Unprincessy

The wet pavements gleaming under the street lights offered little inducement, for her shoes were thin—richly buckled and very princessy—but her purse did not even contain a taxi fare—an empty purse and very unprincessy.

But Clarke Silvernail is hard to bear as the marquis, Kay Strozzi is the most unprincessy princess that ever walked upon a stage, Carlin Crandall makes a bad and unnecessary part worse by overemphasizing it too much, and the rest are more or less resigned victims of their circumstances.

The life of an unprincessy Jewish Princess began in the home atmosphere of serious talk generated by the father (a lawyer) and mother (a Russian professor, now chairman of the department at Hunter College), and always including the fraternal twins, Elizabeth and Robert.

But no other Princess has been a wartime refugee fleeing as an infant in a cot from the advancing Russians, a Sydney-educated schoolgirl, a worker, a dependent on her earnings to pay the rent, a Catholic yet a divorcée – the list of unprincessy features is a long one.

Meghan had a bigger role too in her next project, a curiosity called The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down. Originally an award-winning independent film directed by Paul Sapiano in 2006, Sapiano remade it for television, with the same plot and the same title, casting Meghan in one of the leading roles, that of Dana. It was a look at the twenty-something party lifestyle, broken down into episodic chapters and addressing such unprincessy subjects as drugs, clubs, alcohol and one-night stands.