Walt Disney World : In the World of a Five Foot Mouse

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY GUESTS

2011-02-28T18:40:00.000-08:00

Anytime I see someone with an interesting name I always ask them about it. I met Wyatt Earp's great, great, great grand kids. I think I impressed the Mendenhall family that I had heard about thier grandfather's Glacier in Alaska.

On a few occasions I actually got a bit of a history lesson. I met the Miller family one day. Not an uncommon name. In fact, in some areas of the country there are dozens of families named Miller and Smith. Ever wonder why ? Accordng to one guest, during the times of war through out history when kings and emperors would form army to attack thier neighbors, the smiths, as in blacksmiths, silversmiths and other metal workers were left behind in the villages to make the armor and weapons. The Millers, or Mill Workers, were also left behind to make sure everyone stayed fed. Hmmm, inretesting. Is it true ? I'm not sure, but it sounds plausable.

I always find it fasinating the number of people who have traced thier family tree. One family i talked to traced thier ancestors all the way back to the Biblical city of Ur. When ever i get families with the last name Disney, they always try to see if that will get them somewhere. The answer to that is. . . No. If you were truly related you wouldn't be checking yourself into a standard room over looking the loading dock. We may have been born yesterday, but we've been around the block a few times since.

One thing you definately learn working in Disney customer service is how to read people. Here's a hint, if you think someone is lying, say nothing. in that moment of silence, the liar gets real fidgity. they can't stand silence. If given enough rope they will usually hang themself.

Service animals come in all shapes and sizes. At the Studios, a tech said he saw a child with a service pony. . . in the park. One of my guest had thier service dogs that was trained ot detect siezsures (i think). During one of kid's play groups (back home), the service dog went to a differnet child and signaled that the person was needing help. Basically, what the parents thought was a behavioral problem ended up being a true medical condition AND it took a dog to figure it out.

oops it's new year's eve and i never did my posting

2010-12-31T19:30:00.000-08:00

I'll fill this in soon. . . as for now, i'm too busy watching my christmas present ( a Roomba vaccum) clean the floor.

that's pretty sad isn't it.

IT HAS IT'S MOMENTS..

2010-11-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

People always ask. "Is it fun to work for Disney?"

I have to be honest, "It has it's moments."

True, we get awesome discounts on the Disney Cruise Line and free addmission to the parks (both California and Florida). They have some pretty nice sales on end of year merchandise. Companies and restaraunts around the theme park area often offer Disney/Universal/SeaWorld employee discounts.

HOWEVER, when I was in costuming and something went wrong in a show, a certian group of performers managed to always blame it on costuming. The Stage Managers usually sided with the performers. Thus, costuming folks seem to live in 'fear' (I use that word loosely) of being accused of doing something wrong. For a while, certian 'precious performers' would intentionally do things to thier costumes just so they could get out of doing a set, then blame it on costuming. Our managers rarely stood up for us. We tended to play CYA in everything we did.

Working the shows was awesome. To hear the audience respond to something I was apart of is an amazing feeling. Our characters become instant classics and the music soundtracks help to define a generation. During my last blog I mentioned the Spirit of Pocahontas show. I wnet back and watched it on youtube afterwards. . . The music has been stuck in my head ever since. :) The holidays, especially Christmas, are bare-none. A forty five foot Christmas tree is in one resort lobby. Chocolate carousel horses are in another resort lobby. Candlelight processional in December at Epcot is simply amazing. When Disney does something, they know how to do it right.

It doesn't mean they always 'did it' right, however. There are plenty of examples of WTH ? The Goosebumps show. "Hey let's put on a show where the audience has to stand in an asphalt road and not put any kind of seating. . . anywhere. And, I know, let's make the ending of the show totally contingent upon a young child saying some lines in fornt of a hoard of strangers." In theory the show could never end if the chosen children got stage fright and/ or backed out at the last minute.

Working for a company that is known world wide for quality and family heritage makes each of us an instant celebrity. . . when we're more than 200 miles from home. My friend and I took a trip to England in the early nineties. We drove from London to Edinburg and stayed in bed and breakfasts along the way. We were running late getting into Edinburg that night, but the little girl who lived at the house refused to go to bed with out seeing the people who knew Mickey Mouse.

THe internet is an awesome infromation tool. Guests can book their vacations, make dining reservations, find out what rides are best for thier interests. They can also find out how to scam tickets, con managers and learn key phrases like "How are you going to compensate me." and "That is not acceptible." Unfortunately, we have to treat everyone the same way, so if it looks like a scam and smells like a scam. . . we're pretty sure it's not a bed of roses you're dishing out.
We had a guest recently come to the desk and demand a manager. She told the manager that her room was filthy and that there was potatoe chips scattered on her balcony. The manager came back later and said the supposed potatoe chips was dried leaves from a near by tree. STILL, this guest wanted fast passed and other compensation. Needless to say, now, he was ticked.

Where else can you work were you see a 'Tron-o-rail' (monorail painted to look like a Tron bike) on your way to work AND see a flock of wild turkeys meandering through a golf course all in the same day ? Because of the Shades of Green resort being a military owned and ran property, we get to see fighter jets fly over Magic Kingdom every so often. How many private companies have the honor of hosting a swearing in ceremomony for thousands of new American immagrants ? Think about it, there is a group of Disney cast members (imagineers, I think) that every time there is a new President of the United States, goes to the White House to meet with them so they can accurately recreate their likeness in the Hall of Presidents. And what other company has future kings (of England), former presidents and celebrities from all walks of like wanting to reconnect to thier child hood. . . if even for a day.

A well know rule at Disney, if you're working is never, ever ask for an autograph. It is possoble to get fired for it. That doesn't mean that we can go 'back stage' and say "YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHO I JUST SAW, OMG. I CAN DIE HAPPY NOW." Another well known Disney rule is that if you use one of your passes to let someone in the park, you are reponsible for thier actions. So if you let your beer drinkin' cousin you bearly know into the park, he desides to jump out of the boat in the Pirates ride and runs around the village scenes. You could be reprimended as your relative gets carted of to jail for . . . what ever.

Is Disney a fun place to work ?

To that, I say, "It has it's moments."

MEANDER THOUGHTS OF A WONDERING MIND PART TRIO

2010-10-31T17:19:00.000-07:00

It's time for my yearly to clean up my file of jotted down Disney snipets that didn't have a home anywhere else.

When dealing with guests, you have to be professional and courteous at all times. Well, when you are checking them into your resort and see that they live on Swamp Poodle Rd ( I think it's some where in north Philly), you just have to ask, "Are you kidding me ?" I also had a guest who lived on Yellow Brick Rd. She said she loved her street was was never going to move. Jump off Joe Rd (Grant's Pass, OR) Actually came with a history lesson. Apparently 'Joe' was being chased by indians back in the day and jumped off a small bluff into the falls to get away. Sadly, the legend states that he didn't survive the fall.

A friend of mine worked at the Give A Day, Get a Disney Day call center. (Give a Day was a promotion that Disney did in 2010 where they encouraged a million people to do a volunteer project and get a free Disney ticket to the park in return.) Apparently a pageant promoter had ALL of the girls in the pageant do a volunteer project, BUT they only wanted us to only give tickets to the girls who won the pageant. WTH ??? Obviously it was a resounding and unanamous NO from our end. If you did the work, youw received the tickets.

That was about as good as the guest who was soooo pissed off that they weren't going to get the tickets, BECAUSE they didn't actually sign up to be apart of the million volunteers, that they threated to call the President of the United States. My friend was so tempted to say, "Really ? If you have Obama's phone number, can I get it too ?

There was actually two different Pocahontas shows at Walt Disney World in the nineties. The Animal Kingdom version had Pochontas, Grandmother Willow and a cast of sometimes reluctant animals, like the rabbit that needed a nudge from the stage hand to get going. . . I literally saw a hand from backstage pushing the rabbit out on the stage.

Most people, however, have forgotten about the short lived (nine moths + or -) show that was at the Studios. It was supposed to be 100 % native American cast and crew. Yeah, that didn't happen. There was one wardrobe person, one stage technician and about half the cast who were native American. I actually found it on youtube the other day. (Search for Spirit of Pocahontas )During the run of the show one of cast members who played the medicine man performed a traditional native american wedding on the stage. (after hours).

When you work in a show, you tend to 'create your own little world and some things that make perfect sense in your sphere of reality makes other people go "HUH?" One of the lines in Pocahontas was, "Wingapo, this how we say hello?" Which later turned into (backstage anyway) Win-GA-Po. For years after the show went down, a few of us still said, "Win-GA-Po," when we'd see each other.

While I'm on the subject of 'our own little world', the show that came after Poca, was Hunchback of Notre Dame. . . A Musical Adventure !. During the run of Hunchback, we had Gypsy wedding. One of the performers and a Stage Technician got married (not on stage though). Everyone in the cast and crew stepped in to help with the preperations from the dress and food to the photographer and decorating the hall. The bride asked one of her fellow cast members to walk her down the isle, because her elderly father wasn't physically able to. This cast member was so humbled and honored to be able to do it that he got a little teary eyed. He said, "since he was gay, that was probably going to be the only time in his life that he'd ever be able to do that.

When guests come to the park, they can get a Happy Birthday button to wear. I had a guest with some questions come to the desk. As i was trying to help him, I could have swore the name he had written on his Birthday button was 'THE*DORK'. I was about to ask why he wrote that on there, when i realized it actually said THEODORE. O0ps!, Glad i didn't make a comment.

I recently was asked about a new resort that Disney World was going to open called Buffalo Junction . It was going to have Buffalo and Elk, i guess like a north american version of Animal Kingdom Lodge. I had never heard if, but after a little internet searching i realized he was right. It was supposed to be located in the strip of land between the Wilderness Lodge and Fort Wilderness campground. I found articles written about it from the 80's and 90's and a possible resurface in 2009. I'm not sure if the powers that be are still kicking around the idea, but who knows, what will crop up, if the economy gets better.

Speaking of the Fort, i often wondered what ever happened to the famous cow called Mickey Moo. She was a dairy cow with a black corporate mickey shaped spot on her side. Again I went to the internet. My sources tell me that she passed away in August of 2001. Awe does that mean there's no more Mickey Milk ?

Alas, my meanderings are more like fizzelings, so i'm calling it a night
. . .
A NIGHT.

WAR STORIES

2010-09-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

WAR STORIES. . . When I thought about what to write this month, I started coming up with a list of near misses, slip ups and other accidents that the participants eventually walked away from, but they sure did have a good story to tell anyone willing to listen.

With Epic being a Stunt show, people do get hurt. Luckliy, no one had ever been killed on the stage.(At least up until 2009, but that's a story for another blog). We did have two serious near misses over the years, however. Both accidents involved the the slide for life. Which is a cable slide from the top of the Indy high fall building to the floor. During a rehearsal in the early ninties, when the park had barely opened, one of the Marion stunt doubles fell from the cable near the top of the building. She broke several bones in her face and elsewhere. Although she did survive her injuries, I don't believe she ever returned to performing after that. Then one of tumblers fell from the slide for life in the early 2000's. After some time in the hospital and a lengthy rehabilitation, he tried to return to the stage, but we didn't see him much after that.

One of the Epic tumblers was on the buildings in scene two and landed wrong. He didn't break his leg, instead is bowed out on him. It was about like having a sprained bone. He limped into the stage one day to show off his injury. His entire leg from the knee down was solid black and blue. The tumblers have their names written on the inside tounge of the shoes, so obviously, we know who's is whose. One of the tumblers sprained an ankle and was taken to the hospital for x-rays. He said the emergency room workers were giving him a hard time because a grown man 'had his name written inside his shoes'.

Stunt men aren't the only one's with 'war stories'. Characters are constantly getting wacked, hit and jumped on by the 'precious darling children'. A operation's cast member was working the autograph line for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and had to cut the line off so the performers could leave the stage after thier 'set' was done. Apparently a particular guest, who was not included in the last few people to get the autographs, took offense to that and hit the cast member. Did i mention that this particular cast member was a 5 foot nothing grandmother.

During the nineties, we had a group of performers who rode to thier set location in a modified minivan. (For integrity sake, I can't tell you which performers they were). The one in the back wasn't prepared for the van to start moving and fell out of the truck. He was taken, in costume, by ambulance to the hospital to be checked out. Once he was given a clean bill of health, he had to wait to be picked up by some one from his dept. Oh yeah, he was 'still' half dressed in a muscle suit costume. . . a green muscle suit. He said the people at the hospital was giving the oddest looks. Just remember, those things that don't kill you, make you stronger. . . Right?

