I had lunch today with a coworker, and across the table at the restaurant, he said, “I was watching a movie this weekend and a character totally reminded me of you.” I asked what movie, and he couldn’t think of the name right away, and said it was a cartoon. I first thought of MTV’s “Daria” because a friend I had long ago had told me that my sullen sarcastic personality is like the Daria character. My coworker said it’s a Disney movie. I said, “Lilo & Stitch?” I’ve had a couple of people mention to me when Lilo & Stitch first came out that in childhood, I must’ve been like Lilo. Imaginative in a twisted sort of way. He said that’s not it. I knew what was coming.

“Oh, it was Mulan!”
“So did the personality of the character remind you of me, or was it the way she looks?”
“It was her looks.”

I told him that another coworker had watched the movie with her husband when it came out years ago, and at a scene when she let her hair down and was again “Mulan the girl,” both the coworker and her husband said simultaneously, “That’s Cindy!” The coworker I was having lunch with agreed but he couldn’t identify which scene it was that it hit him how much Mulan resembled me.

It was probably the scene where she transformed into a man.