A duchess’s tale

Sarah Ferguson is trying to halt her long fall from grace, said Laura M. Holson in The New York Times. The past year has been particularly bad for the Duchess of York. She was caught trying to sell access to her former husband, Prince Andrew, for $40,000; nearly went bankrupt; and was denied an invitation to the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

At 51, she’s candid about how far she’s fallen. Recently, she found herself trying to earn a bit of money by giving a motivational speech at a remote resort in Edmonton, Alberta. “It was a casino in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “I got to the tent and, because of the pouring rain, only eight people showed up. I had gone from marrying the queen’s son to being in a tent in the middle of nowhere with eight people in the audience. I’d got down to bowling alleys.” The wedding snub was a reminder that “the fairy tale,” as she calls it, truly is over.

Yet that also means, she says, she is now free to reinvent herself as something more than an ex-royal. “With Catherine going up the aisle, you know what went through my head? I feel like I’ve handed her the baton and said, ‘Well done. And you’ll do it right.’ I didn’t do it right, and now I am going to go get Sarah right.”

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