Friday, June 25, 2010

Denizens of Disney



A Helpful Field Guide to the Inhabitants of the Magic Kingdom

Dedicated to Libby, and to the poor souls standing in line for The Jungle Cruise on a 90 degree day in June

(Author’s Note:  the study of Magic Kingdom denizens has been a long and arduous process, encompassing hundreds of woman-hours, and thousands of dollars worth of tickets and Mickey Mouse ice cream bars.  I present this guide to help you, the reader, identify and more fully appreciate these creatures.  Please be advised that they are wild, and in their natural habitats.  Please exercise caution when dealing with them, both for your safety, and for theirs.) 

The Newlyweds.  Identified by their unique Mickey Mouse ears: the female’s is white, with a veil; the male’s is black, with a top hat.  Also wear new, shiny wedding bands and glazed looks.  If you’re not careful, you will knock them over; they don’t pay attention to their surroundings, only to each other (and have only rarely seen the light of day on this honeymoon).

The Foreign Tour Groups.  These seem to be a rarer species these days, for unknown reasons.  Beautiful creatures in matching orange t-shirts, led by a frustrated woman holding a flag and yelling to try to get their attention.  Usually harmless, but can occasionally clog major intersections.

The Stroller Commandos.  These creatures use a stroller as a weapon to advance themselves through the crowd, much like a battering ram.  They have apparently forgotten that they have a kid in there.

The People Who Rush the Gate of the Attraction and Nearly Cause a Stampede, Even Though the Show Repeats Every Eight Minutes.  Self-explanatory.

The Button People.  It’s their birthday, their anniversary, their family reunion, their first visit.  They are given a button by the cast members to advertise the reason for their celebration. You are obligated to offer them congratulations.

The Self-Appointed Entertainers. Small sub-population of teens and young adults, often drunk, who have decided that the park would be even more fun if they provided additional “entertainment.”  They scream like banshees in the Haunted Mansion, and love to enact dramatic sequences with the costumed characters that inhabit the park.  They find their actions hilarious; everyone else finds them annoying. ((hi mommy, I know your describing me here so…thank you for remembering :]))

The Photographers.  Will stop in the dead center of Main Street, causing a traffic jam behind them, so they can get the perfect shot of Cinderella’s Castle, or, more often, of their loved on in front of the Cinderella’s Castle.  Become extremely annoyed if you accidentally get in their shot.

The New Parents.  Will wait in the afternoon sun for 90 minutes so they can bring their child on Dumbo the Flying Elephant- a ride that takes approximately three minutes.

The First Timers:  Appear lost- because they are.  They have yet to figure out that the Magic Kingdom is arranged in a circle.

The Thrill Seekers.  Will spend the entire day running from Space Mountain to Thunder Mountain to Splash Mountain.  Love to tell everyone: 1. how many times they rode the ride 2. how much they screamed 3. how sick their friends got and 4. how SOAKED they got on Splash Mountain (OMG!).

The Parents Who Should Be Tied Up and Made To Ride “It’s A Small World” 100 Times in a Row.  It’s 10:30 p.m.  Their four-year-old is hungry/cold/exhausted and sobbing in the stroller.  The parents, however, refuse to leave the park until closing time.

The Kid That You Wish You Had:  Parking your car in the Dopey lot is exciting.  Riding the tram from the parking lot is exciting.  Looping through the endless attraction lines is exciting. You don't have to spend money on them to make them happy.

The Disneyphiles.  Recognized by their Goofy hats, Mickey Mouse t -shirts, Tinker Bell handbags, and lanyard full of trading pins. Excellent source of Disney minutiae, like where the closest Hidden Mickey is, or where the best ladies room in the park is (Main Street, behind the Crystal Palace, near the Baby Care Center).

The Gazillionaires.  Stay in the suites at the Contemporary- for two straight weeks.  Buy the $500 Mickey sculptures in the Main Street Emporium as souvenirs for their hired help.  Usually have a nanny in tow.

The Sitters:  Always male.  Will find a convenient bench in the shade and wait for the rest of the family to finish watching the show/riding The Mad Tea Party/finish yet another trip into a gift shop.   Also can be spotted on the People Mover in Tomorrowland going round and round and round….

