By Kathy Brown
A photo was making the rounds of Facebook that caught some attention: two little girls dressed in Anna and Elsa costumes standing by the frozen Connecticut River. The photo has now been featured on Fox 61, WFSB Channel 3, and NBC Connecticut, as well as retweeted by Good Morning America, and even Patty Murin, the actress who plays Anna in Broadway’s version of Frozen!
The children are Michela MacDonald and Grace MacDonald (both 5, and surprisingly, not related to each other). The picture was the brainchild of Shauna MacDonald, a local photographer. Shauna’s daughter Michela, had received an Elsa dress for Christmas and Shauna thought that the ice would be a perfect backdrop for a photo. So Shauna asked her friend Torrey if she and her daughter Grace “wanted to go on an adventure.” Torrey said, “She told me to grab our dress and meet down by the river.” Then they realized that they had a problem: both the girls had Elsa dresses! Torrey turned to Facebook, and “within minutes” people offered to loan her an Anna dress for the photograph. Torrey went to Essex to pick up the dress, and Neal Perron, who lives in Haddam Neck, saw Torrey’s Facebook post and offered his yard for the photo shoot.
“We knew we had to get to the other side of the river to get just the right afternoon lighting,” Torrey told us. “It was a race against the clock, but we made it just in time.” She said that the girls were wearing warm jackets and wrapped in a blanket safely on shore while the shoot was set up where the ice had been pushed up and out of the river onto the banks. Then Shauna “snapped the perfect photo.” In the photo above, Elsa is played by Michela, and Anna is played by Grace. Torrey said they did the photo shoot at the perfect time because “the next morning the river that had been deadlocked for two weeks was free flowing.”
Both Torrey and Shauna are self-proclaimed “huge Disney fans” and are heading to Disney together soon. Torrey said, “Anyone who has seen Frozen knows Anna and Elsa’s love thaws the frozen fjord, so we like to think there was a little Disney magic that evening in Haddam Neck as well.”
Photo by Shauna Dai Photography.
