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2 – Lessons – Extras

When You Can Fly Again
by Fancy Nancy (Performed by Mia Sinclair Jenness)

I have a lot of silly music in Barry Anderson, and part of the fun is milking the irony of the diminutive and girlish for all it’s worth, but I tend to feel particularly silly about this one.  “Technically” it’s more of a special feature than a literal part of the soundtrack, because it’s not as literal as—who am I kidding?!  I flippin’ love this song for this.

I’m not sure when I first tried watching Fancy Nancy from Disney Junior.  It was probably a suggestion after a Sofia the First video, which I’ve watched much more of.

I have all-the-relate with the little poof princess.  I had kinda steered away from Fancy Nancy, despite the amount of media-intended-for-children that I enjoy.  I think the covers of the books reminded me of the Eloise books, which I didn’t like as a kid.

I haven’t looked at them since, so it’s quite likely I had an unfair opinion of them as a child.  But the character of Eloise, and the art style, struck me as rather demanding, self-centered and unaware of how her decisions affected others, which made me mad as a kid… probably because those were three things I was very terrified that I was.

Reminiscing on it now, I think drawings of little girls playing dress-up irked me, especially oversized high heels.  Trying now to figure out why, exactly.  I loved dress-up, and my mom being our acting teacher on and off over the years meant I felt like I had permission to never really stop.

I was a box of French Fries and a jilted bride for different Halloweens as a teenager.  As an adult, I’ve done Ecee-ish Sofia and Snow White, and Callous-ish steampunk Megara.  I wore my papier-mâché R2-D2 helmet to my office job last year, even though nobody else dressed up.

I’m not afraid of dress-up, even when I’m the only one or it gets me weird looks, so why would the illustrations of dress-up bother me so much?

Huh.  On self-reflection, it seems I was never afraid that I was faking being a weirdo, like the costumes I listed above depicted; even okay being a pretty weirdo.  But I’ve always been afraid that I was pretending to be elegant, grown-up, or sophisticated.  And that’s what the pictures in the Eloise books evoked in me: feeling like I was watching a girl being immature, and selfishly acting like she’s the center of the universe, while obliviously pretending she’s all grown up, having no idea how she really looks from the outside.

Meanwhile, I was 100% scared that I would never be the mature, elegant woman I so wanted to grow into, and felt like surely I was embarrassing and had no idea of the ways in which I was making everything about me.

*Ahem.*  Well that tangent was unexpected.  In any case, that seems to be why I avoided Fancy Nancy.

Although once I finally tried watching the episodes of the show, from an adult perspective, those very things I feared about myself seem to be the same things that make Nancy Clancy endearing to me.

She wants so badly to be grown-up and fancy.  And it’s not that she just pretends, as my young mind was so afeared.  She loves fancy things, so she takes the effort to learn about them.  She works hard at ballet and etiquette, and is very young to know so much French.  Where her friends love softball, or jokes, or her little sister loves pirates, Nancy loves fancy; she doesn’t fake any of that.

However, she’s still smol.  And as hard as she tries to be grown-up, she’s still a little girl.  A very dramatic little girl.  And she feels jealous when her best friend gets the lead in ballet, and she gets impatient with going fishing with her grandpa when it’s dirty! 😱  And she puts glitter instead of postage stamps on her dad’s envelopes before putting them in the mail, lol.

She’s a little girl, and not having learned things is not the same as being selfish or fake.  Not having learned is not the same as not wanting to learn. (Note to younger self…)

And I find Nancy adorable because she always wants to learn, she just often doesn’t realize how much she doesn’t know yet, and takes herself a little too seriously because of it.

And, omigoodness, how much she’s little Dania.

I love Dania so much, and omigosh she’s fun to write!  But a lot of people have had trouble with Dania.  I think it makes sense that she often kinda triggers feelings in readers.

A lot of my readership has mom-related feels anyway.  And then here comes Dania, who is a fairly intense character in the first place (ESFJ(ej) – The Supercharged Cavalry), serving as a bit of an antagonist for the first chapter and into the second, as she holds her ground that this “life ending” event occurring to her son is actually something befitting and an honor.