When Universal Studios had the X-Men stunt show, several of our guys jumped over there to do that show as well. And yes they brought back more 'War Stories'. Like the time 'M', was supposed to run off the top of a building and rapell down. However, the rigging malfunctioned and he went straight down. Everyone who saw it thought he was dead. Thankfully, enough of the rope was wrapped around him to slow his fall. He still hit hard and messed his back, knees and ankles up. 'M' never really got over that fall and he felt the aftermath for many, many years.

Our performers worked hard, lived hard and in some cases played even harder. Since the inception of 'turn around pay' it was possible for people to be literally on the clock, getting paid for several days straight, 24 hours a day. The 'Turn Around Pay' clause in the contract says if there is less than 8 hours between shifts, you get paid straight through. The characters were notorious for working Fantasimic! at night and a character breakfast shift the following morning. This meant less than 8 hours between shifts and it usually meant at least a few of them sleeping in the breakroom over night.

A favorite 'in the park' cast member past time, especially for the college kids, is drinking thier way around the world at Epcot. The few times I joined in, we rarely made it passed a couple of countries. At least drinking in the park was a bit safer that down town Orlando. At one point, Orlando's downtown was nothing more than bars and tatoo parlors. (AS OF 2010, IT'S NOT THAT WAY ANYMORE). One night three of our performers from Epic went out drinking and got into a bar fight. Long story short, they were jumped in the parking lot by people with knives. One actually got some teeth chipped when a knife went through his cheek. It all came to an end when one of our guys grabbed his gun from the car and fired into the air.

While working at Universal Studios, I watched a stilt walking class practice in the rehearsal room. I asked what happens if you fall? Are there any tips for landing safely? The answer, 'you don't fall'. Rrr-i-g-h-t. Hunchback of Notre Dame had it's own fair share of War Stories, not the least of which was when a stilt walker fell on stage and broke his hand. I was actually sitting in the audience that day and had no way to help him. The stage had a run way that the cast used to enter the theater. The stilt walker slipped on a wet spot and as he fell one of his stilts got hung up under the bleechers. With out missing a beat, the rest of the cast ran off stage and literally picked him up. Once he was back on his feet, or stilts, he finished the scene, then went to the hospital with a broken hand.

Like I said, work hard, live hard, play hard.

OPENNING OF ANIMAL KINGDOM. . . AHhh the memories

2010-08-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Over the nearly twenty years of being with Disney, I have had the opportunity to be apart of some amazing and unforgettable events, not the least of which was the openning of Disney's Animal Kingdom. To start out with, this job wasn't even something i was pursuing. In fact I was just passing through the Epic (Indiana jones show) breakroom one day and a friend of mine was on the phone. She stopped me and told me about her phone call with one of tech managers/ crew chief's (not exactly sure what his title was then). His job with the Animal Kingdom opening was assisting all of the radio broadcasters who where doing live remotes from the various parks and he was looking for people to help out with the setup/ tear down/ escorting (basically get the media folks thier stuff and keep them from getting lost).

Of course I jumped on that with a vengences. 'J' and I pestered the snot out of our department manager for permission leave the department briefly and a week or two later we're sitting in the rehearsal room at the studios finding out what our job would be. Call times at 2:00 AM, most mornings. 12 + hour shifts most days. Exclusive rights to join the media's parties most nights. Basically a no sleep marathon for a week. Since, for the week, we were concidered media crew, we were allowed to join in the parties, eat free food and get the souveniers. In a word 'AWESOME'.

They were also celebrating the newer Downtown Disney Westside opening, so during one of the parties we sampled food from Wolfgang puck and Bongos. David Copperfield made an appearance at Pleasure Island. Way back then, they were going to build a David Copperfield's Magic Underground restuarant at the Studios and they opened a magic shop in the newer part of Downtown Disney.

The Studio's media party was amazing. Disney has what they call Screaming Fans. Cast members get paid over time to line a red carpet and scream and yell like the people who are walking in were movie stars. They do this for conventions and other occasions. I've worked it. It's fun. You just have no voice left the next day. Anyway, at the Studios party, we were met by Screamng fans. At the end of the red carpet, managers were handing out pineapples filled with wine. My manager who gave us the permission to do this side job was there. I looked at him and said, " I guess I picked the right extracurricluar activity". As I worked the crowd, I saw my other managers standing off to the side just watching and unable to participate. They were alot like seeing Roudolph not being allowed to play in the reindeer games.

The only party I didn't make was the one at the new sports complex, now called ESPN's Wide World of Sports. My heart was willing, but the little thing called sleep deprevation was kicking in. It didn't help that I had to be at work at 2:00 the next morning. . .

Oh yeah, 'the work'. I guess I should talk about that too :). At 2:00 in the morning, we were back stage loading up Pargos( flat bed golf carts) with tables, coolers of ice, media gear and a hundred and one other things, then we'd get our assigned areas that needed to be set up. We learned, very quickly, when driving a bumpy little golf cart at full speed, that the back section of the park (between African and Asia) is not flat. In fact it's down right rough. I won't tell you how we found out the first time, but. . . . Table ? what table? . . . KIDDING, sort of.

At 2:00 in the morning you freeze, but by noon, you'd about get heat stroke. We'd get the tables for the stations set up early in the morning. The morning radio personalities would arrive and get a ride to their spots through out the park. However, at 9:00 all motorized vehicles had to be out of the park. We were hustling along the media crews that were right on the edge of the cut off time, because we knew it was foot traffic only after the park openned. During the week WE got a crash course on where all of nooks and crannies in Animal Kingdom were. At one point, I could almost draw you a map to were the all of sprinkler heads and power oulets were located. To this day, when I go to the park, I look around and think, we were there and through that backstage gate is the Lion King breakroom and over there is the Pride Rock Cast Member comissary. . . .

The afternoon was spent walking back and forth assisting the broadcasters with tons of equipment. Okay, maybe not tons, but at near 100+ degrees out, it sure seemed like it. After one of my trips to the furthest reaches of the world. . .I mean park, I chugged an entire bottle of water in in one gulp. Others in our group were manning media information stations in the present day Tusker House covered seating area. (Oh, yeah, we were fed there too. . . At that time, they had rotiserie chicken, ribs and Prime Rib. Mmmm, prime rib). I never worked at that post, I just remember seeing radios all over the place and a bees nest of activity.

We did see our fair share of celebrities. The most memorable story was when one our ladies was told to stand by an open box truck. They were loading and unloading items and needed to make sure things didn't walk away without one of us tied to it. She said a gentleman walked passed her and asked he could sit on the truck's lift gate for a few minutes. He stated that he wasn't feeling as energetic as he usually did. She didn't see any harm in that, so they hung out and talked for a few minutes. She asked if he was having a good time and was able to see all the animals. He said he was and had no problem getting into the exhibits and rides. She noticed his hair was shaved or very short, but never recognized who she was talking to until the plaid dressed VIP escort walked up and asked if he was ready to go. As he walked away, she realized she was chatting with Micheal J Fox. (He had resently had surgery trying to help the Parkinson's disease)

The one and only time I ever saw Mr Eisner was back stage before a media appearence. . .moving on.

Animals have away of letting you kow when they are not happy. The Gorillas in the Gorilla Falls portion of the Savanna were no exception. If you go to Animal Kingdom now, you'll notice that it's not called Gorilla Falls. That's because not long after the park openned, the charming primates started throwing Poo at people. Disney quickly changed the name of that section and has kind of down played the Gorilla exhibit ever since.

Another park openning faux pas came from our illustrious leader himself. During an interview with Mr. Eisner, a bird in the background kept squaking and drowning him out. When asked what was the bird's problem, Eisner said something to the effect of eating it for lunch if it didn't stop. , , OF COURSE the Disney Spin Doctors jumped in and said 'no, no that what our CEO meant to say was that someone needed to feed the bird it's lunch'. Riiight.

SNIPETS ABOUT SHOWS I NEVER WORKED

2010-07-19T01:58:00.001-07:00

To say I never worked at Doug Live on Stage isn't quite right. I did work there a couple of times dressing the guests that were picked out of the audience, but it was never my scheduled home stage. Doug was a Nickelodeon character that Disney bought, created a show and a merchandise line out of it, then sent it back to Nick. Doug was a very imaginative pre-teen that turned in to the super-hero Quail Kid in an effort to save the world. . . or maybe it was just to survive middle school and to conjure up enough courage to ask out Patty Mayonnaise. When they were in rehearsal for Doug they had a Veerrrry expensive prop called a Cosmic Thingy. It was worn on the head and had gadgets and gizmos all over it to simulate something from an old sci fi movie. I was told it cost nearly $2000, that's right two thousand dollars. Well, it never made it past rehearsal because it was dropped and broke. Never Fear The Techs are here. One of the techs built a similar looking gizmo out of a bike helmet and coiled tubing. Same effect at a mere fraction of the cost. Have I mentioned that Disney is like a small government. Bids for items are always inflated. Sometimes you just have to sit back and go "Huh?"

I have been told by good authority about a Magnet Incident that sent a wardrobe cast member to the doctor. The Quail Kid costume had a large 'Q' on the front held on by a set of very strong magnets. When costuming was preparing the costumes for laundry, one of guys put the magnets in his pockets and continued sorting the clothes. As he loaded the clothes washer, the magnets did what magnets do and attached themselves to the washer, BUT not before they snapped together catching a particular part of the male anatomy we'll call Mr Coolie along the way. The costumer was stunned at first, but then he realized he was helplessly stuck to the clothes washer. My good friend SS worked at the show. She was too busy laughing hysterically to help free him. To add insult to injury, he said that in the doctor's office, they also were laughing when he told them the story (By the way, he survived the incident and later became a manager. So it's all good.)

I asked CJ, a good friend of mine about any stories he had about his days as a Disney character. I think he has writer's block, because he could only think of one. While working at the Jungle Book show in Animal Kingdom, since their stage was in an out of the way place, they'd send the monkey characters out in the street to draw people back to the show. On one particular day, a monkey was messing with some guests at the Restaurantoursaus. At that time I think it was still a McDonalds. He knocked on the window glass and actually broke the glass. After that, there were no more Jungle Book monkeys running a muck in the park.

During the Pocahontas show, the short lived one at the studios, about half the cast was native Americans. In a world of 'cookie cutter' people (men with similar hairstyles, no facial hair, no tattoos, etc), seeing the Indian cast members with native hairstyles was refreshing. Apparently the Greta Groom, now it's referred to as the Disney Look people, had fits about letting them keep their long hair. They wanted them to conform to Disney standards. . .then wear wigs for the show. In order to get Native Americans in the cast Greta had to give in and for a while we had cast members with Mohawks, braids and hair down to their waist. . . Ah the good ole' days.

One of the cool things that happened at the show was a wedding. Two of the cast members were married on stage (after hours) in an authentic Native American wedding ceremony. Unfortunately, I wasn't working there at the time, so I missed the event.

During the show, John Smith meets Pocahontas, offers to shake her hand and says, "this is how we say hello". For a brief period of time Indiana Jones Stunt show was doing shows out on New York street not far from Pocahontas. (I think they were rehabbing the stage or something). The Stunt show audio kept bleeding over into the Poca stage. In fact at one point John Smith said his line, "This is how we say Hello". This was followed by gun shots from the stunt show. . . Nothing like some brutal honesty here at Disney World. It was said that the Poca cast was getting a bit aggravated at intrusions and talked about forming a War Party to invade the stunt show. . . Yeah, that never happened.

Goosebumps was a show who's popularity was affected by the fact that there was no seating, no shade and it was hot a blue blazes out there. It also didn't help that to end the show, kids from the audience had to say particular lines. If they got stage fright and didn't say the lines. . . in theory, we'd all be doomed and evil would rule the world. Translation: The cast members had to improvise at times. As part of the area, they also had a haunted maze. The characters loved that part of their job because the could scare the bejesus out little kids and get paid for it.

AHhhh the things people say

2010-06-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

Kids . . . and adults, say the darnedest things. While at work on the concierge floor one night, a father and his young preschool daughter came to the desk. The child had a mangled bag of Doritos in her hand. She pointed it at one of cast members and said "I going to dissappear you with my magic bag of Doritos." She waved the now rolled up bag of Dorito crumbs at the cashier. The cashier dropped behind the desk. The little child burst out into laughter. They did this several times and each time it had the same results. There's not too many jobs where you get paid to play with kids.

We had a guest who had lost the in-room safe key. We informed him that it was $35 to replace it since we'd have to re-key the safe. The guest remembered that he was sitting on one of the couches by the fire place the night before and went to check there. He came back a few minutes later and said, "I found the key in the cousions of the couch, along with five dollars and a handful of gold fish crackers."

