
A young boy and girl are sitting on a bench in a park. The boy asks the girl if they can kiss. She refuses, and tells him she has to be sure of who he is before kissing him. She then starts asking him about a number of things, including their future lives if they ever get together. Meanwhile, a dozen meters away, there is another couple, physically identical to them, but completely opposite in their vision of love.
"Rodgers' & Hammerstein's Cinderella" wasn’t just a fairytale, it's a Black girl's fairytale. It was a fantasy world where the undeniable beauty of Black girls and Women was celebrated and beloved.
Not only does the system prevent upward mobility, but it makes it incredibly easy to slide from comfortably middle class to unhoused.
It doesn’t offer an absolute answer for the dialectical ethical questions that emerged in search of justice but portrays the characters as living people beyond the identities of victims.
I think these messages and the way they are presented in this small-town in Texas are increasingly more important as the internet/ social media becomes more and more critical and judgemental every day. Love yourself today and every day because as Ru Paul always says: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?”