"Your Story"

My daughter in Wig & Makeup

 Your Story

Too often we paint our faces,
shape our words,
cast a spell of favor & need,
portray virtue
while veiling all vice,

leave the gem inside
unpolished.

My wish for you is simple:
inner Faerie; embrace.
Imagine, create,
live your story
unafraid & bold

& from your pen,
may truth unadornedly flow.

by Margaret Bednar, April 25, 2015


This is for "Imaginary Garden with Real Toads - Go Grimm".   The photo is of my daughter helping out a friend with her graduation thesis project (for Wig & Makeup) to make a series come to life - My daughter is Violet the inventor from Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events"  - which is not a Grimm Fairy tale, but I think it loosely fits in and I do love the image.

I enjoyed this link about Fairy Tales and below is an excerpt I found fascinating:

The Salon Era[edit]

In the mid-17th century, a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women, where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day.

In the 1630s, aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms, salons, in order to discuss the topics of their choice: arts and letters, politics, and social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class: marriage, love, financial and physical independence, and access to education. This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education. Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons (such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette), which encouraged women's independence and pushed against the gender barriers that defined their lives. The salonnières argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes, opposing the system of arranged marriages.

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational parlour game based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons. Each salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme, spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination, but also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life. Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors. Critiques of court life (and even of the king) were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark, sharply dystopian ones. Not surprisingly, the tales by women often featured young (but clever) aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies, as well as tales in which groups of wise fairies (i.e., intelligent, independent women) stepped in and put all to rights.

The salon tales as they were originally written and published have been preserved in a monumental work called Le Cabinet des Fées, an enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.^[38]