When you say, " Have a great day", the natural response is, "you too." So i try messing with people's minds and say things like, "Have a Great Vacation". "You tooo. . . I mean, Uhm. Thank you" Although I have to admit, it did backfire on me one day. While checking in a guest, I said, "We'll get this done, so you can get out of here. . . and start your vacation." I caught myself in mid sentence, but it still sounded bad. . . oops!

Its always fun to see people getting into the moment. A front office cast member came back stage the other day and said he saw some one wearing a shirt that said, "Unattended children will be given Expresso and a Free Puppy."

Sometime you hear snipets of comments as a person walks passed that sound funny when taken out of context. Like the 30-something man who I heard say, "STUPID GRANDMA!" as he stormed passed the desk out the front door. One of our cast members who used to work at a Disney Store realized that certian things we say on property could get you arrested if said out side of Disney like, "Come here Princess, I have something for you." We give out stickers and coloring books, but outside of Disney. . .Eeek!

We have guests that are just so clueless. I had some one who wanted to cancel dining reservations. The conversation went something like this.
"I need to cancel my reservation."
"What name is it under ?"
"I don't which name we put it in."
"Do you know what restaurant it's at ?"
"I'm not sure."
"Do you know what time it was at?"
"I, uh . . . I'll be right back."

Being the 'Happiest Place on Earth', I've had people ask me if we ever get angery people. The answer is "Yes, YES and yes.".

There was a guest late one night that I was trying to get checked in and she was pissed that there was problems with her reservation. While the back office was fixing it, I was doing damage control and tried to calm her down. Every new round of ranting, was usually followed by "Where can i buy cigarettes?" or "they took my lighter at the airport. Can I get a new one?" or " I haven't had a cigarette since this morning". I realize that it was the nicotine takling and I'm sure she could be a very nice person. . . after a pack or two of cigarettes. I vow, I will never start smoking.

When certian extreme political conservatives get to their rooms and realize that Disney does not carry FOXnews on the cable net work, they feel it's a plot by Disney for some kind of political something or another. A Gentleman, I use this term loosely, was literally in my face screaming at me the night of one the Obama / McCain debates. "Why don't you have FOXnews ?! This is not acceptible. I will never stay at Disney again!" I walked back stage and said "Can someone tell me what just happened ?" It was then that I realized that Fox is ultra conservative. That happened around the 2008 elections. It was a pretty heated time. I understand that, but jump forward a to 2010 it happened a couiple of times again. Come on people, get over it.

I have some friends that work in the call center and guest correspondence. With out the face to face interaction, they get a whole different kind of response from our guests. One friend said she had a call from a guest who was miffed that they did not get thier free Disney ticket from the Disney Give a Day Get a Disney Day promotion. No matter how many times she tried to explain to this person that you had to have an account with Disney in order to be counted in the one million people volunteering (which this guest failed to do), this person kept demanding a ticket. Finally in a fit rage, the guest screamed " If you don't give me a ticket, I'm going to call the President of the United States." The call center cast member's first thought was, "Oh really ? If you have Obama's blackberry number, Can I get it from you ?" Obviously she couldn't say that, but she reeeeaaallly wanted to.

A Guest sent an email about a concern and didn't like the answer he got. (Yes, we do say no at times) In his reply letter he said, " This leaves a bad taste in my mouth." The cast member receiving the letter wanted to write back, "You may want to stop eating your email, then"

Guest correspondnce has lost track of how many times some one has said, "Because of (yadayada) Walt is rolling over in his grave." If he's buried in California, it was probaly just an earthquake. One of the best speachless moments i heard about was when a guest clicked on a disney link in her computer and it took her to a porn site. The Call Center cast member assured her that is was NOT something Disney did. Hmmm, makes you wonder what kind of recreational internet surfing they. . .No, I won't go there.

During the Disney Give a Day Get a Disney Day volunteer promotion, a call center cast member was calling back guests once thier ticket issues had been cleared up to give them the good news. On one particular call, a preschooler answered the phone. Her father was heard in the back ground, "Ask Who It Is?" The cast member gave their name and said they were from Disney. The toddler only gave her father a piece of the information, and since the father did know any one by that name he told her to hang up the phone. So to Mr. Lazy, who refused to get up and answer the phone, you just hung up on your free tickets to Disney World, don't you feel Stupid.

In parting i want to leave you with a clever, yet profound thought that a guest said one day after ending an excercise in futility.

'It's one of those things where you chase your tail and catch you nose'

Beauty and the Beast (a.k.a. the Show that Will never Go Away)

2010-05-31T17:11:00.000-07:00

Other than the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spetacular, Beauty and the Beast is the second longest running show at the Studios. We like to think of it as the Grandmother of the Broadway show. Whether that's true or not, who knows.

As the Broadway show was opening, we saw an interview with one of the performers from New York and he commented on how hot the costumes and make up were. You should have heard the moans and groans in our green room. The general consencus was, " They have an air conditioned theater, they should come to Florida in near 100 degree August and do the show, then you'll know what heat is."

One of my all time favorite bloopers came from B&B. If you remember the mob scene from the show when Gaston comes out and yells, "Kill the Beast before he Kills Your Children !!" This particular time the tech didn't get his mic on in time and all the audience heard was Gaston yelling, "Kill your Children".

Side note, in light of all of the pop star, "did they sing life, or didn't they". I can assure you that yes, our performers sing live. I won't say they're never tracked, sometimes there is a techincal glitch or hicup and the tech has to run the tracked music to get through the show, but it is very, very rare. For a while, we never had to buy AA batteries for ipods, cd players, ect. The lav mic's batteries were changed every two to three shows, but the batteries still had some life to them. They just didn't have enough to trust an entire show on them. So at several of the stages, the techs would have box of half dead batteries free for the taking. Ahhh the good ole' days.

For a while each of the shows had some kind of pre-show entertainment. For B&B it was and acapella group called Four 4 A Dollar. Over time they had aquired a huge fan following. Te four guys even when on to compete in international competitions. At one time the placed third against performers from around the world. But cut backs came in 2008 and they ended thier over ten year run at the mouse. They continue perform under thier non-Disney name of Return to Zero.

Backstage, as with most theaters, they had thier fare share of shananigans. The ballgowns are preset on the floor so that the dancer can just step into it. Belle's dress sets up higher that the pink ones. One day one of the guys crawled up under the dress and hid. As Belle was ready to step into it, all she sees is this face coming up out of it. She screamed and about had a heart attack. It took her a few moments to recover, but being the trooper that she was, she didn't miss her enterance.

At Disney there are wedding proposals practically everyday. My favorite one to date is the one between two cast members at B&B. The soon to be Bride was a dancer and the future Groom was a performer at the show. His fiance's dance partner taught the future groom the Waltz and wardobe did some hasty alternations to a Ballroom jumpsuit. The techs gave him a mic and the animal handler held back a cage of pigeons from the show's finale. During the Waltz, the soon-to-be bride's dance partner disappeared off into the wings and the future groom stepped out onto stage. The bride knew what was going on for the first time and she started to cry. After everyone's bows, the two stepped down stage center, he knelt on one knee and proposed. Of course she said yes. The birds were released and the entire audience gave them a standing ovation. There was not a dry eye in the house. I wasn't there, but i saw it on video in the Hunchback of notre dame greenroom the next day and I still teared up.

So I guess dreams do come true for cast members. . . .

SNIPPETS OF LIFE BACKSTAGE

2010-04-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

When you work in close proximty with the same group of people for many years, you become a family. Albiet a disfunctional and often warped family, but still a family.

During Hunchback of Notre Dame: A Musical Adventure, the Gypsies / characters took being a gypsy to heart. In fact one of the openning crew wardrobe dressers quit Disney soon after the show opened and became a gypsy in real live. Now, that's a bit extreme, I'll admit it.

Backstage, we were always pulling pranks on each other. Snowball, the lifesize horse puppet, was used in the first scene, then after that it was more or less a dressing table. The stilt walking gypsy undressed in that corner and we learned early on that his dew rag (head wrap), was easily mis-placed, kicked up under things, or in other ways simply lost. So Snowball's ear was 'the official costume preset space for the dew rag' during the entire 7 year run of the show. I loved hiding out under the puppet and when the dresser would stop to preset the performer's costume, i'd reach out from under the puppet and throw the shoes across the floor. She'd reset them. I'd toss them in different direction. The poor lady would get so confused. Then I'd reach out and grab her leg, she'd scream and run. Usually after the fact i'd get threatened with some form of retaliation. . . It never came.

We had one person who was very jumpy. The cast knew that and they were always reaching through the clothes rack and grabbing her. She'd scream every time. (You would think after a while, she'd learn.) It was fun messing with the Equity cast members too. One of the gargoyle's lines during a song was 'I ask for FAME'. This cast member was getting ready to step out on stage and a fellow cast member casually walked passed and said, 'I ask for PAIN.' Sure enough, the gargoyle went out and during his solo sang, 'I ask for pain.' When he got back stage, he was cussing up a storm. He said he felt the word come out, but by then it was too late.

During the big Riverdance craze, they had a 'Riverdance show' where when anyone had to move across stage, they did like they were in Riverdance. I don't think the stage manager ever caught on. One of the gypsy's got a new hat. We nicknamed it the misfit elf hat. It would fall off his head every time he went on stage. When the rest of the cast decided to play keep away and kicked the hat all over stage one show, the stage manager made our costumer bring back his dew rag.

The Muppets have had many incarnations over the years. The very first one was Here Comes the Muppets. It was a stage show located where the Voyage of the Little Mermaid is now. One of the giant props / set pieces they had was the front of a monorail (as if they had ran it into the theater.) Apperantly there was quite a bit of room in the nose of the prop, because I was for warned that they loved kidnapping costumers and making them ride out on the stage hidden in the monorail prop.

Story has it that one of the precious children (characters) frantically called for the dresser to help him. The Dresser we'll call 'M' ran to help and came face to face with YODA. It scared to pee out of her. The performer had a rubber Yoda mask and when 'M' saw it she went to the floor in the fetal postion in an full blown anxiety attack. She laughs about it now, so we can look back and laugh with her. When you aren't expecting to see a freaky green shriveled up old man, it can really mess with your head.

I remember the first time i saw Chewbacca. I hate to admit it, but the first words that came to mind wher was What the Hell is That and why is IT walking toward me. Later me and Chewy would become great friends, but that first inmpression will always stay with me.

Muppets 3D movie has Sweetums. A big furry rag-a-muffin that comes out in the theater to look for Bean Bunny. One night, a Sweetums costume was laid out on the couch in the greenroom in such a way that is looked like some one was inside. They took a metal bucket put some water into with chunks of bread - instant fake vomit. And they left it for the morning cast to find. Early the next morning, Dresser 'M' came to set up for the day and saw this. thinking there was someone inside that had gotten sick and passed out. She called the paramedics. Let's just say, they failed to see the humor in it and she ended up getting a reprimend on her record.

Summers are brutal in Florida and during the Muppets on Location show there came an era of experimenting with personal cooling units. One was a shirt and pants with tubing sewn to it so that ice water could be pumped through it. Sounds doable, until the moment you realize the titty bitty connector that joins the shirt tubing with the pants tubing has just came disconnected. Let's just say, after seeing Kermit 'peeing' on stage, the tubing cooling units were soon scrapped.

I believe in giving fair and equal time to other areas of the park as well. Way back in the beginning days of the Studios, the Wicked Witch at GMR (the Great Movie Ride)broke a hydraulic line and it looked like she was peeing too. I was also told that during Tarzan's swing over the tram, he lost his loin cloth. When asked if he was anatomically correct, we never got an answer. Hmmmm, I wonder why?

Voyage of the Little Mermaid is a show has seen it's fair share of train wrecks. . . Literally. On ocassion a puppeteer will trip or miss a step and all of a sudden the entire fish puppet scene turns into on big jumble of neon colored foam as the other puppeteers run into and over each other.

There is a scene change where (for years) a costume dresser would go out on stage and take Ariel's shells. . . except the time when Ariel's hair got tangle up in the string tie. The dresser tried deperately to untangle it, but as the curtian was about to go back up, she shoved the shell bra into the back of Ariel's dress and ran off stage. The whole last scene Ariel had to stand facing the audience to hide the shells. The whole cast was cracking up.

When you leave the Mermaid show (or at least it used to be this way), the leavee would get kidnapped, tapped to a chair and place under the rain curtian on stage. At other stages, the going away send off usually included an entire container of baby power and getting thrown in the shower. Leaving Fantasmic! used to meant getting thrown in the moat, until we realized what all was in that water. Epic (Indiana Jones). . . you never really truly leave that show so it doesn't count. People who get 'fired' come back six months later and get rehired all the time. An now with Light Motors Action at the other end of the park, when you get too beak up to play at Indy, you can transfer down there and drive cars for awhile. (fyi, I did not say that, one of the Indy's told me that. I'm just repeating it.)

