So today I got crazy. Inheritance made me want to do a historical, and as I started playing around with the prompt words from Three Word Wednesday, I couldn’t help thinking of this song. Sure, the song doesn’t fit with historical fiction so much, but the sentiment is rather timeless and universal, I think.

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired

So this bit today had plenty of influence from the song, despite the different time periods. I could probably post all the lyrics and use them in some way, but I’ll try and stick to only the ones that have the most significance to what I wrote, trying to put each lyric with a section of fic. We’ll see how that works for a change.

The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful…

Love was reserved for those with beauty, and that was a lesson she’d learned years ago, when her childhood friends had married off around her, when the boy who’d always seemed destined to her said his heart belonged to another. She should have married at seventeen, as they had, but now she was twenty-four…

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone…

…her siblings had already married and settled, and her sisters considered her a failure, accusing her of making up all her previous suitors to avoid the shame of being so plain, so completely undesirable to anyone.

“Pity, please, the ones who serve
‘Cause they only get what they deserve…”

That was the part that kept her stomach rolling—being bound over to a stranger for the rest of her life, being dependent upon him, being in the same position of service to him as her mother was to her father…

And the rich relationed hometown queen
Marries into what she needs
With a guarantee of company
And haven for the elderly…

“…Would you rather court scandal or spend your life in the service of your great aunt?”

It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
When dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me

That was the way society worked at present, and perhaps someday some suffragette would change that, but she was not one of them.

We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire

Kabobbles Sing Along is just what I think when I hear songs. I sometimes see images when I hear lyrics, pictures or movies in my head. Sometimes I relate it to stories. My interpretation of the songs and lyrics are probably nothing like their original intent.