The following is a diary I kept while visiting Disney World in Orlando, Florida in order to document my experiences of joy and wonderment for a land where happy people roamed free…like Bison back in the 1800s.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t respond well to unbridled joy and immediately began to question Disney’s motives in creating such an environment.
And I swear on all that is good and decent in the world, that someone in a deep underground lair was pumping the smell of baked goods directly into the Magic Kingdom so that no one would detect the faint whiff of desperation permeating from the other non-joyful people who felt that there was something sinister going on.
For seven days I was held captive (with my family) in a land of pastel colors, forced smiles, and songs (oh dear God, the songs) until I did the only reasonable thing a sane person could do. I allowed my body to suffer a complete breakdown (with bile and anal discharge if you must know) and hid in my hotel room until my Disney pass ran out.
And the biggest surprise of the entire week?
That I went to “The Happiest Place on Earth” stone cold sober.
May my words be a warning to you all…
It’s raining here in Florida which isn’t that much of a problem. I grew up in Oregon where people mowed their lawn in pouring rain so getting wet means virtually nothing to me. The humidity is fierce but again, it is something I am used to, seeing that I spent almost fifteen years in the South (Houston, Texas and Savannah, GA respectively) and am used to being covered in a glossy sheen of thick sweat.
The rain has kept the crowds down to massive instead of oppressive so I still have the ability to move inside the globs of families all decked out in matching T-shirts that seem to have one thing in common; to make the teenagers in the group want to kill themselves. I share a small moment with one particular teen girl decked out in a bright yellow shirt marked up in iron-on black velvet letters spelling out: THE TAYLOR FAMILY 2011 VA-CAY! She stares at me and shakes her head slowly while rolling her eyes. I smile back and raise my shoulders in an “I know” movement. If I had a cigarette I would have given it to her.
I enter the park through the turnstiles and all I notice is how clean it is. How unnaturally clean. The kind of clean you would find in the home of an obsessive compulsive person who occasionally gargles with Pinesol. I search for the smallest indication of trash on the ground just so I know I haven’t died and entered into some Way station like in the movie Defending your Life but there is none to be seen. I imagine an entire legion of invisible goblins forced into some kind of servitude where their only sense of freedom comes from allowing a gum wrapper to roll across the floor in front of Cinderella’s castle before being destroyed by an Imagineer for treason.
The day progresses mainly in this order: stand in line for an hour then go on a ride that lasts 3-5 minutes, Get off, go find another line, repeat. The only real thrill comes from knowing I’m next in line, not the actual ride, because, let’s face it, who actually wants to “ride” Snow White other than those with a German fairy tale fetish (and by the way, that ride goes like 60 miles an hour and ends about a minute and a half after you first get on-awesome).
The most confusing moment of the day: Visiting the Carousel of Progress that supposedly includes current technology but is really just a bunch of animatronic people dressed in 80s clothes playing with a reconfigured Virtual Boy on a flat screen television…if the future is filled with Cosby sweaters (as is prognosticated in this show) you can count me out.
The day ends with the Electric Parade which excites a man behind me so much that he yells (in a high-pitched girl voice) the name of EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER PASSING BY so that they stop to see who has been ingesting helium.
Back at the hotel I pass out completely from heat exhaustion, ignoring my husband who was looking forward to an evening of Hotel Monkey Sex. I dream about the Small World ride all night long.
Day 2 (EPCOT):
The temperature is 96 degrees with humidity just short of taking a shower in your own clothes. The crowds are insane and there seems to be a huge concentration of enormously fat people zipping by me on scooters, their haunches creating a jet stream toward various EPCOT attractions (and by the afternoon I will be begging these Wall-E inspired creations to ride past me just so that I can feel a breeze).
I participate in various educational rides and discover that while interesting, I am bored beyond belief.
At the Ellen’s Energy Adventure (starring Ellen DeGeneres) I ache for one of the robot dinosaurs to rip her head off just to get a reprieve from the bad acting (it’s a mixture of video and animatronics). At Journey Into the Imagination with Figment I am tearing up from an insatiable need to stab and gut Figment and by the time I wander into the Living with the Land exhibit, I am more impressed with the air conditioning than with the nine-pound lemons Disney is growing (seriously, nine-pound lemons what kind of hell involves lemons that weigh more than newborn babies?).
It is at this point that I come to realize that I am not happy at the “Happiest Place on Earth”.
Maybe it comes from all the forced smiling and waving that all the employees have to do. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I paid $4.75 for a Coke with Ice. Maybe it’s because no one seems to be wearing deodorant and smell like a combination of Fart and Garlic, or maybe it’s from a deep-seeded belief that this perfect EPCOT future will never happen and they should instead focus on rides that reflect the reality that is sure to come like “The Monorail to Unemploymentville”, “The Tower of 401k Terror” and the “At Your Age You Are No Longer Sexually Viable” Sit-n-Spin. Those are the line I would happily stand in for 120 minutes.
By 4pm I am in a deep depression and have had the back of my shins bruised by various Lard Ass Scoot Arounds at least twelve times. No one in my family is enjoying themselves due to various issues and even though we still have to visit the counties of EPCOT we give in to lethargy and sore feet and leave the park by 5pm .
At dinner we eat in relative silence before heading back to our hotel rooms, hoping that the next day will be better.
Before passing out I allow my husband to have his way with me and we proceed to create a new Disney ride, the “FINE-STICK-IT-ANYWHERE-YOU-WANT-JUST DON’T-WAKE-ME” that takes about the same amount of time as the Snow White ride did.
But at least we didn’t have to wait in a line for it, though that is of little consolation.
(Read Part 2 next Friday which will include the thrilling tale of Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios and My Day Spent in Bed Wishing I Was Dead while the rest of my family went back to EPCOT…it’s so good it’ll be like you were there with me having diarrhea).