The Boys of Epic loved to play. . . all the time. And heaven forbid a thunderstorm prevent them from doing a show. I've seen indoor base ball games using a duct taped towel for a ball, full contact ping pong matches (I'll explain in a future blog), hangers flying through the air and an occasional frisbee. However, the last time I saw a frisbee in there a custodial cast member got hit by it and reported it to her management. The Epic boys got in deep trouble over that.

I have to admit, when (back in the early 80's) when I first heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard of. Little did I know that a few short years later that I'd be dressing Leo, Micheal, Rapheal and Donatello. The cotume for the turtles included a small piece of fabric we called the 'happy strap'. It held the front and back together. . . think about it for Just a moment and you'll figure out where the term came from. When the turtles were feeling a bit onry, they could easily embarras a dresser by making certian noises and jestures. And we did have one or two dresser who refused to go back to that stage or just flat out quit.

Did I mention that the rules of personal space and the human body are forever skewed once you work in costuming? In normal society, the average personal space it about three to five feet. In the world of a dresser, it's inches, or as in the case of Lights Motors Actions stunt show, it's suck it up and get over it. . .okay that was Really bad choice of works.

At LMA there is a motorcycle rider that drives through a wall of flames. Costuming's job is to put the flame retardant on his entire body, including the nether regions. I was told that a deeply religious dresser saw that and refused to work the show again.

I often thought 'I have the wierdest job in the world'. Then I'd watch the show, or see the audience's reaction and think 'I have one awesome job'. I guess that's why i was there all of those years.

until next time,

Live Long and Prosper, no wait, There Is No Try, Only Do. . . Snakes, Why'd It Have to Be Snakes. . . . I give up, That's A Wrap.

A BIT OF AN IRREVERANT LOOK AT THE DISNEY FILMS WE LOVE SO MUCH

2010-03-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, as cast members, we have our own opinions on the movies the company puts out. I've listed some of them i've heard over the years. Take it for the fun it is intended to be.

Snow White - A film about a princess who is forced to live in the woods and hang out with seven little ole' men

Alice in wonderland - Follow Alice on a drug induced trip into her subconscious filled with characters that are off thier rocker and down right creepy.

Mulan - A film about a Chinese Heroine. By the way, when the people in China where asked thier opinion, most admitted that they had never heard of her.

101 Dalmations - A film that has been visited and revisited at least 101 times over the years. Please have your pets spayed and neutered. Oh, and Ah, watch you step.

The Aristcats - An entire film that was created because someone thought it was cute to take the letter "R" out of aristocrat.

Bambi - The timeless classic about hunting animals who have learned the English language. Loved by hunters everywhere.

The Black Caudron - There's nothing quiet like a story a boy and his pig. . . A true classic

Cinderella - A story about an unfortunate girl who spends time in the woods talking to animals and feeling sorry for herself.

Dumbo - A light hearted look into the good folks who run a circus. Keep a box of Kleenex near by for this one.

Fantasia - A film who's time had never came, but still managed to inspire a loosely put together stage show on both coasts.

Fun and Fancy Free - It should be free. Did anyone actually buy this one ?

So Dear to my Heart - It wasn't

Hercules - Join the wacky adventures of the Disney animators as they struggle to form a plot. It also inspired the shortest lived parade at Walt Disney World.

Hunchback of Notre Dame - A pure bastardization of the classic Victor Hugo tale. Watch as the gargoyles build up Quasi's self-confidence with a snappy song, send him off to win the girl, only to be rejected in the end.

The Jungle Book - Is about an unnatural relationship between a boy and the only bear to live in the jungle in recorded history.

Lady and the Tramp - Love Doggy style.

The Lion King - Inspired the phrase "Hakuna-Matata". Seriously, does it really mean 'no worries' or are the animators jerking our chain ?

Aladdin - Great movie. Great songs. The parade a the Studios was a royal pain in the @$$ to work.

Pinochio - A classic story about listening to life's Jiminy crickets or you may turn in to toothpicks.

Song of the South - A film that's so racially divisive that it can't be bought in the United States any more, but yet has inspired a ride (Splash Mountian) at the Magic Kingdom

Beauty and the Beast - No one doubts it is a modern classic, but after all these years, do we still have to have a Stage Show (at the Studios) based on it ? . . . Oh, great now it's on Broadway.

The Little Mermaid - Contains essential story elements that the stage-show (at the studios) leaves out, causing it to make sense. . . . Sushi, anyone ?

Mary Poppins - Would you trust a bunch of dirty men dancing on your roof? And what precisely is Mary doing up there with them ? Hhmmm

Oliver and Company - This forgettable 'modern classic' contains songs from Billy Joel. Sing along with such hits as. . . . . . . . . .?

Peter Pan - The never grow up theme of this film seems to be the life philosphy of many of the company's entertainment / character cast members.

Toy Story - A movie that makes the Hasbro company gitty with anticipation.

A Bug's Life - The next time you grab the bug spray, stop and see if they speak English first.

Pocahontas - Watch as Disney makes (up) history again. . . .

Robin Hood - A Visually fun film, but the audio sounds like it was recorded in a tin
shed.

Sleeping Beauty - Princess, in distress . . . Yada Yada . . . . the Prince saves her, they live happily ever after. The end.

The Fox & the Hound - Friendship conquers all. (Unless you're Micheal Eisner and Jeffery Katzenberg, then it 'Show me the Money')

Sword & the Stone - This tale has been told in many different ways over the millenia, but never with such a lack of excitement. If King Authur were real, he be pissed !

The Three Caballeros - What ever . . .

I LOVE A PARADE !!! . . . sort of

2010-02-15T16:34:00.000-08:00

Disney loves parades. Even when it's not called 'A Parade' in a park that, it was said, was not designed for A Parade, they still have . . . A Parade, or in Animal Kingdom's case The March of the Artimals. But then, they also tried to convince us that it wasn't a Zoo either. Who can forget the "Nahtazu" commercials which ran until 2006. I guess when you're AZA accredited, you have to admit that you ARE a zoo.

The March of the Artimals was one bizzar parade. Filled with neon colored characters and very odd floats, it pushed the limits of what a parade could do. One float that was paticularly wierd had large honeycomb and a queen bee that was laughing hysterically. I was told that the story behind it was that she had drank so much honey that she was drunk. If that's true or not, i'd love to hear from anyone who knows for sure. They had some very cool stilt walkers in this parade. and even after the parade was closed the Bird Stiltwalkers appeared around property for a while. The costume looked like it was person riding a tall bird. The puppeteer/stiltwalkers were so skilled at manipulating it, that you truly believed it was alive.

After the Artimals danced of into the sunset in June of 1999, It was replaced with Mickey's Jammin' Jungle Parade in October of 2001. This one gets spruced up for the holidays and they change the name to Mickey's Jingle Jungle Parade. Both are pretty much the same thing, just with christmas decorations on the floats and Christmassy costumes. Still heavy on the artsy side, this one centers on the core Disney characters, so I'm sure this version will be around for a while.

Epcot has had only one parade over all these years. Tapestry of Nations was created for the new millenium celebrations which ran from 1999 to 2001. It was later tweeked a bit, given a new name 'Tapestry of Dreams' and was extended until 2003. It too was very artistic with giant puppets and huge drum floats. In the millenium version, the parade lead off with a Sage of Time stiltwalking character. For the Tapestry of Dreams the Dreamseekers started the parade and the wishes of children where heard through out the soundtrack . Epcot is a hard place to have a parade. Making it around the the world showcase means there's a lot of ground to cover. Instead, they broke it up into multiple units entering the park at the same time.

The studios has had the widest variety of parades, motorcades and other moving shows. Way back in the beginning there was the Dinosaurs parade (1992) based on the Television show. (You may remember that the baby dinosaur's catch phrase was "not the mama!" ) It was the only time that I've heard of the float driver wrecking the the float. In the driver's defense, he did have to take a very tight corner, but this time he missed and hit a chain link fence. Fortunately no body was seriously hurt, but there were a few people who where on the float that got knocked a around a bit. Most of the Studio's parades have a scantily clad dance troupe . . . the Dino parade had the Dino-girls. Short shorts. Tenee tiny feather and leather tops. Nothing in the middle. I guess you have to have something for the dirty ole' men :)

Running from December 1992 until August 1995, Aladdin's Royal Caravan followed the short ran Dino parade complete with their Dirty Ole' Men unit. . . I mean Harem Girls. I find it amusing to see how things are recycled and 'repurposed' over the years. The double decker float from the Dino parade later became a moving street market float for the Aladdin Parade. The spitting camels in the Aladdin parade lived outside of the Soundstage Restaurant for a while, but are now set pieces beside the Aladdin flying carpet ride at Magic Kingdom. The Genie balloon float, swordmen's costumes and the harem girls would live on in Magic Kingdom's ' Remember the Magic' parade long after the Royal Caravan had left the Studios.

The Aladdin parade was a bear to work. There were inflatable costumes that we had to load and unload from a 16' box truck, batteries that liked to 'meltdown' in the middle of the parade, large troupes of street dancers AND we had to walk the parade. Two to three costumers had to walk with the inflatables . . . juuust in case they deflated we could help the performer off stage and out of costume. We even had to wear costumes and Fez's that cosmotology had to bobby pin in place. To dress and undress the inflatable acrobats, we had to climb on a 4 foot +or- platform in order to reach them. A good friend of mine was running late one day and ran to climb on the dressing platform and missed it. She said she ended up underneath it. She was okay. Just a bit dazed.

Management will always, always , always try to get as much of the show out as possible. Whether it be short staffed, weather or technical diffuculties. . . The Show Must Go On. During Aladdin parade Jasmine and Aladdin rode on top of a huge elephant float which required the use of a fork lift for them to get up there. This is Florida. Mother nature loves thunderstorms. Aladdin and Jasmine were in place. The fork lift was put up. . . Let's just say, they did not beat the incoming thunderstorm and the two characters where absolutely soaked by the time they were rescued from the float. Aladdin's costume includes a purple feather in his turban. After the storm, his entire costume had streaks of purple from where the colors had ran. Soon there after, we had a white, in case of rain, feather.

Disney had gotten a lot of mileage from the Toy Story characters. After the original movie was released, there was a Toy Story parade at the studios which ran from 1995 to 1997. Buzz, Woody and the gang have been all over the place ever since. Buzz even went to the International Space Station for a while as part of a children's educational program. After Hercules replaced Toy Story as THE day parade, they started sending out a mini unit with a troop of green army men, Buzz and Woody in a converted micro van. I believe, in a previous life, it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles van.

Speaking of special events and mini parades, the Studios has had motorcades for everything imaginable. Star Wars weekends motorcade was a mini parade of cars, movie stars and Star Wars characters, except fan club weekend. When the 501 legion was in the house with thier costumes, we had one Huge parade with a sea of Storm Troopers leading it off.

Super Soap Weekends, and it's testoserone cousin ESPN weekends, each have motorcades with thier idols riding in covertibles. For a true fish out of water type experience look no further than the Home Improvement Father's day parade on june 15,1997. Tim Allen's Home Improvement show was a huge success, so Disney capitolized on it. They pulled every type of machine they had at thier disposal out of the wood work and put them in this parade. Horticulture and Engineering folks, who have never been on stage before, were now the STARS. Forklifts, Bush hog mowers, industrial mowers, backhoes, earth movers, a monster truck or two. . . the list goes on. All of the Disney owned items were washed up and a Binford label was put on it some where. Even today, you may see an item or two here and there that still has the Binford name on it if you look for them.

When Hercules movie came out, so did a new parade. The Hercules Zero to Hero parade, however, it had a farely short run (1997-1998) because the Mulan parade was hot on it's heels. With Mulan, it was back to the forklifts again. This time it was costuming that had to ride the fork lift we could reach the extremely tall Elder's floats. The mulan parade had a chinese dragon that was in a shape of the Great Wall of China. EVERY body who ever worked the parade haaated that thing. If the people infront of you didn't do thier job right, extra weight was thrown onto the people behind them, and yes people did hurt thier backs because of it. When the parade closed, the parade maintenance people allowed the cast to 'tear up' Great Wall. Needless to say, there are many little souvenier pieces created that day.

What I missed the most about the Mulan parade was the beautiful Perchuran Horses. Every day we had four horses pulling the Mulan and Shang float. The day we closed the parade, Shang asked the horse handlers if he could sit on one of the horses. They let him. They used to live at Fort Wilderness Campground, but I'm not sure if the company even has the Perchurans any more or not. I also missed seeing the Chinese acrobats from the China pavillion from Epcot every day as well. For some of our cast, it was thier daily Chinese lesson. When the parade ended, I guess it was 'class dismissed'.

