Prologue
In front of the curtain. Two women dressed in ball gowns with full crinolined skirts. One is very tall and blonde. She speaks first.
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess who was kept locked in a walled enchanted garden by a wicked Witch…”
“Oh No there wasn’t!”
“Oh Yes there was!”
“Oh No there wasn’t!”
“OK. There wasn’t. How about a beautiful Giantess who hated men because of what they had done to her?”
“That sounds more realistic – if you are the beautiful Giantess. You are, Marie, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I get to be saved by this handsome dwarf…”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure. He is handsome. He’s a dwarf and I love him.”
“OK. If you must, Marie. Now get on with the story.”
One woman walks off stage left. The tall blonde walks between the curtains.
The Curtain rises revealing the Giantess seated at her computer. She is blonde, nearly two metres tall which is not apparent until she stands up and comes down stage, well built, curvaceous but not fat. She is a large lady suitable for the part of a Wagnerian soprano, particularly a Valkyrie or Rhinemaiden. Her hair swings either side of her face in shimmering curtains lightly waved. She is wearing a ball gown, full skirted in black and white striped taffeta with a fitted bodice in metallic black. The puffed sleeves billowing around her arms are in the same taffeta as the skirt. As she walks towards the audience her skirt hisses with the rustle of her petticoats.
In the brightness of the footlights it is apparent that she is not in her teens or early twenties. Her face has begun the process of becoming lived in but is still beautiful if saddened by life.
“Hello. I’m the sad Giantess.” She announces.
“Hello” chorus the well warmed up audience.
“I’d like to tell you a secret. Should I?”
“Yes!” reply the audience enthusiastically.
“I hate men!”
In the orchestra pit the musicians play the introduction to Katarina’s song from Kiss Me Kate.
The Giantess sings “I hate men” encouraging the audience to join in the reprises. At the end of the song she bows to the audience’s applause.
“Shall I tell you why I really hate men?” she asks.
“Yes!”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Then I’ll tell you.”
She goes back to the computer and pulls the chair downstage before sitting on it and leaning forward.
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“No we won’t,” respond the audience prompted by a placard held out from the wings.
“You are sure about that?”
The placard is inverted to reveal the next response:
“We’re sure.”
Invariably at that point my dream pantomime would end. Even in a dream I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone why I hated men. For I, Marie, am the blonde Giantess. The dwarf who will save me is Alan, a fellow student at my computer class. How he will save me and why I love him I do not know. In my dream I am convinced that he and he alone is my salvation and that I will love him. In real life I am not so sure. How can a dwarf who barely reaches my waist save me from myself and my unreasonable hatred of men?
Chapter One.
I’m twenty-nine, nearly thirty. That is a fact: a fact that influences my life. As a teenager and in my early twenties I imagined that by thirty I would have married, settled down, and have a family.
I wasted my twenties on two men who used me and then cast me aside. Actually I threw the second one – right out of my front door on to the lawn but not until after he had told me he was leaving.
I won’t go into details about how unsatisfactory both men were. I’m biased and still angry. I won’t even name them. All I will say is that both were control freaks who wouldn’t let me do anything unless they allowed it. I was their slave in all but name despite being taller and bigger and brainier than either.
The first got tired of me. He found a fluffy more manageable bimbo and just walked out. The second caught me on the rebound and soon I was back into the same self-destructive spiral of pandering to his whims and fetishes. I hated being tied to our bed dressed in corset and stockings and yet it happened several times a week.
Things started to change when I joined evening classes to improve my work skills. He didn’t object because it meant I would eventually earn more money for him to waste. On the nights I was at my class he would go out clubbing with his mates.
I joined the students’ club and from there I was persuaded to sign up for a women’s consciousness-raising class. I told him it was another class that met at the same time. It was my first lie of many. I found the class irritating at first because some were too overtly feminist but I made friends. After a few weeks I became to realise that I was his doormat.
I started to rebel. I wouldn’t do everything he wanted. I refused to be tied up. One night he tried to insist. He was the one who ended up dressed in the corset and stockings tied to the bed. I gagged him with his own dirty socks because he would have been sexually excited if I’d used my panties. I left him like that all night and slept on the settee. That was the beginning of the end. He didn’t tell me he was leaving until he too had found a convenient younger replacement.
Once he had left I decided to have nothing to do with men. I wasn’t going to be caught on the rebound again. I have kept that resolution for a year. Yet now I am having dreams about Alan the dwarf. Why?
If I think clearly about Alan I can come up with some reasons why I dream about him. First and probably most important is that I like and appreciate him. He is kind, considerate, intelligent and invariably even-tempered. Second is that I can’t imagine him as any kind of control-freak mentally or physically. Physically he would be no match for me. Even when he stands to his full height his head is well below my breasts. Mentally Alan never tries to enforce his opinions on anyone. He discusses, argues, tries to persuade; but if he fails he shrugs it off. He accepts that others have opinions that could be equally as valid as his own.
He is a great person to be with. After talking with him I feel better about myself. He is really interested in other people. The only obvious flaw I can see in him is acute self-consciousness about his lack of inches. He likes to be treated as a normal human adult. That he is. He isn’t like many dwarves with an out of proportion head. At a distance with no scale references he looks like a perfectly normal and handsome man. I would consider Alan as an acceptable date except that we would attract attention because of the vast disparity in our sizes. At nearly two metres I’m taller than most men.
Yet I’m planning to use Alan. Is that fair? Probably not. Men have used me and now I intend to use Alan, the one man that I like and respect.
It all started at our women’s consciousness raising class. They decided that they would produce a adult pantomime to raise money for a local hospital charity. Because it would be women’s group pantomime the majority of the cast would be female. A group started to write the pantomime. The theme was that women are our own worst enemies and were only subjected because we allowed it.
I ignored the writing group until they told me that I was the heroine. By then it was too late to change the script. I would be the enchanted princess who could only be rescued by a kiss from a man but the man had to be a dwarf. The writing group knew that Alan had taken part in some amateur pantomimes and that he was a friend of mine. They had relied on me to persuade him to participate. They hadn’t asked Alan, or me. Now I had the task of persuading him to take part as the hero.
I felt used. Now I had to ask Alan to allow himself to be used as well. I hadn’t even seen the script. They had told me some things but they didn’t want me to see the script until I had persuaded Alan to co-operate. I blew up. I lost my temper and told the script writing group what they could do with their script. When I calmed down, and that took a lot of cajoling from people who were not script writers, they agreed to let Alan and I see the script before he made a decision. They still wanted me to get him to agree before reading it. I wouldn’t. We compromised that I would put the proposal to him. If he didn’t reject it out of hand then both of us could have a copy of the script to read together but it wasn’t to be let out of my sight.
I still felt like telling them what to do with their pantomime but I knew that many people had put work into the project. If I rejected the pantomime it would be a blow for all my friends.
I spoke to Alan in the coffee break at our next computer class. I sat down next to him.
“Alan,” I said.
