Less than a month ago, 27-year-old Princess Madeleine of Sweden was all set to marry her long-term boyfriend, lawyer Jonas Bergstrom, 31. It was to be a “fairy tale” wedding, according to Hello magazine, with dancing and drinking and a traditional smorgasbord. But then: A 21-year-old Nordic handball player with the wonderfully sluttish and low-rent name Tora Uppstrom Berg revealed to Norwegian magazine Se og Hor that she had had a fling with Bergstrom behind Madeleine’s back. “I could not foresee the kind of attention this would get and I regret that I told the story,” Tora said later. “I feel sorry for Madeleine.” Whatever, Tora.
The wedding was, needless to say, off. Rather than be hounded by the Swedish press, who follow her every move (of course they do! Who else are they going to stalk, ABBA?), the princess decided to get on a plane and come to a city where hardly anyone knows her: New York.
What will she do here? According to Hello, she’s “been throwing herself into work for her mother’s World Children Foundation in an attempt to take her mind off the breakup.” So there’s that. But she’ll also have to shake off the Swedish paparazzi, so she’ll probably get a radical new haircut, maybe something brunette with bangs, from a sassy hairdresser who will become her best friend. After that, there will be a montage: The princess looking out at the city from the top of the Empire State Building, interacting with crabby cab drivers and snooty salesgirls who don’t know she’s a princess, and having a terrible mixup in which she doesn’t realize she’s not supposed to eat the koi fish in the pond at the botanical gardens. Oops! Finally, she’ll end up having a lonely, homesick wander through the aisles of Ikea. There, she’ll bump into a hunky carpenter with rumpled hair, abs of steel, and no idea that she is a princess, she’ll help him select an Ektorp, and they will fall in love and live happily ever after. Or, at least, that’s what would happen if this were a Julia Stiles movie.