As of 2010, the longest running parade at the studios is the Disney Stars and Motorcars. From Oct of 2001 to March of 2008, it debuted as park of Walt's 100 years celebration. With the stars and cars parade, Disney broke the long time tradition. . . habit. . . custom of opening a new show and or parade with ever new movie release. Cars and stars parade was an 'evergreen' parade. Just swap out cars and you cover the new movie which is what they did when Monster's Inc came out. Hercules car was replaced with Mike and Sully. During the holidays one year, the parks were packed and they wanted to make the parade route longer to allow more people to see it. So they started at the end of New York Street. The christmas lights were up for Spectical of Lights, or at least they WERE, until the Mary Poppins car (the one with bert and mary riding the carousel horses) caught a string of lights with the top of the carousel pole and ripped an entire section down. I don't remember them taking the parade down New York street again after that.

A Note From The Rumor Mill: Durning the run of Stars and Cars Parade, it has been said that Aladdin wanted to give his significant other something extra special for the holidays. So he went to the parade barn late one night to take pictures with the Aladdin car. Let's just say if the rumor holds true it was him, the car and a turban in the pictures. . . . .

When the modified convertibles for the stars and cars parade arrived, our parade maintenance people were also taking delivery of the Animal Kingdom's Mickey's Jammin' Jungle parade vehicles as well. Behind Star tours there is a dip between perimeter road and the little parking area. Maintenance decided to use this dip to gently back one of the DAK float vehicles off of the flat delivery truck. Long story short. . . they miscalculated. When I was coming back from running errands i saw a large flatbed truck, ramp down, bed tilted up and parade float vehicle sitting with it's back bumper on the asphalt and the front bumper on the truck bed. THe wheels where barely touching anything. Basically, it was stuck.

AHH the good ole'days.

p.s. after some further research, i'll blog about MK's parade history.

WE ARE THE (SMALL) WORLD. . . .

2010-01-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

It's January 23, 2010, a week and a half ago our little corner of the world was changed forever when the tiny country of Haiti was rocked with one of the deadliest Earthquakes in history. True, Florida is several hundred miles from the island, but being the closest state to the island nation, we became the point of entry for refugees and ex-patriated Americans wanting to return home.

When I worked in costuming, there were large numbers of white anglo-saxon Americans and Hispanic Americans in my department. Spanish, Span-glish, English all became common place at work. However, when I started working at the resorts, I found myself swimming in a mix of spanish, vietnamese and Haitian Creole. I remember walking into the cast building of All Star resort and wondering ' When did I just leave the country?' Working around so many hispanic people, you start to pick up bits and pieces of the language. Although I have tried to learn a second language, i discovered that i just don't have the language gene. However, listening to the Haitian housekeepers, I keep asking myself, is that even a word?

Language barriers or not, once we heard about the earthquake, our thoughts immediately went to the Houskeeping staff, which at most resorts is heavily Haitian and Vietnamese. Disney had made it known that they are stepping up to help the haitian cast members any way it could. They made a substantial donation to Red Cross almost immediately. There was a Help Haiti Now telethon on January 21, 20010 and nearly 400 cast members volunteered their time to man the phones room taking donations. Even the little things say alot, like having a bake sale in the cast cafeteria with all of the money raised going to the Red Cross. In the cast hallway, there is a bulletin board dedicated to cultural diversity issues. I was walking out today and someone had put up several pages of Haiti facts and figures.

Diversity. It's a funny word. Basically it means to acccept and respect each others differences. That's a great concept, except when it's used to exclude the majority. Let me explain. In the character costuming building we had a manager from Puerto Rico. We had many of the hourlies from hispanic countries or Miami, BUT not everyone spoke Spanish. That didn't matter. Our manager (I use this term loosely) did an entire shift meeting in spanish AND never translated what he said to the non-spanish speakers. They were pissed. As I would always say, Diversity goes both ways. I will respect you, if you respect me; that, however, rarely seemed to happen.
(By the way, that manager got laid off in the 2009 management layoffs. Hmmm, karma.)

Before I wrote this week's blog, i was trying to think of a country that's not represented somewhere at Disney. I honestly can't think of any. Before I left costuming, Epic (Indiana Jones show) has three guys who spoke Russian. (2 bulgarian and 1 Russia). We had a tumbler from spain by way of peru. If you think Africa isn't represented, Wrong. Animal Kingdom Lodge has several people from various African countries working in various jobs. When I was there they had a door greeter from Niarobi (I think) and several others that entertained the kids with storytime and African music time.

Most of them are on temporary work visas like the ICP's (International College Program). ICP's come over to work for pretty cheap wages, pay high rent in Disney apartments and then leave a few months later before they have a chance to get jaded and bitter. When you think of Epcot's World Showcase, think ICP's or temporary work visa's. Although, I'm not so sure about Canada and Mexico. They could probably fudge a little there and no one would notice. So China has been sending people over for years to work in the China Pavillion. However, once Hong Kong Disney opened and the talk of a Bejing Disney maybe in the works, there has been a huge wave of chinese ICP's coming through the college progam.

When you see wave after wave of fresh off the bus internationals, it would be easy to start generalizing cultures. In the first bunch of ICP's of 2010, the ones from China seemed so timid and shy. I kept thinking 'and the warrior Genghis Kahn is your ancestor?' Australia and England ICP's are pretty much "Hey, how are ya doing. . . where's the party?" American college program kids are more like "Hey, the party's at my place. . . bring the keg!" (Nothing personal meant, it's just honest observations). In 2009 we had two Chinese ICP's kill a duck at the apartment complex. Thier intentions where to eat it; instead, they were sent home immediately.

When you talk about Diversity in a work force, you can't forget politics. During the Bush Administration, one of my cast members at Epic was a staunch Republican. He worshipped the ground Bush walked on and always hated it when I pointed out the president's flaws and misdeeds. After the Iraq war started, I ask 'D', "What is YOUR President doing now ?" Sometimes, he'd just hang his head and walk away.

And what conversation about Diversity would be complete with out mentioning religion. Again at Epic, one of the tumblers is Moroccan Muslim. I am a Southern Baptist. We would start talking about religion and the break room would clear out. I was always fine with agreeing to disagree and move on. My Muslim friend, however, would tend to get a bit fired up at times. Before I tranfered he offered to give a copy of the Qur'an. I accepted it and told him i'd read it, but that was as far as it would go. . . .Finally, We agreed to disagree.

It's all good

BBRRRrrrrrrrr. . . . 27 DEGREES ARE YOU KIDDING ME !!!

2010-01-13T06:04:00.000-08:00

Now that my fingers have thawed out some, I can write mt first blog of the new decade. Wahoo !! The year 2010 came in like a lion with several days of low and mid twenties temperatures. I always have guests telling me, " This is Florida, you people don't know what cold it." WELL, when we are colder than Colorado the first week of January. . . Who's laughing now ?

We had a family with three kids who were dieing to go into the hot tub. They were gone maybe twenty-thirty minutes when i looked out the window and saw three little kids wrapped up head to toe leaving the hot tub. I guess it was a case of 'We came.We saw. We conquered. . . Now let's get back in side.

THe life guards are loving it. When the air is too cold to open the pool, they come inside and play games like Jenga (with giant Jenga blocks), chutes and ladders, ect with the kids. Not a bad gig . . . if you don't mind freezing your tail off when it's juuuust barely warm enough to have the pool open, but no one in their right minds would dare to go in the water.

Speaking of freezing your tail off. We had THE Disney Marathon on January 10th and 11th. And yes it snowed in Florida. Well, more like sleet and rain by the time it reached Disney. I was coming into on Saturday (during the half marathon) and saw the large mass of people running through Magic Kingdom parking lot. Actually, running isn't quite what was happening. It was more like walking briskly while huddled under panchos and silver heat wraps.

For the full marathon on Sunday, it was 27 degrees at the start. I had a guest from Detroit who said she had ran ten marathons in her day. She chose to do the Disney one because it was in Florida and she thought any where would be warmer than Michgan in January. Wrong. She told me that the 2010 Disney Marathon in Florida (of all places) was the coldest one she has ever ran. I was told that at the water stations, they had to squish the cups around to break up the ice in them.

Another event that always seems to have frigid cold weather is the Cheerleader competion. It could be the balmy-est tropical winter on record, but the day before Varsity Cheerleaders move in, the temperatures will drop like a rock.

"If it's cold out, it must be cheerleader season."

I always felt kind of sorry for the kids in the short cheerleader skirts huddled the space heaters waiting to go on stage, until I worked at All Star Resort and was having to field all of the complaints from other guests about the cheerleaders running amuck at the resort.

As far as the rest of the property, very little will ever actually close a park due to the cold. Pretty much just Hurricanes affect theme parks as a whole. The water parks are another story. So far as of January 12th 2010, the water parks have been closed about as much as they have been open for the year. People ask if they water's heated. . . Yes, but you do eventually have to get out. At which point you will freeze your hieny off.

I know that Indiana Jones Show will shut down if the the temperature gets below 42 ( I think). At extreme cold temps, the hydraulics in the set pieces will begin to freeze up. The characters love the cold. Your dog gets frisky in the cold weather, so do the Disney characters. . . except Jasmine and Ariel and a few other scantily clad folks. But sent Darth out with his black on black on black ensemble and he's ready to take over the Universe !!!

A NEW MILLENIUM AND OLD DECADE

2009-12-30T15:56:00.000-08:00

As I sit here on the edge of a new decade, it seems like it only yesterday that we were freaking out about Y2K. Ten years have passed and we're still here. The sky hasn't fallen and Florida hasn't fell into the sea. . . not yet anyway.

In the months leading up to Y2K, Disney took all of the computer crashing, power outages and general mayhem predictions to heart. This time 12/30/99, there were crews moving gas generators to every traffic intersection. THe contingency to the contingency plans were being distributed . . . practically in book form. (You think I kidding, I am not). In contrast, I also worked at Universal Studios as an Entertainment Tech, I got to work on December 31 and was handed one sheet of paper. That was it. In a nutshell, Universal's plan was 1) shut down all the rides ten minutes till midnight. 2) If all hell doesn't break loose, restart the rides ten minutes after midnight.

In the first years of the new millenium brought a new CEO to the Walt Disney Company as Micheal Eisner stepped down, it was more like being pushed off the mountian. After years of lack luster job performance and multi-million dollar bonuses, the share holders, spearheaded by Roy E Disney, finally had enough and gave Eisner a vote of no confidence. . . basically, he was fired. Bob Iger steps in and take over the reins.

In 2001, 911 brought huge changes to the world of mouse. There had been a trend of scaling back security guards to save money. Some posts were eliminated. For a while, they tested a non-human security gate for cast entrances we refered to as the cheese shredder. Slide your ID through a code reader and the metal gates turn to let you in. It was a fifty chance that it'd work right. Fortunately there was living breathing person in a security 'cube' who could override the the gate. I'll admit, i actually forgot my ID one day and my Universal ID looked enough like the Disney one that he let me in.

After 911, all of that changed. Guest's bags started being checked. They replaced the security kiosks entering the back gates of the parks with what I call the 'Fort Knox style Security" gates. It consists of two lift gates and a massive pop up, stop you in your tracks if you try anything suspicious, solid steel gate/ barrier thing. I've also seen canine units added to the Disney patrol force. After 911 they actually had bomb dogs checking out each and every car entering the park's back gate. I remember doing my morning runs and driving past our version of 'Check point Charlie'. On various mornings I'd stop to watch for a while. At one point they even had a dog house out there for the bomb dog which I thought was kind of cute. It was at that moment I decided that if all hell was to break out in my country, i needed to be apart of the solution and not sit on the sidelines, so I joined the American Red Cross. And I've been doing that ever since.

The morning of 911, I was a coordinator for Epic (Indiana Jones) and I was supposed to have costume fittings all day. But As I sat in the greenroom with my cast and watched as the second plane hit the towers, costumes weren't important anymore. The cast went out and did one show that day, then they pretty much mutinied after that. Several of the guys said, " I refuse to go out and do a show where we shoot at people and blow things up when i just watched several thousand people die in a plane crash. Early after noon the decision was made to close all parks immediately. Everyone had gone home, except for one pocket of wardrobe people at Streetmosphere or Fantasmic! (I forget which one it was). My costuming managers forgot about them and never told them to go home. Security was pissed and so was the costumers. Gotta love a management team that forgets about thier cast. . . but more on that in another blog. :)

In 2002, Disney bought the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Saban Entertainment and soon there after they appeared at the Disney MGM Studios.

