So the Sunday after Thanksgiving I found myself at Disneyland. To be honest I’m still not sure how it happened. I wasn’t drunk or high on tryptophan so the only explanation can be sweet-potato-induced mania with mitigating cabin fever. I can’t recall much about the whole incident really. I have a foggy memory of my partner Jeffrey saying,
I’m bored. Let’s go to Disneyland.
and then not much else until we were pulling the Yaris into its spot at the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure, Level: Daisy, Section D Aisle 1.
I’d never been much of a Disney fan, even as a child. My first trip to the Magic Kingdom was a little over a year ago when we were still considering the great move westward and came out to visit friends and check things out. Seeing the park for the first time as a 42 year old New Yorker was a somewhat startling experience. Like a long time resident of Eastern Europe getting his first glimpse of “the west.”
The Disneyland Park is quite…well…elegant and for all its blatant Americana it seems to me more reminiscent of a small Swiss city than anything of Southern California. Its blue and white castle shimmering in the sun offset by the craggy austerity of the Matterhorn, impeccably clean, well-ordered and overseen by amiable well-mannered caretakers… My reverie is then shattered. Shattered not by Huns, Prussians or Goths, no this invading force was made up by Americans (ok, and more than a few Japanese but they’re so cool in a we-gave-you-Ultra Man-Godzilla-and-Zen-Buddhism sort of way that I’m leaving them out of it). And not just Americans, but ugly, poorly dressed, ill-behaved Americans with ugly, poorly dressed, ill-behaved American children. In fact I’m sure that more than a few of these kids have been lost in the park for sometime and have turned feral. I witnessed one feeding on a turkey leg in manner that would make your skin crawl. Honestly, this kid was one step away from human flesh. More disturbing were the scooter people. These folks travel around the park in battery powered carts. Many are large. Some of them are transporting their own oxygen. Their own oxygen. I’m sorry but if you require constant oxygen, should you really be at Disneyland? Well I guess Lourdes doesn’t have SpaceMountain, giant spinning teacups or out of work actors dressed as cartoon characters.
It being the Sunday after Thanksgiving the park was decorated for the holidays making it even more beautiful and Swiss than usual. And best of all my favorite attraction, The Haunted Mansion, had been re-imagined as Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas, the wonderfully twisted film by the wonderfully twisted Tim Burton. It was all there, gingerbread men in gingerbread coffins, shrunken heads wrapped as gifts and even Santa Claus (Sandy Claws) as Jack the Pumpkin King.
We rode that twice.
After a while we’d had enough magic and decided to head for home. We fought our way through the mobs gathering for one of the nightly light spectaculars, each encounter making us regret having come in the first place and swearing that the mistake would never be repeated. We’d almost made it to the front gate when the lights on Main Street dimmed, music swelled from unseen speakers and glistening silver light began to appear first on Sleeping Beauty’s castle then on the roof tops of Main Street. It was stunning. Then in a final twist of the knife it started to snow. OK, not real snow but close enough. I left that night choking back tears, real tears. Magic Kingdom …
YOU WIN THIS TIME DISNEYLAND.
BUT I’LL BE BACK!!!
Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles. He has no idea why.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:07 am
[…] 8: The Musical, fingerprinting bullets, opera house = skate park, Disneyland claims another victim, music video created with 45,000 photos, science enlivens TV fiction, playing mountain music, […]