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Cinderella Chess

Rules of the Game

            Cinderella Chess is a highly competitive, strategic board game, played by one shaggy-haired girl usually during early evening under the family dining room table. The game is played on a fold-out checkerboard whose pattern resembles the linoleum dance floor seen in the Rogers and Hammerstein made for television version of the famous fairy tale in the early nineteen sixties.  The thirty-one (used to be thirty- two but one of the bishops is missing) black and white pieces made of glossy plastic move about the checkerboard and other areas of the carpet   Each piece, whose black or white color bears little significance, stands on a base of green felt which reduces friction as the pieces slide across the dance floor during ballroom scenes.

The object of the game is for the shaggy-haired girl to act out her fantasies of romance, envy, and revenge while acting out her unexpressed and vast storehouse of aggression on those who the little girl sees as her perpetrators, select members of her own family.

Movement of the pieces

The pieces lie scattered about on the carpeting just next to the checkerboard until needed for play. Once in play,  movement of the pieces is similar to that of  moving Barbie dolls: stiff-backed bouncing around the board while dancing and leaning in toward each other as they talk. 

 Rook

The four rooks, which double as tombstones for the mass graves toward the end of the game, stand at each corner of the game board.  Their castle-like appearance gives the rooks a more decorative than active role in the game, adding a medieval appeal to the set. Rooks move only during scene changes.

Bishop

Two of the bishops stand as the mean stepsisters, Donna and Jody.  The stepsister bishops, complete with fashionable pageboy style hairdos, occasionally command Cinderella to vacuum and to dust, but mostly order Cinderella to quit whining and to stay out of the way. One of the bishops, Cinderella’s full blooded sister Maribeth, calls Cinderella queer and orders her to go take a bath, comb her shaggy hair, and to stay out of the way. Maribeth aligns herself with the stepsister bishops, thus further alienating Cinderella from the rest of the family. Cinderella’s only comfort is when she runs off to her own little corner in her own little chair where she starts strategizing the overthrow of the dysfunctional family dynamic.

Pawn

Pawns fill in  at random as extras: other couples at the ball, the footmen, assistants to the prince, the glass slipper bearer, executioners, turret gunners,  mass gravediggers at the burial of the sister/stepsister bishops, et cetera.

Godmother

        The Fairy Godmother, the largest piece in the game,  is played by a porcelain statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As the most powerful piece in the game, The Fairy Godmother, is able to transform shaggy haired, flat chested, pointy butted Cinderella into a voluptuous beauty, resembling the shaggy haired girl’s sister Cindy. 

Knight

The four knights act as horses that pull the pumpkin carriage on the night of the ball. The knights later double as cavalry soldiers during the stepsister/sister bishop war.

King and Queen

        The Black King and Queen are the eventual in-laws of Cinderella.  The benevolent monarchs sit in their perch on the piano bench balcony and look on approvingly when Cinderella and their son hook up during the ball.  The royal couple detest the bishops and order their cleansing via pillow bombs dropped from their balcony.

Prince

The Prince is nearly identical to the King:  handsome and smart in his glasses, he holds an engineering degree from the University of Idaho in Moscow, reads science fiction, and often finds it necessary to use a slide rule while at work at the local Air Force base.  The Sister/stepsister Bishops want, more than anything to sixty nine with the Prince. The Bishops try everything (striptease dances, bribes of money, threats of violence, acts of torture) to seduce him who has eyes only for Cinderella.    During the course of the game, the Prince becomes Cinderella’s love object, her soul mate, her sex toy, the champion of her rebellion, her fellow expatriate, her baby’s daddy.

Cinderella

Cinderella, the white version of  the Prince’s black queen mother,  acts as the amalgam of the shaggy-haired girl’s sister Cindy, actress Leslie Ann Warren, and the shaggy haired girl, herself.  Cinderella attends the University of Dayton where she is working on a degree in Social Work so that she can one day help poor and needy people in dangerous neighborhoods.  Cinderella spends her free time walking slowly through art museums and dancing at parties with Bali Hai-guzzling hippies who play music so loud that the windows buzz.

Winning the game

The little girl with shaggy hair wins the game when Cinderella and her handsome Prince fly away on a jet plane, escaping the entire chessboard, and live happily ever after by relocating to a rook-cornered castle filled with hippie friends, overlooking the Pacific Ocean on Cliff Street in Santa Cruz, California.