On Febuary 1, 2003 came another stop you in your footsteps disaster. Again I was doing my morning runs and kept waiting for the sonic booms from the Space Shuttle Columbia landing. It never came. It never came. I finally found a TV and heard the classic line 'Houston we have a problem." As i tried to do my work that day, I found every break room on property just so I could get snippets of news.

In 2004, after much on and off negotiations with the Henson Company, the stable of Muppet characters was bought by Disney. THe 3D Muppet movie at the studios has been in the park for years, but now Kermit, Miss Piggy and others have a perminate home with the Mouse.

The ecomonic recession has given Disney something to groan about. The last couple years in this first decade, Disney has had to resort to basically 'giving away the farm' to keep the cash strapped population coming back for more. Buy four nights at a resort get three nights free, free on your birthday and gift cards ranging from $200 to $750 (which just started for 2010), it'll be interesting to see what the reservations people can dream up next.

Hong Kong Disney opens in 2005 and from that point on, a large number of our college program kids (temporary employees Disney hires to work in the parks while they get a meager paycheck and college intership credits). We've had college program people for years, but the International College Program, or ICP's, add interesting cultural and language barriers. In 2009 we had a couple ICP's from asia that chased down and killed a duck out side of their Disney owned apartment complex. They had planned to eat it, but where immediately sent home instead.

I have found that we spend a lot of trying to de-confuse people about what things and places are called, but who can blame them in just this last year alone we've changed names of parks, closed islands, openned timeshares and other such mayhem. MGM Studios is now Disney Hollywood Studios. EPCOT is simply Epcot. Pleasure Island is no more, but the marquee and street signs for it still exist. THe Disney Institute ceased to exist as a 'place' in 2000, but the concept of professional buisness training continues as a branch of Disney University. Although the Institute as a resort has been plowed under, the core buildings and Spa live on as a timeshare. . . I mean Disney Vacation Club's Saratoga Springs.

As far as the cast members are concerned, 2009 nine should be called 'the Year of OSHA'. The monorail accident that took the life of the driver was not the first monorail wreck, but it was the first fatal one. In fact I had a costuming manager who had an 11x14 picture of the monorail car that he wrecked years before. They where shooting a promotional video, a piece of equipment was too close to the track and he hit it. The accident of 2009, i don't know all of the details other than there was a track switching problem and that Disney was fined $44,000 (according to the evening news).

Soon after that an actor who I have had the pleasure of working with was leaving the Pirates Tutorial show at Magic kingdom and either fell, slipped or tripped. He hit a backstage wall and broke his neck. He was in the hospital and doing okay on that Thursday. On Monday he went in for surgery and never survuved. Indiana Jones Show had it's first death in 2009 as well. It's amost hard to believe that a tumbler could break his neck from doing a dive over. I guess that goes to show you, that when your number is up. . . you can't just take a rain check.

On a much lighter note, 2009 was filled with anticipation as we all waited for the Harry Potter Wizardy World to open. Yes I know, that's at Universal, but thier expansion made Disney kick it into gear and in the last quarter of the year they announced the largest expansion of Magic Kingdom's history with the revamping of Fantasyland.

As I sit at home and anticipate my neighbor's fireworks that will soon keep me up all night :), I am reminded of an older gentleman who I used to work with. He decided he would be nice and bring in a bottle of champagne to toast in the new year. We stood in the backstage area of Fanstasmic! to watch Epcot's and the Studio's fireworks. . . basically fireworks in stereo.
We tried to explain to him that we were not able to drink champagne on the clock. He kept saying, "but it's New Year's" and we kept saying, " you can be fired for that." We never could get him to understand.

On December 16, 2009, we lost one of our staunchest advocates and leaders. Roy E. Disney, Walt's Nephew, passed away to cancer. He was the driving force behind getting Micheal Eisner into the CEO's seat and an even bigger force in getting him out of it over a decade later. Once Micheal became more concerned with bonuses and stock deals, he seemed to loose the MAGIC or Pixie Dust, if you will. Just knowing that there was still a 'Disney' some where in the Executive offices was comforting. . . now, we just have to hope for the best and pray for better.

As we bid a not so fond farewell to 2009, let us tip our champagne (unless you are on the clock, then it's sparkling grape juice) glasses to the fireworks blasting over the Magic Kingdom and say PLEASE LET 2010 BE BETTER THAN 2009. !!!!

MEMORABLE GUESTS I HAVE KNOWN

2009-12-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

At Disney, you will see anything from a Pixie dusted princesses and their equally glitter covered fathers to kids on leashes and squeaky shoed toddlers. Some of the most memorable moments have came out of the innocence of a child. I was working on the concierge floor and a little boy and his father came to the desk. The young one's father said, " go ahead and ask them." He spoke so softly that we could barely hear him. He asked for some 'colored cheerios'. . . froot loops. So we got him a cup of 'colored cheerios' and a carton of milk.

Back in the mid nineties, I was at Epic (Indiana Jones) on a slow day. On my side of the stage, a family sat about half way down in the theater. The rest of that side was empty. The two young kids were all the way down front and watched the show in amazement. . . until the fire went off and they ran back to their parents. As scene two progressed they slowly crept back down to the front row. At the end of the scene, a truck blew up, they retreated again, but quickly returned to the front row after the fire was out. During scene three, where Indy fights the mechanic, these kids were like a yo-yo running back and forth to their parents. . . . until the plane blew up. They booked it back to their parents and jumped into their laps. The parents and I were busting out laughing.

During the Christmas holidays, they shoot fake snow off of the building in the studios and on main street in magic kingdom. I worked an extra hours a shift at the Spectacle of Lights and had to keep warning the kids to 'Not Eat the Florida Snow'. . . Fake snow in Florida equals soap foam. Yyuk !!

The lobby of the Wilderness Lodge has two totem poles, except one young child called them 'potem toles' . . . gotta love kids.

At the Wilderness Lodge, we had a guest who wanted directions to the health club then decided it was too far to walk. True story.

I can't not tell you how many times the hockey puck from the arcade air hockey game has disappeared. CAN ANY ONE TELL ME WHY? What's so fascinating about a hockey puck?

A guest was checking in and asked if the bathtub had 'don't fall down bars'. I wonder if the American Disabilities Act people ever thought of calling the handicap accessible hardware a fun name like that :)

During 2009, guests got into the park for free on their Birthday. A guest asked about the offer, I told him that he could go the guest relation window at any of the parks to get the free admission. He said, "That's okay, I'll just buy a ticket." I wanted to say- Seriously? and do you routinely throw away nearly $80- but instead, I convinced him to not waste his money buying a free ticket.

When I was still in college (had to have been 1992ish) Orlando had a Navy Base. Several of the Navy guys went to my church. I took a couple of the guys to Magic Kingdom one day. Thinking back on it, with a breakfast of Oatmeal Creme pies, I'm not surprised at what happened next. We got to the park and made as far as the Tea Cups. Both guys laid down a challenge and decided to sit this ride out. The one guy said, 'I'm in the Navy. I have a cast iron stomach. No TEA CUP carnival ride is going to affect me.' The famous last words. They got the tea cup spinning even before the ride started and they managed to get that thing going so fast, they were just a blur for most of the ride. I have never seen someone literally green, but one of these 'Navy, I have a cast iron stomach' guys crawled off of the ride, made it as far the nearest bench and laid down until we found him some real food.

While I was working an extra hours shift at the studios during a jump rope competition. . .yes, I said jump rope competition. At the end the of the day, I was walking across the park and a small group of the competitors was behind me talking.
One said," Some asked if I was chearleader, I said, do I look like a chearleader?"
I wanted so back to turn around and say, "Why yes, yes you do." But I behaved and kept on walking.

While at Boardwalk, one of my fellow front desk cashiers accidentally dropped a guest's driver's license behind the computer. We tried to get it, but couldn't reach it. The guest eagerly offered to crawl under the counter to get it. Come to find out, the guest was actually a cast member in some corporate office in the lost prevention department. Along with his id, he also found numerous ink pens, note pads and tons of other office supplies. He told us that he had always wanted to do that. . . What ever floats your boat, I guess.

In the lobby at the Wilderness Lodge for Christmas, there's a scene set up with Christmas decoration bears and a little bench so guests can get a nice Christmas photo in front of the indoor fountain. In 2008 there was a little bit of a water leak from the floor above. . . Okay, it was a water fall that splashed everywhere. We dried everything off to keep the decorations from getting damaged while engineering worked on the problem, put up wet floor signs, and laid towels out on the bench and on the floor. You would think everyone would understand: it is wet, stay back. Oh no, not so fast. Time after time, we'd see people getting hit by the accidental waterfall. Some were even getting mad. You just can't make somethings idiot proof, because idiots are too ingenious.

When I play the parks, I seek get revenge on the idiots. Let me explain. When you go to a theater and the cast member said "Please move down filling in each and every available seat," they mean MOVE and keep moving. SO, if I have to pass by those individuals who refuse to move, I make sure and step on each and every foot. I was on the Disney cruise and a fellow guest was giving the breakfast omelet chef grief. As the #$%^ moved on, I told the chef that I'd trip her out on the island if he'd like. He just smiled and I never saw her again. . . darn.

My cousin and I went to Animal Kingdom in 2008. Because of a medical issue, I needed to rent a scooter to get around. I loved the scooter, it was the other guests that were getting on my nerves. My cousin's grandson was trying to see some animals in an exhibit and this couple pretty much pushed him out of the way, so I kept edging the scooter up to right behind them. I never touched them, but eventually they got the idea and moved on. While we were waiting for the parade, we were getting crowded out by another obnoxious guest. He was literally leaning over top of me. Finally, I reached around the back of the scooter and rested my arm on this guy's belly bag just to get him to back up. Even with that, he hovered over top of me.

Stupid Human actions are not limited to Disney. Off the coast of Florida, a cruise ship guest got into an argument with his wife. At one point he said, "I'll just jump overboard then."
She said," Fine, do it."
So he did.
The Disney ship was close behind and was able to find the missing guest and drug him to safety.
The newscasters that night said," he was okay, but was taken to the hospital to be checked out. . . and maybe a little anger management classes."

But then when you come to think about it, we have a lot of guests who could use anger management classes. . . But more on that later

MEANDERING THOUGHTS FROM A WANDERING MIND, PART DOS

2009-11-18T18:00:00.001-08:00

Funny how, as i gather snippets of nothingness for this blog, i noticed that i did my first 'Meanderings' a year ago (almost to the day). Since i started writing, i found that i was coming up with tidbits of behind the scenes happenings that didn't really go with anything else. So. . . .

Back in the day, each of the cash handling locations had a version of a mini bank, complete with bullet proof glass and bank style vaults. Then in the early 2000's the cash control folks were slowly replaced with machines. . . cranky, tempermental, money eating machines. ANYWAY, the older resorts still have survelince cameras and other little known, but still working safety features. My manager, bless his soul, had no idea what the little white button in the money room was for, so he pushed it. . . several times. Nothing happened, so he left. In walks an unsuspecting cast member to count her bank and she is over run by security. Come to find out the little white button was and irreversable security alert. Lesson learned, if you don't know what it is, don't push it.

The quickest way to get someone's attention is to make them think there is some juicy gossip to be had. I was working on a story one day on my lunch break and didn't know how to spell 'conniving'. I called the main building thinking, that if anyone had a dictionary, they would. They didn't. So I hung up the phone. Two seconds later, the phone rings and someone answered my question. Her next comment was "Who ya writing about ???" I hated to dissappoint her, but it wasn't a co-worker.

Disney is all about story telling. One of our entertainment tech leads could make a story out of any thing. For JM (won't use real names to protect the innocent. . .) every thing included a story. There was no such thing as " Hey I have a quick question for you." In fact it was said, if you Asked JM about one plus one equals two. . . he'd start talking about the theroy of TWO.

I have yet to go check it out, but i have been told that in the Muppets 3D movie at the studios, the imagineers were playing around. If you look at the ceiling you will see 'a net full of jello' (work with me here, and say it all together) . . . Annette Funacello. If your still lost, your home work assignment is to go home and watch all of the original Mickey Mouse Club episodes.

During the run of the Aladdin parade, for one of the anniversaries the stage managers got us a cake shaped like Genie. Bright BLUE Genie cake and as we all know yellow and blue make green. No one wanted to admit it out loud, but the next day I kept hearing whisperings in the corners of the greenroom "What color was your poop?" I can answer that, it was green, neon green. Amusing ? . . . Now, but it was a bit disturbing at the time.

I had a guest come the the desk and wanted to let us know that there was no longer a service animal in thier room. Apparently her father stormed out of the resort and took his dog with him. "It was nothing we had done," she said. "He has anger management issues." What I found amusing was the 'service animal' was supposed to help with his anger issues. I'm thinking the dog didn't work very well.

