, mothers are strangely absent, often never mentioned, as if little girls were delivered to delighted, devoted dads by an attentive stork.
Even before I lost my father, I devoured Nancy Drew mystery novels, reading several in the space of a weekend. Other fans of the intrepid Nancy might remember she lived with her dad and Mrs. Gruen, the housekeeper, with no mother anywhere in sight.
Nancy also had a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, but he definitely stayed in the background. Mostly Nancy "tooled around in her roadster," to use the language of the early novels, with her girlfriends Beth and George. Together, they solved crimes without ever requesting the help of a man, be it Nancy's lawyer father or a member of the local police force.
I wanted to grow up to be like Nancy Drew and, sharing her first name, it seemed I might have a chance.
In my apartment in Paris, I also have some 1930 editions of Nancy Drew mysteries. Heading towards retirement age, I don't think there's much chance I'll ever become a "sleuth" like Nancy, but she remains a source of inspiration to me.
In fact, she and Sarah Crewe, the name of the "little princess" Shirely Temple portrayed, are the inspiration behind a serialized novel I've written and will soon be sharing with Republican Herald readers.
Beginning Monday, September 2, 2013, you'll find a link to it on the homepage of the electronic edition of the paper. The novel is Mademoiselle Remix and twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, she'll be writing to you...
To give you a taste of what it's all about, Mademoiselle Remix's story is that of a modern-day princess who falls out of a fairy tale into the real world.
Like Nancy Drew or Sarah Crewe, she is a girl raised by her father, a millionaire recluse, who has built himself a castle high in the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania. There he raises his daughter alone, with the help of a housekeeper and a governess, the same woman who schooled him when he was a boy (the character is a cross between Miss Patterson, a former head of the Pottsville Free Public Library, and Miss Schartel, once the Latin teacher at PAHS).
Then her father loses his fortune and commits suicide. Overnight, Constance, sixteen years old, finds herself alone, with no family, no home—or so she believes.
Her father had always told her her mother was dead. It was just the two of them against the world, but she soon learns her mother is alive, though not well, living with her son, Constance's half-brother, in the suburbs of Paris. And that's where Constance is headed, to one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of all of France—whether she likes it or not.
Constance speaks perfect school-girl French—her governess saw to that. She can adapt to the language, but can this innocent girl, who was never allowed to have friends, adapt to a mother she believed dead, a half-brother named Karim, a high school fraught with racial and ethnic tensions, a distressed and violent neighborhood nextdoor to one of the most brilliant cities in the world?
To find out, you'll have to read Constance's twice-weekly "letters to the World." In them, she tells her own story in her own words, those of a sheltered young woman suddenly and brutally confronted with 21st century reality. Beginning in September and across four months, you'll participate in the "remix" as Constance is reborn.
Mademoiselle Remix is Constance's autobiography, her reaching out to the World. It is also the story of a part of France that few tourists, let alone Frenchmen, know. For over twenty years, I have lived and worked there, in the "dangerous suburbs" north of Paris and I believe that's where the future of France, perhaps of the world, is being written now.
When I was seven years old, I already knew I wanted to learn French and go to France someday. Who knows what mysterious influences put such ideas in a young girl's head. And I have always loved telling stories that make people laugh or cry.
I'm hoping that's what Mademoiselle Remix will do, just as I hope you'll reach out to Constance, as Constance reaches out to you...
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