DisneyWeird 4: Alcohol and Fast Cars

It took him at least four Rum & Cokes to get through dinner with the kids.

They sat across from us at the Coral Reef in EPCOT, and to be fair, his kids were more sedate than many we'd seen.

The Coral Reef was comparatively tranquil, with its floor-to-ceiling fishtank view and contemporary blue decor. Stingrays, sharks, and god knows what-all drifted by, pretending not to notice our plates of Blackened Salmon and Broiled Lobster Tail... After a day of punishing ourselves in the Orlando sun, it seemed the place to be. Plus, they offered a decent 22-ounce glass of their own house ale, which was surprisingly good. Or was it the heatstroke?

Several years ago, when traveling with a very different crowd in Puerto Penasco, Mexico, I learned that sunstroke can make crap beer seem like God's own nectar. Tecate in the states never has the magical, life-giving quality that it did after ten hours of boiling radiation on the sun-blasted, bone-white coast of Mexico. We built an enormous, elephant-sized bonfire on the beach and watched the moon rise through a velvety gauze of cheap Tecate... it was one of those Lovely Scenes in Life that are impossible to repeat. And with good reason.

But I digress...again.

Of all our Disney dining experiences, the Coral Reef was the best. But when our anonymous Dad slumped away, leaving his rum-stained glass and credit receipt, it seemed clear that Disney must test the very limits of a parent's stamina. There was a stink of defeat about his table, and it reminded us that our weekend was almost over.

We left the restaurant with bellies full of seafood and beer, and went directly to the GM TEST TRACK ride.

The gimmick here was to simulate the stress-tests auto makers inflict upon new cars: Shock tests on bumpy hills, sudden stops, temperature shifts, etc. The ride takes you through all these stages, and it's fun without being too fun.

After this, you're thrust out on a track where you accelerate quickly in the open air. That was MUCH better, particularly with all the beer in our guts for ballast during the 65mph banked turns. It was nearly closing time, and there were no lines. NOBODY was waiting when our ride was over, and so, with some mildly desperate pleading, we were permitted to ride again.

Just please unhook and re-hook your seatbelt, and have fun!

When that ride concluded, our pleading was more desperate. We had lost all dignity. One more time? Who could say no to such an innocent group as we?

When THAT ride was complete, we were down to our last 7 minutes before the park was due to close, and we deployed the Secret Weapon: the silent, pleading eyes of inbred cocker spaniels. Around we rode again, but it was to be our last time.

The night was drawing to a close, and there was barely enough time to race back to the Magic Kingdom for their ceremonial fireworks. From there it was a mad sprint to Space Mountain, and from there, sadly, to reality.

The morbidly curious can view the full set of photos here.

DisneyWeird 3: Freakout on the Teacups, with After-Effects

DisneyWorld in its original form (The Magic Kingdom) opened to the public on a bright Florida morning in 1971. I was three years old at the time, and completely unaware of the event. Honestly, I wasn't aware of much in those days. Sesame Street was in its second season, and I was content. Oscar the Grouch was my hero. Perhaps he still is.

In the case of DisneyWorld, it seems odd that this theme park that would come to represent all the dreamy excess of the American Empire is only 35 years old. Wasn't it.....always there? It contains some of the great legends of our civilization: Cinderella's Castle, Space Mountain, and that bloody Teacup ride. These are the Great Artifacts of our culture, our fingerprint upon the earth. DisneyWorld has become a vast cathedral to Dreams, as only Americans are permitted to dream.

It's a sobering reminder of how fresh and new this Empire is. America doesn't have the strength of Real History. It doesn't have roots. Its flesh is only as deep as the glittery surface of Disney's fantasy props. We could vanish tomorrow, and the surviving nations of Earth would be left to clean up our star-spangled wreckage. The United States of America would enter the history books as a fragile experiment in mass gluttony gone horribly wrong.

But that's tomorrow...or the day after tomorrow! We live for NOW, baby, and with reckless abandon! To prove it, we will get on that teacup ride and turn ourselves inside out with spinning sickness!

The legendary Teacup ride is a great lesson in the physics of motion. The floor is split into an interweaving pattern of circular templates which turn at roughly the same rate. One teacup per circle. The whole business is mounted on a giant carousel turntable, so each teacup is spinning AND rotating at the same time. Additionally, each teacup is mobile by being freely mounted on a spindle and can be spun at will, if the rider grips the wheel and heaves in one direction.

So our mission was simple: We would claim our teacup and haul that bastard as fast as possible, for as long as possible. And we did. When the music started, we took control and rode that Fat Dragon into the heart of madness.

The world was a smear of warping space, a glittering, mercury-tinted photograph streaked with razors across a sphere of glass, roaring into the eyes and down the spinal cord like a Mother's Milk of pure, desperate motion: a primal, tumbling circus which packed all bodily fluids against the outer walls of flesh... This was the last great Spin Cycle of the Cosmos and it was happening NOW, NOW, NOW, laughing up the very dream-soaked Towels of God from our throats...

And it was over. We had been hauling at the wheel like speedfreak truckers, and it was now time to WALK amongst normal people.

Recovery was easy, but the brain still churned with delirium. We were hungry, and stumbled like zombies towards what looked like an ordinary food court.

We entered, smelled cheap pizza, and I saw THE BEAST.

It was a hideous lizard creature. Man-sized with the cruel beak of a carrion-bird and the calculating eyes of an alien genius...and it was seated at a keyboard, making some kind of lounge music. Amongst us weary travelers, the analysis went something like this:

CHESTER: "holy [bleep], does anybody else see that....or is it just me?"