The Strategists.  Plan the trip like a military campaign, with a set itinerary, Fast Passes, designated meeting points- and actual restaurant reservations.  Refuse to be deterred from “The Plan”.

The Person Who Only Wants to Ride the Haunted Mansion, and is Content to Walk Around and Eat Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Bars the Rest of the Day:  That’s me. 

About the author:  Dr. Smith has been visiting the Magic Kingdom regularly since 1975.  She still remembers the names of all of the “E” ticket rides- and actually knows what an “E” ticket was.  She is considered an expert (in her own mind) in Magic Kingdom sociology.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Long Island, 2010. After the Gulf Oil Spill.


I am writing this post from the beach in Southampton, New York.  The Halsey Neck access point to the beach in Southampton, New York, to be exact.  It’s a serene kind of beach:  it seems populated with thinkers and walkers and readers rather than body boarders and beer swillers and barbequers.  It’s not like the Florida beaches that I grew up with; it’s a more contemplative type of beach. A beach to simply look, and feel, and smell, and to think of nothing and everything, all at once. 

My kind of beach.

I’m sitting on the sand looking out in the water, and I am trying to imagine the salt water covered in thick, shiny, greasy masses of slime.  And I am especially thinking of another beach like this, far to the south, along the Gulf Coast. It’s another contemplative beach like this, where I used to sit and think of everything and nothing- like I am doing now; where I sat as a quasi-intellectual college student writing bad poetry.  Not much has changed- except I’m now a 41 year old quasi-intellectual adult writing bad blog posts along with the bad poetry.

Allen and I visited that beach a few weeks ago, down there in the Florida Panhandle, before all of this happened. It may have been a farewell visit; I suspect that it never will look like the way that it did in April.  What will all of that pristine sand and the clear green water look like covered in oil?  Will that fine white sand blow for miles down the empty beach and pile up in drifts?  Will there still be sand dollars buried in the sand?  I doubt that the sand will blow, or the sand dollars will stay alive, when the oil comes.

In April, the weather can be quite unsettled in the Deep South.  We headed down to our campground on the beach just as a line of severe weather was headed down the same direction.  We arrived in the late evening, and it looked like the worst weather had passed us by.  We were safe, in our campsite hidden behind the dunes.  There was nothing to worry about.

I woke up in the middle of the night.  The sky was flashing; I could see it even with my eyes closed.  Flash…flash……flash…flash. flash…FLASH…..flash flash flash…. The sky glowed greenish.  It was dead still.

 I have seen storms like that before in my life- the storms where the lightening comes so fast that the thunder can’t catch up, and the sky glows from all of the electricity.  They suck all of the air surrounding them inside- inhaling the atmosphere- so that you seem to be a in vacuum before the storm arrives. They are a living creature.

That storm lay off the coast, stalking us, and waiting to strike.  I lay there, feeling frightened and helpless. Our little cocoon of a camper suddenly felt thin and fragile. All we could do was wait….

That storm now seems to portend what was to follow.  We were fortunate that night:  the monster slunk back out to the open ocean and away from us.  This new monster- this oil from the broken well in the Gulf- I don’t think this one will retreat.  This one will not be content to sit offshore, menacing. This one is coming.

Like that night in the camper, I feel helpless today,  in the face of this oil spill, the dimensions of which I simply cannot get my mind around.   

Right now, the only thing that I can do is to ride my bicycle down to the shore in Southampton. I chose to not turn the ignition key in the car. 

Maybe this disaster will effect a change in the nation’s psyche.  Maybe we will consider consuming less fossil fuel.   Maybe some of those people who drove their luxury SUV’s down to the beach access at Halsey Neck Beach will leave them home, and ride their bikes instead – they can park them next to mine, in the nearly empty bike rack.  Maybe we could make our roads safer, so that the other type of “traffic”- pedestrian, bicycle- could travel without fear alongside the cars and trucks.

Maybe we won’t be able to kill this monster- but maybe we can stop a new one from being created.

St. George Island, Florida, and the rest of the Gulf Coast:  you are in my thoughts and in my prayers. 

