The Princess Diaries

I don’t know. The Hos aren’t exactly Nazis. They’re very nice to the little cat they’ve raised from a kitten to chase rats away from the chicken wings in the salad bar.

Maybe I’m not too sorry about missing the taping tomorrow.

But I am sorry Grandm่re tore up my list of the ten women I admire most. I thought it was nice. When I got home, I printed it out again, just because it made me so mad, her tearing it up like that. I put a copy in this book.

And after carefully reviewing my copy of the Renaldo-Thermopolis Compromise, I see nothing about princess lessons. Something is going to have to be done about this. I have been leaving messages for Dad all night, but he doesn’t answer. Where is he?

Lilly isn’t home, either. Maya says the Moscovitzes went to Great Shanghai for dinner as a family, in order to grow to understand one another better as human beings.

I wish Lilly would hurry up and get home and call me back. I don’t want her to think I’m in any way against her groundbreaking investigation into Ho’s Deli. I just want to tell her the reason I won’t be able to be there is because I have to spend the day with my grandmother.

I hate my life.

The Ten Women I Admire Most in the Whole World

by Mia Thermopolis

Madonna. Madonna Ciccone revolutionized the fashion world with her iconoclastic sense of style, sometimes offending people who are not very open-minded—for instance, her rhinestone cross earrings, which made many Christian groups ban her CDs—or who have no sense of humor—like Pepsi, which didn’t like it when she danced in front of some burning crosses. It was because she wasn’t afraid to make people like the Pope mad that Madonna became one of the richest female entertainers in the world, paving the way for women performers everywhere by showing them that it is possible to be sexy onstage and smart off it.

Princess Diana. Even though she is dead, Princess Diana is one of my favorite women of all time. She, too, revolutionized the fashion world by refusing to wear the ugly old hats that her mother-in-law told her to wear, and instead wore Halston and Bill Blass. Also she visited a lot of really sick people, even though nobody made her do it, and some people, like her husband, even made fun of her for doing it. The night Princess Diana died I unplugged the TV and said I would never watch it again, since media was what killed her. But then I regretted it the next morning when I couldn’t watch Japanese Anime on the Sci-Fi channel, because unplugging the TV scrambled our cable box.

Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary Rodham Clinton totally recognized that her thick ankles were detracting from her image as a serious politician, and so she started wearing pants. Also, even though everybody was talking bad about her all the time for not leaving her husband, who was going around having sex with people behind her back, she pretended like nothing was going on and went on running the country, just like she’d always done, which is how a president should behave.

Picabo Street. She won all those gold medals in skiing, all because she just practiced like crazy and never gave up, even when she was crashing into fences and things. Plus she picked her own name, which is cool.

Leola Mae Harmon. I saw a movie about her on the Lifetime channel. Leola was an air force nurse who was in a car accident and the lower part of her face got all mangled, but then Armand Assante, who plays a plastic surgeon, said he could fix her. Leola had to endure hours of painful reconstructive surgery, during which her husband left her because she didn’t have any lips (which I guess is why the movie is called Why Me?). Armand Assante said he would make her a new pair of lips, only the other air force doctors didn’t like the fact that he wanted to make them out of skin from Leola’s vagina. But he did it anyway, and then he and Leola got married and worked together to help give other accident victims vagina lips. And the whole thing turned out to have been based on a true story.

Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc—or Jeanne d’Arc as they say in France—lived in like the twelfth century and one day when she was my age she heard this angel’s voice tell her to take up arms and go help the French army fight against the British (the French were always fighting the British, all the way up until the Nazis attacked, and then they were like, “Zut alors! Can you help us?” and the British had to go in and try to save their lazy butts, for which nobody French has ever been properly grateful, as exemplified by their sloppy highway maintenance; see death of Princess Diana, above). Anyway, Joan cut off her hair and got herself a suit of armor, just like Mulan in the Disney movie, and went and led the French forces to victory in a number of battles. But then, like typical politicians, the French government decided Joan was too powerful, so they accused her of being a witch and burned her to death at the stake. And unlike Lilly, I do NOT believe that Joan was suffering from adolescent onset schizophrenia. I think angels really DID talk to her. None of the schizophrenics in our school have ever had their voices tell them to do something cool like lead their country into battle. All Brandon Hertzenbaum’s voices told him to do was go into the boys’ room and carve “Satan” in the door to the bathroom stall with a protractor. So there you go.

Christy. Christy is not really a person. She is the fictional heroine of my favorite book of all time, which is called Christy, by Catherine Marshall. Christy is a young girl who goes to teach school in the Smokey Mountains at the turn of the century because she believes she can make a difference, and all these really hot guys fall in love with her and she learns about God and typhoid and stuff. Only I can’t tell anyone, especially Lilly, that this is my favorite book, because it’s kind of sappy and religious, and plus it doesn’t have any spaceships or serial killers in it.