It’s okay if it brings up feelings about pushy women in your life, because I’m not about to pretend that Dania is never pushy or intense.  But I hope as “Lessons” goes on, that I’m able to show her more for who she is.

“When You Can Fly Again” is from the episode “Bonjour Butterfly,” where Nancy finds a butterfly in the garden, but it’s wet and so it can’t fly, so Nancy determines to nurse it back to its natural state of ethereal fancy, so that they can become “the best of friends” and do fancy things together.  She must, of course, learn during the episode that that’s not how butterflies work, and that the butterfly needs to be able to fly free.

I love all the details of the video, like Nancy’s butterfly costume, how she looks into the cage in awe, or flaps her hands at the end, her oversized bracelets tinkling.

But I saw the precious little song and immediately thought, “🤣 It’s just Dania with Barry!”

Is it silly for Nancy to think she can teach a butterfly to speak French?  Yes.  Is it silly for Dania to want her wee féileacán (*whispers to camera* that means little butterfly in Irish!) to play dress-up with her, even though she knows he’s still her little boy in there?  Yes, very silly.

But she gets excited, like Nancy does, imagining all the fun you can have, suddenly having a friend who you can do butterfly things with!

Suddenly presented with a little fairy friend and pupil, like she always wanted and thought she’d never get a chance to share her most precious secret world with, Dania gets a little over-excited.  So she teases and pokes at Barry, trying to get him to learn and be open to magic, while also letting herself have fun, since it’s so very extraordinary that she can share a wide open world with her precious wee one.

I think it’s important to point out that, unlike almost everyone else, Dania never forgets it’s still Barry in there.  Sure, she has fun with him being a girl, more even than she lets on sometimes.  But she doesn’t forget it’s her oldest, the boy she’s been watching turn into a man.

However, like Nancy doesn’t understand why a butterfly might not want caviar, or to go to a spa, Dania just doesn’t fully understand why being shoved by magic into a girl-cage (by his estimation) is so traumatic.  Dania loves being a girl, and underestimates the drastic-ness of the contrast for Barry between Grape and his usual state.  Along with that, and like she says, with every glitter baby she’s ever heard of being thrilled and proud to be what they are, Dania’s frankly pretty shocked that Barry’s even upset about his fate.

I think, for most of his first magic lesson, Dania thinks of Barry’s moaning and complaining as not unlike when he was in middle school and would whine about chores or homework.  She’s his mom and she’s always seen that teasing him past his moodiness usually works, and after he grumps for a while, he ends up having fun.

Just like she knows better than to let her godchildren have whatever they want, she’s used to knowing better than Barry, but gently (more gently than with Nick) being able to nudge him to make better choices.

But from the moment Barry realizes he’s wearing her wedding dress, and falls flat on his back, Dania realizes that these aren’t just adolescent emotions Barry is dealing with anymore.  In that look on his face, as he tries to count the cost ahead as his entire future has been upended, Dania suddenly sees that her little boy has entered the adult league when it comes to emotions and issues.  This isn’t just a grumpy boy who needs to be teased into enjoying his fairy homework; this is a young man who is suddenly being confronted by the fear that the very person he is, is as fleeting as the breeze under his wings.

She sees him suddenly as an adult in training, and from then on teaches him accordingly.  She’s still training up a fairy-bestie, and she still sees her baby boy, even amidst purple curls.  But she can tell that Barry is ready to understand faydom with an adult sort of complexity, wanting to understand what’s really true, rather than just doing what he’s told.

And so it’s not just about teaching a surrogate-daughter about how to make dresses anymore; she’s suddenly able to teach a wide-eyed, thoughtful student about how to be the Seelie fairy mother that she’s worked so hard to be, sharing all the lessons little Dania wished she knew when she was sixteen.

It might not be wise to expect a butterfly to learn French, but letting hers start to grow into a man, despite his curvy-girl body, Dania’s able to enjoy her wee féileacán learning to fly in his very own way.  And she has the feeling, they’re gonna be friends.

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