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Snakes Alive (2010 edition)

There’s (sort of) a new addition to our menagerie- the one that includes three cats, two dogs, I’ve just forgotten how many chickens, two fish, and one freshwater snail…

I’ve named our new addition Bob. I had decided, after numerous interactions, that he deserved a name. So Bob it was. And, now that he has a name, I feel somewhat protective toward him- which, for me, is rather unusual.

Bob is a snake. A really big snake.

(Above: one of Bob's cousins, from the UGA snake website)

Bob made his first appearance last summer, shortly after the rattlesnake incident. Having just recovered from that ordeal, I was sitting on the patio in the evening, and watched something slither toward the
grape arbor. It was dark brown, dingy, and fat. Water moccasins are dark brown, dingy and fat. But, after the rattlesnake incident and the resulting trauma that it caused, I was in denial. “That is NOT a water moccasin… that is NOT a water moccasin…” And then it slithered under the grape arbor and out of sight. My denial mechanism asserted that I hadn’t really seen a snake at all, much less a water moccasin. And so the incident was forgotten.
______________________________________________

“Be careful when you go in the garden… there’s a giant cottonmouth in the garden! Eek!”

That was the text message that I received two weeks ago from Jenni. I had been in that garden the day before, on my hands and knees, pulling weeds. While a cottonmouth was stalking me, apparently.

The possibility of a large water moccasin roaming the yard was not amusing, so I headed over to Lowe’s to buy a bag of snake repellent (yes, they actually make the stuff). The problem was, what if I put down snake repellent, and he was trapped inside of the yard, rather than outside?

Of course, Jenni also said that it may be a non-venomous water snake, as they look very similar. However, I prepared for the worst- that I had a cottonmouth in my yard- and hoped for the best- that it was really just a water snake.

I got the opportunity to make the distinction, up close, feeding the chickens that evening. I went out to the carport to bring the chickens a scoop of chicken feed- and there he was. Hiding under a table. He hadn’t spotted me, thank goodness.

With my usual calm and thoughtful demeanor when confronted with a reptile, I jumped up on a bench and screamed for Allen. I also began swearing. Loudly. In Spanish (in times of great stress, Spanish seem to be the best language in which to swear, in my opinion).

Allen came out. He got too close to the snake for my comfort, as per usual. So I started swearing at him in Spanish.

We stood there- me on top of the weight bench, and Allen by the table- trying to figure out what we were dealing with.

Dusky color? One vote for cottonmouth.
Thick body? Not so sure. The vote could go either way.
Big triangular head? Definitely not. One vote for water snake
Slit-like eyes? Hard to tell. Wasn’t planning on getting a closer look.

General opinion was leaning toward ‘water snake.’

“Let’s catch it” Allen suggested.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “You don’t know that it’s not a water moccasin! You just think that it’s not a water moccasin! You have a hypothesis that it’s not a water moccasin! You have not proven that it’s not a water moccasin!”

I headed for the back porch and waited for Allen to get bit and die, since he refused to listen to me.

“Come here!” He finally said. “I have him pinned with a broom.”

The snake was trapped underneath the whisk of the broom. He was curled up, and casually sampling the atmosphere with his tongue. He looked pretty placid.

“He doesn’t look particularly dangerous,” I said. I crept a little closer to him to get a better look. If he were a water moccasin, I doubt that he would be this docile; he probably would have tried to swallow the broom by now.  
I snuck even closer, and got a couple of pictures of him on the camera phone to post to Facebook, of course, so our herpetologist friends (believe it or not, we have more than one) could identify it for us.

“Do you want me to let it go?” Allen asked. “I can dump him in a bucket and take him away somewhere.”

“Nah- let him go.”

We let him go, just like we did with the rattlesnake. As icky as I find them, they are magnificent creatures, in their own way. And he’d clear the yard of vermin- a nice perk.

Allen took off the broom. Bob hauled ass.

I watched very carefully where I walked the rest of the night.

Bob has decided that he has nothing to fear from us, so has decided to carry on his business with us around. Last week, he was in the lawn, sunning himself and happily slithering around the yard.