JAY: "no...... i mean, yes. That appears to be really there."

TERRY: "this IS the holy [bleep] of restaurants."

JAY: "um, is anybody else vaguely disturbed by its legs?"

CHESTER: "dear sweet jesus, it has Fat Banker's Legs!"

go to Part 4.

DisneyWeird 2: An Orgy of Bacon in the Land of Magic

There's no pain in the world; no suffering, no trauma, no emotional distress, that a pound of bacon won't cure.

We found ourselves at the scene of what those in the Disney trade call a "character breakfast" and it promised to be the most intense thrill-ride of them all: a total psychic cleansing, a bloodbath of the psyche that would leave even the strongest cynics on their knees and weeping on the day-glo carpet.

The Character Breakfast is an intense experience, a cafeteria restaurant on LSD. The decor is a hyper frenzy of color, and the scent of bacon is stronger than the incense at a Catholic high mass.

And it was a rather religious scene: Sixteen million children ran about like crazed worshippers, falling about the heels of the seven-foot Disney creatures that visited each table. The characters pranced and strutted about behind their white plastic eyes, but it was their silence that seemed the most creepy. In cartoons, these critters always talk too much, but here, they've become enormous mute puppets.

The "characters" traveled in a very precise circuit around the restaurant, visiting each table in turn and never deviating from the path. There was a sense of military order about Disney in general, but it was more obvious here. The visitation route was designed to expose each table to one set of characters before the next wave of customers came in. Disney's grasp on people-moving is impressive.

We tried like hell to interrupt their route, to divert Minnie Mouse to our table and offer her a bit of bacon and flirtatious fun.

Wink-wink. Hang with us...we're the fun people.

She would have none of it. It was like laying sticks down in the middle of a line of army ants: they will ignore the obstacle and proceed as planned.

The Boss must have seen what we were up to, and came over to investigate (photo, above). We were released after a firm lecture about wishes coming true, believing in magic, and keeping our goddamn hands off Minnie Mouse.

go to Part 3.

DisneyWeird 1: Introduction & Captain's Discretion

We were a dangerous group for the saccharine pleasures of Orlando. There was the magazine art-director (me), a book editor (wife Marian), her supervisor (Terry, the tall one), a symphonic french horn player and brewmeister (Jay), and a graphic designer and marathon runner (Heather)...

The trip was anchored by Heather's involvement in DisneyWorld's so-called "Minnie Marathon", a 15K women's race which promised to attract a heady mix of serious runners and insane, costumed creatures.

The decision to make it a group outing arose during a typical Friday happy-hour on Capitol Hill, sometime between the third pint of Guinness and the first shot of Jameson... The spirit of adventure often comes alive in times like these.

More than simply giving aid & support to the marathon, we all had unique meta-reasons to visit that strange wonderland. I had never been to Disney-anything before. My own sense of dark humor normally protects me from such happy-chappy stuff. I was CERTAIN there was a psychic barrier at the gates of Disney; an invisible firewall that would detect people like me and deliver a mighty shock, sending all the cynical people scampering like humiliated dogs.

Saint Peter looks down from the gilded archway of paradise, sporting giant cartoon mouse ears, scowling... "christ, dude, I can't let you in here; you'd freak the children!"

No matter! The laws of irony made it IMPERATIVE! I must go to DisneyWorld...

---

The boat ride from our resort hotel to "Downtown Disney" was tense and smelled of danger. The boats were supposed to depart every 15 minutes, and we waited patiently at the dock. Below us in the water was a mallard duck, lapping the water and obsessively preening with a shattered bill. The top half had been broken clean off, revealing its jittery duck-tongue, giving it nowhere to hide. A strange omen.

The boat finally arrived (after an hour-plus of waiting), and the "captain" was a rough piece of work: Barrel-chested and stuffed into a crisp white shirt, stone-faced and staring silently through mirrored shades... he had the look of an drill sargent driven insane by sterroids. Raw hatred rose like steam from his body, and we quickly determined that, perhaps, we were about to die.

A timid tourist approached the Captain, asking if the boat could please stop at the next resort on the way to Downtown Disney...she had understood that such stops could be requested.

"No. That would be Captain's Discretion" the man replied. He carried himself with all the severity of a shopping-mall security guard lost in a fever-dream of authority. We all boarded the craft and proceeded to CREEP down the river at a pace that barely broke the water. Other boats shot past like rockets while we puttered along. He was doing this deliberately to infuriate us, we thought. Captain's Discretion... We whispered amongst ourselves about about staging a mutiny, a full-blown uprising. Would any of these tourists have the raw chutzpah to join the revolution, I wondered... a quick look around the boat confirmed my fears. We were surrounded by sunburned potato people, and the mutiny died before it ever had a chance.

The Captain ran his boat with all the subtlety of Mussolini, stopping the engine once to turn and glare at a tourist who dared to shift in his seat. "SIR...all persons must remain seated until we reach our destination."

We finally DID reach our destination some 90 minutes later than planned, and the phrase "Captain's Discretion" had become a new term for the Unstoppable Forces of Nature. I figured this captain was on the brink of quitting his job, and refused to babysit these whining, caucasian beasts any more.

Perhaps we'd see something in the news about a Disney boat captain that went mad, brain eaten by syphillis and caffeine pills, who scaled the tower of Cinderella's Castle with a bayonet in his teeth and an automatic rifle strapped to his back, unloading on all the world's tourists while beating his chest and making awful croaking noises at the blood-red sky...

--- Go to Part 2