Ariel's Black and Deaf Mermaid Friend

The other day I was babysitting my cousin's two daughters in Blaine, Minnesota. After dinner, we were all really excited to watch Gnomeo and Juliet. However, the difficulty of trying to figure out how to get the Blu-Ray player to function on my cousin's TV was on par with disabling an atomic bomb. Thus, after about a half an hour of trying all of the different inputs, outputs, throughputs, and any other "puts", my father somehow figured out how to get it on the DVD player. NOT the Blu-Ray, mind you, so all of our Gnomeo and Juliet desires quickly were ripped out from under us. However, the messing with the TV became like building a house of cards, and we were too scared to touch anything else on the remotes.

The remotes reminded me of a particularly hilarious stand-up comedian named Kyle Cease, as he ranted about the sheer complexity of remotes, especially the ones at other peoples' houses. "You press one button and their blender starts, another and their dog dies and you sit there thinking 'you have a dog death button? Why would you want a button for that...?'"

Anyways, back to the story. So, we told the girls they had to choose a DVD, and I am pretty sure they chose the worst one out there: Princess Stories. It was basically a collection of horribly "heart-felt" stories told by the Disney Princesses that were supposed to teach life lessons to little girls. My particular favorite was the story told by Ariel, better known as the Little Mermaid. This was during her pre-human years, and she was swimming around with her little aquatic friends and saw a human dancing, and decided that she could never be happy until she could express herself with her legs and dance. Somehow (I was not paying that detailed of attention) she met a black, deaf mermaid girl and her interpreter-octopus who felt that she would never be happy until she could sing. So the black deaf mermaid tells Ariel that she knows of a place that they could go to wish on a giant starfish and get their wishes, but that it would be a very dangerous journey. It was about a 15-20 minute short story, so the journey was not all that perilous. However, when they reached the giant starfish it turned out that for some reason he could no longer preform magic. How sad. But then, the girls learn that they can ALREADY express themselves, JUST THE WAY THEY ARE!

Isn't that touching on so many levels? Well, you would think so, but right after Ariel learns that it is okay to be a mermaid, doesn't she turn into a human anyways? How do you think her black and deaf friend feels about that? Probably not too happy...