Once upon a time, there was a girl named Cindi! (Yes, her name had an exclamation point after it. You laugh but we’re only a generation or so away from that happening.) 

Anyway….Cindi! lived with her stepmom and stepsisters. The stepmom was obviously more enamored of her own daughters than she was of Cindi! (See? Using a lot of pointless exclamation points is super annoying.) so she gave them the good selfie-taking cell phones and left Cindi! with one of those flip phones where she couldn’t really see what she was taking, the picture comes out really small and grainy, and the phone memory could only hold about three shots. This obviously put Cindi! at a disadvantage when it came to online dating.

But she abided.

She tried to keep up with the number of winks her stepsisters received but she had yet to master the bikini shot at the ocean and she wasn’t sure how to use crop so she always appeared with someone else in her photos. Life was hard for Cindi! and she spent much of it walking around looking at her stepsisters wanting what they had much in the way Bruce Jenner must have felt in his early adventures with the Kardashians.

One day the sisters heard about a tryout for a reality TV show where contestants had the opportunity to marry a prince at the end. (Ha. Bet you thought this story was about going to a ball.) All you had to do was figure out which man was the prince, which was the sociopath, and which guy had an unnatural obsession with his mother. 

As reality shows go it was an easy one and the sisters were all pretty sure they could tell a prince from a sociopath from a mama’s boy. The one hitch — and reality shows always have one — you couldn’t have any meaningful conversations with the gentlemen of interest. If you started to talk about anything substantive, the network told the applicants they would get bleeped and their hair extensions would be removed on camera and tossed into the fire. The sisters weren’t sure they wanted to take this chance on national television. What if the odds were never in their favor? 

But we wouldn’t have a story if they didn’t, so they did. 

As luck would have it, they all made it onto the show. All but Cindi! who didn’t see the Facebook post about the audition until it was too late. The algorithm didn’t think she would be interested. So it didn’t make her stream until her stepmom commented on it and told everyone in the viewing area how proud she was of her daughters and how much they had taught her. She was blessed to be their mom and so happy they had chosen her to be their mom. (When this heavenly selection took place, Cindi! didn’t know. But it seems today’s parents are always glad to have been selected by the leach they hosted for 9 months.)

During the first day of filming, the oldest sister realized she had used regular mascara and not the waterproof kind with the nutrients that strengthen and lengthen. So she summoned poor Cindi! who had just settled down to a meal full of gluten. The sisters wouldn’t eat it so the wicked stepmother gave all the gluten in the house to poor Cindi! She was also forced to eat non-organic vegetables. 

I mean that in the government label sense because all vegetables are organic, yes?

Her stepsister demanded she bring the mascara on set before the director gave her the cue to cry, which she was sure would be coming at any time now, especially after how Ashley had messed up the earlier scene by asking one of the guys where he went to school. The producers were still debating whether that counted as meaningful conversation or not but the stepsister was pretty sure it did and just knew that without Ashley and her blonde waves, she’d be next in line for the crying jag. Of which, honestly if you had asked her if she wanted to, she would’ve shared she had mixed emotions about it. On one hand she’d be on all the reality show recaps that week, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure she wanted to risk an ugly cry on national television and Hulu. But her mother would remind her, right after she thanked her one more time for being her teacher, that fame costs and here’s where you start paying.

Cindi! was concerned about how ugly an ugly cry could be with the wrong mascara. This sort of incident did indeed trump her desire to spend the afternoon taking the Internet quiz – Which Disney Princess Are You? She kept getting that ridiculous girl who left her glass slipper behind. She had taken it four times now but she was convinced she could beat the quiz and get someone more to her liking. She just had to keep changing up her answer. 

So Cindi! took the waterproof mascara to her stepsister, who promptly yelled at her for bringing the kind without the silk protein. Cindi! tripped over the producer, lost her shoe, and like most dingy girls got up and ran out with only one shoe on. Now anyone who has walked in LA on the hot driveway barefoot in August would know that no one would leave her shoe behind. An earring I would believe, but a shoe, just not possible. 

However, the teller of this tale needs to be able to use the shoe to set up this next part of the story. The writer kindly asks for your plausible deniability and extension of disbelief.

Well, the producer of the show also did low-budget horror movies on the side and he thought Cindi! would be perfect as the first girl axed in the movie. You know the one who’s always making out with her boyfriend somewhere she shouldn’t be? But when he asked the step sister about her blonde friend, she merely told him to stop by the next day at their house and she gave him the address.  

The producer had a rough night as so many people in Hollywood do and the next day all he could remember about the blonde who had plowed into him was that she was blonde. When he arrived at the house at the prearranged time, he came face to face with four freshly-made blondes. Which one was his new slasher film goddess?

At this point you’d expect him to take out the shoe and try fitting it to the girls. If he hadn’t thrown it away, he could’ve indeed exorcised that option. And if he was still in possession of that shoe, you can be assured that every one of those sisters would’ve tried shoving their foot into it. Since the average foot size of most women is a seven and the shoe was a seven and a half, it is unlikely this would’ve resulted in anything other than frustration. 

Instead, he looked at all of them, asked if they’d ever consider getting boob jobs and ass implants and chose the one who said yes. Although a more discriminating starlet might have inquired as to who was footing the bill.

Moral of the story: most men don’t really care which girl they chose. It’s all a matter of timing and the right answer.

Second moral: one should never wear loose shoes. You’ll get blisters and your stepsisters will all bleach their hair blonde even though they don’t have the right skin tone for it.

Third moral: In the end all we have is each other. Slasher movie film producers come and go.

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