A Fractured Fairy Tale: Little Red Riding Hood

Once upon a time, a wealthy couple lived in a quaint Tudor mansion on the better side of Beverly Hills with their only child, a daughter, upon whom they showered love and the best of everything.

As the child grew from plump cherub to scrawny mall-rat the couple fretted about her future, especially her chances of enrolling in a prestigious East Coast College.

"But Harold", the mother cried, "What can we expect from a child with my beauty and your brains? By the way, how did anyone so dull get into Princeton?"

"I dunno" the father said, "I just went where my old man went"

"Oy gevalt" cried the mother, "We're saved, you're a legacy just like our president"

And so it came to pass their daughter attended Princeton as a legacy but unlike our president who Fraternized his way toward influence and power, the girl deconstructed a more typical Princetonian path, dropping out as a rather morose Marxist.

"Red" soon moved back to L.A. where she denounced her bourgeois heritage at the end of her parents driveway before puttering off on a diminutive, but ecologically friendly, Vespa to hook up with an all girl biker gang known as "The Riding Hoods".

As the days and weeks rolled by for no apparent reason as they often do in fairy tales, "Red" slowly made her way to the rural retreat of the Hood Gang, (she was after all riding a Vespa and the journey from Beverly Hills to the woods took a very, very long time).

When Red knocked on the hideout door, an eye appeared in a peep-hole, "Whaddya want kid?"

"Fairy dust" she said appreciating the irony of speaking to an eye.

"Get lost", the eye told her.

"Look we don't have time to screw around. I just wasted days and weeks getting here on a Vespa and this is a prime-time tevevision, we got commercials to run and viewers have brats to get to bed".

"Right, gotcha" answered the eye as the door creaked open.

Red found the rustic but recently remodeled cottage to be precisely what one would expect from a fairy tale; one quarter bath down, lace curtains rustling in a gentle afternoon breeze as sunlight streamed through an open window, a stained red and white checkered cloth draped over a heavily distressed kitchen table - and a wolf-in-drag hidding under a quilt in the master bedroom.

"Godmother, what big ARMS you have!"

"Pretty cool huh? We got all this ordinance from a Steven Seagal set -- uh, my dear."

"Godmother, what big LEGS you have!"

"Don't you dare ask if they go all the way up, -- my child."

"Godmother, what big HAIR you have!"

"The 80's will never die, -- my child."

"Godmother what big LIPS you have!"

"Botox gone bad, but you think it makes me look at least a little like Angela Jolie? -- my child."

"Godmother, what big TEETH you have have!"

NOTE: As of midnight November 10, 2007, the author of this piece has ceased work in solidarity with the Screen Writers Strike.

POWER TO THE PEN.....er POWER TO THE PC!!!