Now I am older and wiser, and the chances of me dressing up in anything resembling a sugarplum fairy are very slim, mainly because you have to be, well, very slim - or into fancy dress theme parties.
"Every time an apostrophe appears in the right place, the Good Punctuation Fairy is made very, very happy!" Truss writes.
In an interview with Craig Zadan, Lapine explained that he hadn't been crazy about Sondheim's idea for a piece about fairy tales, because he felt that "fairy tales are very simplistic".
"It's ironic these days that a fairy-tale ending is thought to be a happy ending, when most fairy tales are very, very dark.
The piece isn't really aimed at children, though, since this fairy princess is very much a symbolist icon, yearning sensually for an absent, possibly unfaithful lover.
Fairy hair is very natural, so no need to over-process it with perms, dyes or straighteners.
She brings me back down to earth — not that I'm with the fairies, I'm very grounded — but she reminds me of more things I want to reach.
Loving ourselves isn't airy-fairy; it's very grounded and real, a process of accepting ourselves just as we are, including shadow issues, past hurts, traumas, hidden rage or deep feelings of grief, so that we feel comfortable in our own skin.
However, in the Brothers Grimm's original fairy tale, Gothel is very much depicted as a typical witch-like character, an idea that was modified for the Disney film adaptation in favor of having Gothel's agelessness instead be "derive[d]... from Rapunzel's hair", becoming one of the few Disney villainesses to not possess magical powers of her own.
The "Rings" trilogy, much of which was written during World War II, is a dark, monumental epic of Good and Evil in conflict, whereas "The Hobbit," first published in 1937 (and later revised), is a more lighthearted book, an adventure story whose comical and fairy-tale elements are very much in the foreground.