Bob may still scare the crap out of me, but I am learning to peacefully coexist with him. Out on the carport last night, the dogs and I heard a rustling sound from between some boxes. Out slid Bob, trying to gain some traction on the concrete and get over to another set of boxes. “Oh, thank Goodness!” I thought.” It’s not a rat; it’s only Bob.” He must have been hunting frogs and rats, which seem to love the comfy carport.

Of course, the kids have raises a disturbing possibility- what if Bob is really Bobbie? What I Bobbie in hunting food for her babies (do they even do that?) What if there are about to be ten more Bobs in the yard? I am not sure I’ll be able to peacefully coexist with… Eleven Bobs???

“Aye! Mi Madre
!”

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Dispatches from the Scamp #1: Allen, Janna and Libby Go to the Movies


The Scamp has spent a lot of time at Ft. Wilderness Resort and Campground at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.  We race quite a bit at Disney, and we use it as our home base; we also like to celebrate any and all birthdays there.  Most of the time, we don’t even bother going to the Theme Parks—we just hang out down by Bay Lake and watch the fireworks and the Water Parade, eat like pigs at the Trail’s End Buffet, and spend hours in the Meadows Swimming Hole, sliding down the water slide and making like lobsters in the hot tub.

I think that the absolute best thing to do at Ft. Wilderness is to attend the nightly Campfire Sing-a-long and Movie in the outdoor movie theater at the Meadows Recreation Area.  You spend the first half hour singing corny songs and roasting marshmallows with Chip and Dale in the open-air theater.  When the fire dies down, they put on the Disney movie for the evening.  In the pre- “now available on DVD for a short time before it is returned to the vault” days, I got to see Cinderella  in that theater for the first time; watching Cinderella turn into a princess on the screen, on a cool summer night when I was a kid, was magic.

I still love the experience as a grown-up, and drag the family there every chance that I get—although we scared the pants off ourselves when we watched Meet the Robinsons out there- that scene in the future with all of the Bowler Hats and the world in shambles- very creepy watching outside in the dark.

I went with Allen and Libby to the movie when we stayed there last month.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the featured presentation.  I hadn’t seen the film in years, so I was excited.

It had been raining on and off that evening so, by the time we arrived, very few people were left in the amphitheater. Both Allen and Libby enjoy creating a running commentary to any movie they attend; I usually try vainly to ‘shush’ them.  That night watching Snow White, they were both in rare form.  Even though I’m usually the designated movie shusher, I joined in—there was no one close enough to hear us, so I only felt slightly guilty talking through a movie.  If you were within earshot, this is what you would have heard:

(Libby):  Ok, so what’s the deal?  The Seven Dwarfs look all cute and cartoony, but Snow White?  She just looks… bizarre….

(Allen):  Ok, now remind me:  what’s with the old lady with the apple?
(Me):  She’s the evil stepmother/queen and she hates Snow White’s guts because she’s way prettier. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror/on the wall/ who’s the fairest/of them all?’
(Allen): I get it.  She’s pretty scary all huge like that.
(Libby): Right?  I’m 14, and she scares the crap out of me!

(Libby, Me and Allen):  No!  Snow White, don’t do it!
(Me):  Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? Geez, how stupid do you get?  Snow White:  sorry.  You deserve what you’re about to get.

(Me):  They kept a dead girl in a glass coffin because she was ‘too pretty to bury?’
(Allen and Libby): GROSS!
(Me): And, really, pathologically, that’s not really gonna work out to well, because….
(Libby): Mother! Really??  Allen, this is the exact reason she’s not allowed to watch medical shows with us anymore.

(Allen):  The LIPS?! He kissed the dead girl on the LIPS?!  Ewww!!!!!

(Me): Awwww…. They’re off to live Happily Ever After in the Castle….
(Libby):  Is that the Castle at Walt Disney World?
(Me):  No, that’s Cinderella’s Castle.  I think Snow White’s Castle is at Disneyland.
(Libby):  I thought that was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle?
(Me):  Isn’t that in France?
(Libby):  Sleeping Beauty isn’t French….

(Allen):  Oh no!  There’s a big red shiny apple back in the camper!  Don’t anyone touch it!!!

(Me):  I’m gonna have nightmares about that witch.  Do you know how scary she is when she’s huge like that…?


(Ok:  it’s not Mystery Science Theater 3000, but we thought  we were funny…)