Speaking of service animals, one of the techs told me he was cutting through the backstage area and there was a group of special needs kids with a variety of service animals. . . including a horse. We see a bit of everything working for the mouse, but a service horse kind of caught him off guard.

The actress Betty White came to the studios in the nineties on a book signing stop with a friend of hers. He was blind and the book 'Dina's Story' was about his first seeing eye dog. After their meet and greet with the guests, she offered to spend a little time back stage taking with us. Belle and Beast, who were doing a meet and greet with some guests, were coming back to the green room at this time as well. The gentleman's new seeing eye dog saw Beast. It's hair bristled up. We thought "Oh no." Beast slowly approached and sat on the steps, so he wouldn't freak out the dog. This dog totally forgot about it's master. It ran to Beast and curled up in his lap and just melted. We were all speachless, including Betty who said she had never seen the dog react like that. It was truly a priceless moment.

On a lighter note, we had guests check into a room with a baby monkey. We didn't know about it, but the house keepers sure found out about it. Disney resorts have a strict no animals policy (except of course service animals). They were asked to leave or take the monkey to the kennel. They left. On our dry erase board in the back office, someone drew a picture of a monkey holding a sign 'No Monkeys Allowed'. Over the course of the next several days it was changed to 'No Elephants Allowed' and a few other animals. Yes we amuse ourselves in the most childish ways at times.

Every year we are given Cast Christmas gifts. It's a gift. You take it and move on. In years past they have been decent little memorbilia items. Picture frames. Laser cut paper weights. Pin sets. Well in 2008. . .we got a little hanging thing with a plastic 'Celebrate' sign and a small tin bell. They said it was a wind chime. . .ooookay. Needless to say we all looked at it and said "What the-". Most of them in my area ended up being hung from the ceiling tiles in the back office. Nothing Says Your Important than plastic and tin.

DISNEY AND WASHINGTON D.C.

2009-11-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

It's always been interesting to me how well connected the Disney Corporation is with the government. Way back in the 1940's, when Walt's animation career was cranking right along, the government asked him to make war propaganda films to help combat WWII. As the red-blooded American that he was, he made a series of anti-german and anti-japanese film like Der Fueher's Face - 1942 / Education for Death - 1943 / Comando Duck - 1944. . . you know, your typical light and fluffy Walt Disney fare. (I'm thinking none of those ever showed in Tokyo Disneyland) He also approached by the military to make instructional films for the troops. Though the Navy was the first, soon the Army, Air Force, Department of Agriculture and Department of Treasury all wanted to tap into Walt's creativity. For the Treasury, in 1942 and 1943, Walt made films that encouraged Americans to pay thier taxes to help the war effort and published a book to teach children about purchasing War Savings stamps.

Jump ahead a couple decades and in the nineteen sixties, when Walt was amassing huge chunks of FLorida swamp land and citrus groves for what would later become Walt Disney World, Orange county Florida pretty much gave the company free reign. Reedy Creek improvement district was created as a special government agency by the state legislature in order to lure Walt to the state. It regulates building codes and can even levy taxes. Guess who the largest tax payer is. . . .. A little side trivia note. The Swan and Dolphin hotels are the second largest tax payers. Don't get me wrong, now a days, the Reedy Creek fire marshalls patrol every inch of the property and I've heard of areas that get busted for breaking the rules. They also provide emergency services for the entire property.

After a relatively short run as The Disney Golf Resort which later turned into the Disney Inn in 1986, the facility was renamed again. Shades of Green (1994) was leased by the government as a military only resort. In 1996, Uncle Sam bought it outright and it became a retreat for US military personel only. Since then, on many occasions i've seen see military helicopters fly over. These weren't the run of the mill police or television crew size helicopters, I'm talking the Huge, Shake the Building, loud helicopters. The only thing that could top seeing them was in 2008, when we heard about a fighter aircraft fly over for some big wig at Shades of Green. The word was let out to the guests. We spent the whole day looking at the sky. Of course it happened after i had left for the day. (dang Murphy's luck)

Every so often Disney manages to do something that makes me say 'That is Sooo Cool." In 2007 and 2009 in July Magic Kingdom's Mainstreet was the site of a US Citizenship Naturalization Swearing in Ceremony for 1000 new Americans immigrants. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . . and we'll send them to Disney World !!!!"

Talk about going 'to infinity and beyond', in 2008 NASA sent Buzz Lightyeaar to the international spacestation for a several months. The actual doll / action figure flew into space as part of a kids educational program. There were pictures of him standing infront of the crawler as the shuttle was being rolled out to the launch pad. What I find hysterical is that when he was brought back, they had a ticker tape parade down mainstreet complete with Buzz Aldrin. . . the real astronaut.

One more thing about NASA, I was told that when Disney was testing Mission Space, that they had astronauts from the cape come test it. Their assessment was that it was the closest thing to a real shuttle launch a civilian to experience.

Since 2005 Disney World and Disneyland has been home to the Presidential pardoned Thanksgiving Turkeys. The US President pardons them, they are wisked away to the airport and flown, first class mind you, to Florida or Califronia where they are the grand marshals in the holiday parade, then they live out thier days at the park. Although for marshmallow and yam (2005) thiers days ended of natural causes eighteen months later. A little side note to this story: Disney sent them a CD with the song Happiest Place on Earth to them so the turkeys would get acclaimated to it.

When I worked at Epic (indiana jones stunt show)in the ninety's, we were told they were holding the show for a VIP. Fine, we thought, let's get them in here, get the show on the road so we could get to lunch. Well, we waited, and waited and waited. FINALLY, we saw Men in Black walking onto the stage as they escorted an older gentleman to his seat. It was Jimmy Carter and he was surrounded by Secret Service men. Can I just say, Secret Service men are scary. The final scene of the show, Indy fires a pistol. It will only shoot blanks, but the secret service men still watched Indy like a hawk untill the tech locked it up. Jimmy Carter was cool. He came out on atage and shook hands with the cast and crew while his body guards glared at us all.

For the Hall of Presidents efficanados, Yes We Can get the THE real Barack Obama to record the short speach for his animatron's voice. The attraction's creators packed up a small audio studio and went to Washington DC and set up shop in a small at the White House (I think) where Barack recorded his few lines.

Nothing but the best for Our World.

GHOSTS, CHILLS AND THE 'WHAT WAS THAT?'

2009-10-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted take some time and delve into the Ghost Stories:Fact or Fiction that surround Walt Disney World. It may be the 'happiest place on Earth', but in a place that's filled with so much emotion, imagination and inspiration, who's to say that some of that 'energy' hasn't stuck around long after the people have left.

THe most popular Ghost on property is George at the(WDW)Pirates of the Carribbean in the 'burning city' scene. Between what I've found on the Disney blogs (Disboards) and some first and second hand accounts I have compiled as much information as I could. George, the person, was a welder working at a high altitude when he either fell or had something fell on him when the ride was being built. His spirit is still very active in the ride to this day. In fact people have claimed to be riding through his scene taunting or challenging him. . . and he had made things move. According to one Disboard blog, they were yelling "George is not Real" over and over. Half way through the third time, thier boat jerked. (DISCLAIMER- Please don't try it unless it's just your people in the boat. You don't want to wreck the ride for other guests.) Stories of seeing lanterns moving that aren't supposed to move(came from a co-worker first hand), the door in the jail scene behind the dog with the keys opens after they know for sure it's been closed(from the Disboards), and seeing shadows / silhouettes in the tower are all over the web. Rumor has it that if the cast members don't tell George Good Night over the PA system before they leave for the night, the ride will break down the next day. (some postings say it's Good Night and Good Morning). In one Disboard posting a person, identifying himself as being a POTC cast member, said that they have also had thier costumes tugged on and somethings George appears in the surveilance cameras. Up until his Widow's death it is said that every year she would ride through the attraction and leave flowers for her husband. Another Disboard writer claims that George stays in the tower (I'm not quite sure where that is) and that they call the door behind the dog 'George's door'. If this door is open, the ride will shut down.

One of the challenges of researching for this blog is not only weeding out the urban
legend from the true stories, but trying to figure out which incidents were at Disney World vs Disneyland. In one Disboard blog, it is believed that seven spirits live at Disneyland(1 lives in the haunted mansion). . . .Take that tidbit for what it's worth. In Disneyland there is a story of a mother wanting to dump her dead son's ashes at the POTC ride. Of course Disney said No; however,rumor has it that she rode the ride and did it anyway. Now, there are reports of seeing a young boy riding the boats in the surveilence cameras after the parks are closed. This story/urban legend has been said to have happened at both POTC and the Haunted Mansion at both Disneyland and Magic Kingdom. Knowing people, I wouldn't be surprised if has happened numerous times over the years.

The Haunted Mansions on both coasts have the next most written about haunts. . . true haunts, not the imagineering created ones. On a Disboard blog, (Disneyland)there have been reports of seeing a boy crying at the exit. Guests have said they asked him if he needed help, but that he would never respond to them. THe Guests would go get a cast member, but when they returned he'd be gone. One of my co-workers worked at the Magic Kingdom Mansion on a slow night. He was on the exit zone and didn't want to keep walking the moving side walk for nothing, so he stepped off the 'treadmill' and was standing in the curtians where he could still see the cars coming. After a while he heard a child laughing, thinking that guests were coming, he stepped back on the moving platform to greet them. . . no child ever came around the corner. I also read an identical story to this one on a disboard too, so apparently the laughing child is a regular occurance. In this version, the attendant called to his fellow cast member on the loading side of the ride, they said no one had entered for over 1/2 hour, so the ride was completely empty. Another report on the Disboards talk about guests seeing a young child running around the ballroom scene. Of course when Cast went to go check it out, no one was there.

Some of the other Mansion sightings are of a man entering the ride near closing, but the cast member at the exit area never see him. I also found reports of a guest who died of a heart attack in 1970 (so this had to be Disneyland). Is this the mysterious man ? Not sure. There's also several stories of a man with a cane who is seen late at night, especially after closing. Story has it that a small plane crash landed in a lake nearby before the park was built and they feel it's him. . . I'm not so sure on this one either. Urban legend ? Dearly departed ? Let me know what you think.

One of the other popular stories revolves around Grad Night. (a.k.a. Give teenagers free reign of a park at night and pray they don't kill each other night.)Apparently, a guy climbed out of the Haunted Mansion car in the seance room and fell to his death. Could he be one of these ghosts? or maybe he's the 'man in the tux' that's sometimes seen in the mirrors used by cast members so they can see people coming around the corner ? One story tells of a female seeing the man then feeling a hand on her shoulder. No one was there. She ran out of the mansion and quit her job (one account has said she vowed to never work at the mansion again. Another version of the story says that this was at the loading zone and she kept seeing shadows before being touched. Either way, she ran out of the building, never to return. There also seems to be something/someone hanging around the 'endless hallway' room behind the candelabra. There was a Disboard snippet that said there were reports of a shadowy figure running at the cast members on who were walking the track after hours, then it simply vanishes. Again, take it for what it's worth.

Splash Mountian, around drop three, a guest was having a heart attack on the ride and tried to get out of the log ride and was crushed to death, now when people do a ride through there are reports of seeing shadows moving around the Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah scene. At Tom Sawyer's Island it is said to be haunted by two people that drowned while trying to swim across the moat during, guess when? . . . Grad Night !! Another tale of stupid people on parade, I mean Grad Night, is on the Wed Way People mover. Mr High School Grad decided to change cars and slipped. Yep, you guessed it, he got smushed by the car. Story tells of people being touched and hair being pulled (at Disneyland, i believe)

On the Matterhorn, it's told that someone named Dolly was thrown from the car when she undid her seat belt and wanted to stand up. THe car hit a decline, she fell out and was ran over by the car. Joining Dolly there is said to be the spirit of a guy who unbuckled his safety gear, stood up during the ride and was knocked out of the car by a low beam on what night? (wait for it . . .) Grad Night !!! On the Disboards, at Space Mountian, they talk about a ghost they called Mr. One Way, who supposedly died in the 70's. Descibed as a large man with reddish hair, he's seen getting into a car with a lone rider then vanishing. The Christmas shop (Which happens to be the only merchandise shop i saw anything written about) reports have been documented that a face on a photo changes from a straight face to a frown.

At the Castle there have been reports of a little girl who died on the way to Disney, now her spirit roams the parks. This one sounds more like some graveyard stories of spirits hitch hiking only to vanish when the car stops at thier destination. But if you can document it actually happening, let me know. In another report there are sightings of a tan figure walking down main street. Again, if you've heard actual incidents let me know. In one Disboard posting said that a little girls haunts the Beauty and the Beast stage at the Studios. I've worked there and never saw or felt anything.

