Songfacts®:

• The story of Cinderella has inspired quite a few songs, most of them without the fairy tale happy ending, and this one is no exception.
  
  Even those annoying couples who stay lovey-dovey years after their marriage will admit that it's not happily ever after all the time. In this song, Suzy Bogguss sings about going to a friend's dream wedding, where she catches the bouquet and the bride rides off in a white Mustang. But when she checks in years later, reality has intruded on this Cinderella story; the couple have kids and jobs and more concerned with compromise than romance. They feel like they missed a page or two, because there's nothing in Cinderella about how hard it would be once real life sets in.
• Suzy Bogguss wrote this song with Nashville songsmiths Matraca Berg and Gary Harrison. When she appeared on the Songfacts Podcast, Bogguss told the story.
  
  "I do look at my luck as a Cinderella story," she said. "I wrote that song with Matraca Berg. We were talking about her mother and my mother-in-law, how they had both gotten married in 1959 when women were supposed to have a really cinched waist and the right coffee maker, and everything would be perfect for your little perfect life, and we started making fun of Cinderella. We started going, 'Now, where are you? I don't think it's turned out exactly like you thought.'
  
  We were getting pretty catty. We didn't think it would be a real song - it was just for fun. We took a coffee break and Gary Harrison, who I've written a bunch of songs with, was out there and he said, 'That's really good, don't tear it up. Get back in there and do it.'
  
  We said, 'Well, you come in there and help us. We need to tone it down. The 'thunder thighs' don't need to be in there.'"
• Bogguss married the recording engineer Doug Crider back when she was a demo singer performing at Dollywood. She can count on him for an honest appraisal, so she knew she had a winner when she played this song for him and he declared it "done."
• This was released as a single from Bogguss' fifth album, Something Up My Sleeve. It's one of her most popular songs, landing at #5 on the Country chart.
• The music video is kind of like the movie Ever After, with live action but elements of Cinderella. It shows a little girl on beach who builds a castle in the sand, only to stomp it out later when she becomes disillusioned with the fairy tale. The video was directed by Roger Pistole, whose credits include "Cold Cold Cold" by Cage the Elephant and "Burning Man" by Dierks Bentley.
• In 2020, Bogguss posted a lyric video for this song incorporating archive footage from her performances of the song through the years.