Is anyone up for a rousing game of “Rainbow Princess Unicorn?”
Oh, you’re not familiar with “Rainbow Princess Unicorn?” It’s only the latest sensation sweeping the five-year-old scene these days. Allow me to elucidate your understanding a bit.
First you need to be a five or six-year-old girl. I cannot stress the importance of this point enough. A five or six-year-old boy will most likely pass on any offers to play Rainbow Princess Unicorn, even if they are offered the coveted positions of either “Dragon Scary Man” or “Prince Rainbow Unicorn.” And a seven-year-old or older girl will most likely to want to play something slightly more sophisticated, like “The Real First Graders Of Springdale Elementary School”, so you should stick within the confines of the Kindergarten set for your inaugural trip into the realms of Princesses, rainbows and unicorns.
Once you have gathered your players you should promptly assign the rolls each player will be using, because attention spans are usually pretty limited, and most participants have a parent waiting on the edge of the playground looking at their watch or cell phone and making those “you have one more minute to play” motions that parents have been making for thousands and thousands of years. It’s rumored that the biblical Moses and Aaron were roped into playing an ancient Mesopotamian version of Rainbow Princess Unicorn (which archeologists have determined was called “Sphinx Chariot Pharaoh Unicorn”) by their younger sister Miriam. If there are more than three players the leader of the group (you will know who this child is, you just will) may assign randomly selected rolls such as “pegasus, robot, power ranger or Yoda” to any and all latecomers and small brothers and sisters that might have accompanied them to the playground this particular day.
Next you have to determine your playing field. This is easy, because anything and everything in sight is “in bounds” and there doesn’t seem to be any concept of time or space. So really, Rainbow Princess Unicorn can continue ad nauseum straight into the minivan when it’s time to go. And depending on the intensity of that day’s game, it might pick right up where it left off the day before.
Though currently a national phenomenon, games of Rainbow Princess Unicorn have been reported in schoolyards on five of seven continents (and there is reportedly a cargo ship full of kindergarteners currently steaming towards Antarctica to spread the good word there).
Scientists and gamers have been studying the exact rules and mores of Rainbow Princess Unicorn as it plays out on the playgrounds and parks or our beloved nation, but despite the best and brightest minds applying themselves to the task, they have not yet discovered exactly what is happening when a group of youngsters (again, mostly females, with a few willing young men added to the mixture) actually start playing Princess Rainbow Unicorn. One bemused former NASA scientist recently opined off camera (there is currently a documentary crew on the scene at my daughter’s Kindergarten, trying to get an angle on this phenomenon) that he didn’t think that the game players were actually “doing” anything other than running pell-mell around the school yard and yelling incoherently to each other while getting extraordinarily dirty. This comment could not be confirmed as the NASA scientist was afraid of losing his grant money. Indeed, the study of this phenomenon is a burgeoning industry (err, field) among academics and is the choice topic of this year’s Nobel Peace committee.
Now I have no way of actually proving this, but Rainbow Princess Unicorn originated with my two daughters. For all the game’s complexity and breathtaking scope, it was actually thought up in about three seconds by the random putting together of my oldest daughter’s three favorite words. I was lucky to have witnessed the exact moment of the game’s origin, because I would have doubted the assertions of my daughters that it was “their game” that everyone was playing.
It’s a shame that I didn’t get the exact moment on video, because there will be no way to claim any cut of the inevitable Hollywood blockbuster that will be surely get made to cash in on this craze. I will simply have to go to the movie with my daughters and sigh loudly at every product placement, realizing that some of that potato chip money could have been mine. Well, actually it would have belonged to my two girls. But they are much too young to handle that much money, so I would have had to steward it for them until the time was right.
They would have just spent it on rainbows, princesses and unicorns if they had had their way.
