Still, it’s hard to figure out what to say in my bio, let alone my expository writing sample on what I learned this summer. Because what am I going to write? “Hello, my name is HRH Princess Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo? You might have heard of me, on account of there’ve been a couple movies based on my life.”
Although to tell the truth, both of those movies took a lot of liberties with the facts. It was bad enough in the first one that they made my dad dead and Grandmère all nice and everything. Now, in the latest one, I supposedly broke up with Michael! Like that’s going to happen. That was entirely projection on the part of the movie studio, I guess to make the story more exciting, or something. As if my life isn’t exciting enough without any help from Hollywood.
Although I do have a lot in common with that Aragorn guy from The Return of the King. I mean, we’ve both had the mantle of sovereignty thrust upon us. I would much rather be a normal person than heir to a throne. I kind of got the feeling that Aragorn felt the same way.
Not that I don’t love the land over which I will one day rule. It’s just that it’s really boring to have to spend the better part of your summer with your dad and your grandma when you’d LIKE to be spending it with your new baby brother, not to mention your BOYFRIEND, who is starting COLLEGE in the fall.
Not that, you know, Michael is going AWAY to college or anything; he’s only going to Columbia, which is right in Manhattan, although it’s way uptown, way farther uptown than I usually go, except for that one time we went to Sylvia’s for fried chicken and waffles.
Anyway, I wrote the following bio for Ms. Martinez while I was still in Genovia last week. I hope that when she reads it she’ll recognize in my prose the soul of a fellow lover of writing:
From the Desk of
Princess Amelia Renaldo
MY BIO
by Mia Thermopolis
My name is Mia Thermopolis. I’m fifteen, a Taurus, heir to the throne of the principality of Genovia (population 50,000), and my hobbies include being taught how to be a princess by my grandmother; watching TV; eating out (or ordering in); reading; working for the AEHS newspaper, The Atom; and writing poetry. My future career aspiration is to be a novelist and/or a rescue dog handler (like when there’s an earthquake, to help find people trapped under rubble).
However, I will most likely have to settle for being Princess of Genovia (POG).
That was the easy part, really. The hard part was figuring out what to say about what I learned during my summer vacation. I mean, what DID I learn, anyway? I spent most of the month of June helping Mom and Mr. G adjust to having an infant in the house—which was a very difficult transition for them, since for so many years all inhabitants of our household were entirely bipedal (not counting my cat, Fat Louie). The introduction of a family member who will eventually—perhaps even for a year or more—get around mostly by crawling, made me acutely aware of the entirely unbaby-safe environment in which we live…although it didn’t seem to bother Mom and Mr. G so much.
Which is why I had to get Michael to help me install baby plugs in all of the outlets, and baby guards on all of our lower cabinet drawers—something Mom didn’t entirely appreciate, since she now has trouble getting out the salad spinner.
She’ll thank me one day though when she realizes that it’s entirely because of me that Rocky hasn’t gotten into any devastating salad spinner accidents.
When we weren’t busy baby-proofing the loft, Michael and I didn’t do much. I mean, there’s lots of things a couple deeply in love can do in New York City during the summer: boating on the lake in Central Park, carriage rides along Fifth Avenue, visiting museums and gazing upon great works of art, attending the opera on the Great Lawn, dining at outdoor cafés in Little Italy, et cetera.
However, all of these things can get quite expensive (unless you take advantage of student rates) except that whole opera-in-the-park thing, which is free, but you have to get there at like eight in the morning to stake out your place and even then those weird opera people are all territorial and yell at you if your blanket accidentally touches theirs. And besides, everyone in operas always dies and I hate that as much as the blanket thing.
And while it’s true that I am a princess, I am still extremely limited in the funds department, because my father keeps me on an absurdly small allowance of only twenty dollars a week, in the hopes that I will not become a party girl (like certain socialites I could mention) if I don’t have a lot of disposable income to spend on things like rubber miniskirts and heroin.
And although Michael got a summer job at the Apple Store in SoHo, he is saving all of his money for a copy of Logic Platinum, the music software program, so he can continue to write songs even though his band, Skinner Box, is on hiatus while its members scatter across the nation to attend various colleges and rehab clinics. He also wants a Cinema HD, a twenty-three-inch flat-panel display screen, to go with the Power Mac G5 he’s also hoping to buy, all of which he can get with his employee discount, but which all together will still cost as much as a single Segway Human Transporter, something I’ve been lobbying for my dad to buy me for some time now to no avail.
Besides, it’s no fun to go on a carriage ride through Central Park with your boyfriend and YOUR BODYGUARD.
So mostly when we weren’t at my place installing baby guards, we spent June just hanging out at Michael’s place, since then Lars could watch ESPN or chat with the Drs. Moscovitz, when they were not with patients or at their country home in Albany, while Michael and I concentrated on what was really important: making out and playing as much Rebel Strike as was humanly possible before being cruelly separated by my father on July 1 (which was at least an improvement over the June 1 DFG—departure for Genovia—date he’d tried to foist on me originally).