Staying at the Studios for a moment, there are reports of a man walking around the Tower of Terror after hours going the wrong way. When they call to him, he doesn't answer and fades away. One of my co-workers said a friend of his was loading the ride and got a call from the control center to tell the man who was standing up to sit down. She told him there was no one standing in the car. The person watching the survelience camera said there was some one standing. She looked again and saw no one standing, so she sent the ride. This next one i've added a link to youtube for it. Watch it and see what you think. . . real or photoshop ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTdnt9tA47o

I have my own first hand sighting story while i was working at Indiana Jones Stunt show. Earlier in the day i made a mad dash run to the commissary to get my lunch. I had hoped to beat a huge thunderstorm that was in the horizon. I didn't made it. In fact as I crossed stage, now turned into a wading pool, lighting struck right behind the berm (a couple hundred yards away). I felt something in the water. Whether it was electricity from the lighting or precussion from the thunder, I'm not sure. Later that day, I was standing in wardrobe. I was at the service window, next to me was a stack of t-shirts, next to that was the coordinator's desk. I turned to grab a shirt for one of my cast and saw someone sitting at the desk. I handed out the shirt, looked back and the figure was gone. This was broad day light, middle of the afternoon. I told a friend of mine and she said 'Oh you met Eddie.' That trailer has since been replaced, so i don't know if Eddie went a way with the building or if the techs(who now use that space) just ignore her. Did nearly getting killed by lighting have anything to do with my sighting? I don't know.

Moving on to Epcot, there have been several sightings of a little girl with long blonde hair riding in one of the cars at Spaceship Earth and a little boy who'll run in front of her then vanish. And one Disboard reporter said there had been a figure seen in the French Pavillion movie theater. Most peoplethink it's a straggling guest and would ask him to leave, when they turn around, he's vanished.

In the area formerly know as Pleasure Island Adventurer's Club, a disboard poster (I assume a cast member), said he'd catch glimpse of a figure dressed in white in the library looking over the balcony above the organ. A Disboard posting talked about a fire station's 2nd floor (empty space)being haunted. I could never figure out if it was Disneyland or WDW, but the report states that they can hear footsteps and knocking. . . settling building ? Maybe.

I want to end with a couple of theories to think about. Legend claims that ghosts, paranormal activity, poltergiests are drawn to and are more active around water. The entire space of Walt Disney World was build on a drained swamp. HMmmm. Makes you think. However, if you buy into the television shows that hunt for ghosts and such, they'll tell you that high Electromagnetic Frequencies can create hallucinations, visions, nausea, ect. What do you think makes alot of the rides and special effects happen ? Electricity and Magnetic devices. Another Disboard poster talked about Infrasound. the same technology is being used to try to detect earthquakes. It's out of human range of hearing, but some people can actually feel it. Do the dolls in It's A Small World emit Infrasound from thier mechanics, which creeps some people out. . . . or is it the song that gets stuck in our head that haunts us to our inner core. :)

Happy Halloween

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND . . . FANTASMIC!

2009-10-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago,one of my readers 'wanted more stories about Fantasmic!". So here I go delving into the mental archives. Just so you know, my experience with the show was the opening rehearsals and eight to nine months during the run of the show. After that it was sporatic. . . very sporatic.

As I was trying to conjure up memories from 'umpteen' years ago, I remembered one that is more about the people who worked there and than the show itself. A vast majority of the techs and stage managers were, at one time, entertainers, ex-performers and garage band musicians, so one day. . . I mean night, after the show, they had a Rock Concert in the rehearsal room. And believe it or not, they were actually pretty good. Nothing was planned. Nothing was scripted. It was just a matter of "Hey, you know this one?" and they'd all start playing. I watched for a while, but around mid-night I left. I think I saw more vente Starbucks than usual the next morning.

Do you want to know the quickest way to turn a room full of adults in to children again ? . . . Hide Easter Eggs. Costuming sponsored a Easter Egg hunt and hid around 500 + - plastic eggs around the back stage area. Everyone impatiently waited through the usual pre-shift meeting with thier hunting paraphanelia near by. When the stage manager sounded like he was done, they make a break for the door. The manager yelled, "HEY, I'm not done yet." They all came back and sat down. He said a few more things, then they made a break for the door again. He tried to stop them a second time, but this time everyone knew he was just messing with them and they kept running. We had two shows that night and they even went out with the tech's flashlights between shows. . .talk about your dedication. HMmmm I wonder if anyone ever DID get that one out of the trailer hitch ?

When some one left the show, like "I'm leaving the company" or "I'm moving up to a new job never to return to this world again" gone, the cast always had a certian. . .endearing way of saying goodbye. It usally included a canister, or two, of baby powder and a trip to the locker room shower. nothin' says livin' like being tarred and feathered with babypowder in the shower. Originally, the 'leavee' would get thrown in the moat the night they left. However, concerns about what was exactly in the water stopped that practice early on.

The water in that moat is interesting. You can see to the bottom. . . usually, but then you start to think about all of the fuel that gets pumped through the gas lines for the 'lake on fire' scene, a large (i beleive four engine) steamboat chugging around the moat in an enclosed enviroment and just mother nature in general and Ewww. I never saw three headed ducks, but we always tried to keep them scared off the water. And yes, the seatmboat is on a track, but it does move on it's own power, thus is why we had a rescue boat that was able to also push a broken down steam boat back to the dock. I'll always remember when they drained the moat to work on it and found several missing costume pieces. Belle's crystal medallions from her dress. Mary Poppin's umbrella. The handle looked okay, but the fabric was rotted away leaving just the wire frame work. One day we set up the stage and left a large cloth bin preset off to the side. We didn't thing about it being as windy as it was. But when we came back fromour break, it was gone. And yeap, it was on the bottom of the moat. A tech armed with a grapling hook went fishing for it.

In the beginning, Mickey, as the Brave Little Tailor, was supposed to walk on water as he goes out to fight Chernabog. There's good trivia question for you. What is the name of the demon / dragon monster that appeared in Fantasia? Chernabog. . . Anyway, back to my blog. The 'powers that be' decided the walking on water image wouldn't set well with the conservative Christians of the world, so they added rocks and built a pathway out into the lake. I recently heard rumors of them wanting to reviving the water walk. We'll see.

In the beginning, the one thing we all loved about working at Fantasmic! was that we were able to park at the stage. No parking in the cast parking lot and traepsing across the park like they have to now. At certian times of the day there wasn't even a security guard at the gate. We'd clock out and be in on the road home in one minute flat. Then 9/11 happened and all of our parking became centralized and the techs got large parking lot to store stuff in.

One of my fondest memories of working there was New Year's Eve. We would usually have late shows that night and would still be at work at midnight. So we'd go out to our parking lot and watch both the Studio's and Epcot's fireworks go off. It was like fireworks in stereo. One year we even had fake champaign. . . you know, the non alcoholic sparkling grape juice :) to toast in the New Year.

So on that note, CHEERS !! and good night.

EXTINCT DISNEY PT 3

2009-09-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

DISNEY'S ANIMAL KINGDOM, though the newest park to Walt Disney World, it still has had a few extinct attractions. At the Theater in the Wild, the JOURNEY THROUGH JUNGLE BOOK show opened with the park. It lasted from April of 1998 to April of 1999 when it was replaced by TARZAN ROCKS. As Jungle Book left the park, so did my best friend's job, who performed in the show. He drifted around for a few weeks in other parks until he 'just fell off the schedule'. Tarzan ran from July 1999 until Jan. 21, 2006 when the Phil Collins inspired rock concert gave way to the new NEMO show. One of the most over looked shows was POCAHONTAS AND HER ANIMAL FRIENDS, which lasted until September 27,2008. The only time I saw the show, the 'animal friends' weren't being very coperative. A rabbit was supposed to hop across stage. . . it didn't. In fact I a stage hand's hand nudge it just to get it on the stage.

DISCOVERY RIVERBOATS which was intended to be transportation across the park, ran between Safari Village and Asia. It closed in late 1999 because, acording to some reports, the guests thought it was boring. The original non-parade parade, because Animal Kingdom does not 'do' parades, (just like it is also na-ut-a-zu, ask an Animal Kingdom junkie about that) was the MARCH IF THE ARTIMALS. Who ever designed this extremely artsy, fartsy parade must have been sipping a little something extra in thier tea. It was the most bizarre show / parade 'thing' I have ever seen. Neon colored characters and Salvador Dali-esk floats, left me thinking "Huh". One float had a honey bee that was supposed to be getting 'drunk' off the honey and laughing hysterically. Again I say "Huh ?"

Animal Kingdom was to include an area devoted to MYTHICAL CREATURES. Though it has never fully materialized as of 2009, there are a few remains from the orginal plans. You'll notice a section of the parking lot is named "Unicorn", and there's a silhouette of a dragon in the Animal Kingdom logo and dragonhead statue sits atop one of the ticket booths. In Camp Minnie Mickey, which was built as a temporary fill-in for the space, there is a dragon-shaped stone fountain. For many years a burnt suit of armour was next to a 'dragon's lair' on the banks of the river, visible from the Discovery Riverboats. With the opening of Everest, Animal Kingdom did manage to get at least one mythical creature in there with the Yeti.

Moving outside of the parks Disney had some notable and much missed Extinct Attractions as well. Fort Wilderness Campground used to have a train which lasted for five years. The live steam train transported guests through the campgorunds. Even though the one and only time I rode it as a kid, I don't remember having to pay, my resources say it cost $1.00 for an adult to ride all day. One reasons for it's demise was the expense and diffculty of finding people specially trained to work on steam engines. Another issue was in the soft florida sand, the tracks kept trying to separate. In 1979, management decided to scrap the train idea at the Fort and unfortunately the trains were left to rust. However, there is a happy footnote, in 2004 several members of the CAROLWOOD PACIFIC HISTORICAL SOCIETY took ownership of the old Fort trains in order to rehab them to thier former lives.

DISCOVERY ISLAND, before Walt's day was inhabited by a lady and her pet Sandhill Crane (according to Wikipedia) and before that, in the early 1900's, it was called Raz Island and inhabited by the Raz family. Since it's aquisiton into the corporate world of Disney, the island, named TREASURE ISLAND (April 8, 1974-1978), was supposed to have a pirate's theme. However, the aviary turned into an American Zoological Association accredited zoo four years later called Discovery Island. However, when a few of the caretakers were caught killing some of the local, protected birds like hawks and vutures Disney almost lost thier accreditation. With the opening of Animal Kingdom, all of the critters were relocated to the new park in April 8, 1999 and Discovery island was returned to the hawks and vultures from wince it came. The rented Sea Racer boats circle the islnd daily, but I've been told that the watercraft patrol keeps the public off the island.

RIVER COUNTRY water park (June 20, 1976 - Nov. 1 2001) was located in the Fort Wilderness Campground. Much smaller park than the next generation water park Typhoon Lagoon, I've been told by my resources that it's true demise came because of it's proximity to Bay Lake. It seems that it was a bit too difficult to keep Bay Lake and her critters at 'bay'. After sitting domant since 2001, one of the slides from River Country was given a new life at the Fort Wilderness pool in the end of 2008. The picnic pavillion has also been given new life as a seasonal dining option Mickey's Backyard BBQ.

PLEASURE ISLAND opened in May 1, 1989 with a wide variety of shops and night clubs like Mannequins, Motion, Comedy Warehouse, Adventure's Club, Rock and Roll Beach Club, 8Trax among others. Although the physical island is still there, the night clubs closed Sept. 27, 2008. It is believed that the Island began drawing the wrong type of crowds and crime started to rise in and around Downtown Disney. So, Disney pulled the plug and believe it or not things have calmed down. . . Hmmm, eliminate the alcohol and crime fades away, imagine that.

Originally the Disney GOLF RESORT, nestled among the Palm and Magnolia Golf courses opned in 1974 with 151 rooms. In Feb of 1986 it was expanded and renamed THE DISNEY INN. On Feb. 1, 1994 THe United Sates Military aquired a 100 yr lease for the resort, but in 1996 it was purchased outright for $43 million and renamed SHADES OF GREEN. The golf courses are still accessible to guests, but the resort itself is stickly military, which makes for some interesting days with military helicopters coming and going or the Blue Angels doing 'fly-by's' over the Magic Kingdom.

The TREE HOUSES (1975-2002) where eventually retired as a resort due in part to the American Disabilities Act. Logistcally they were a challange to make ADA compliant. For the interim years they served as housing for international college program kids. I was told part of the renovation problem was dealing with the asbestos which was widely used in builings of the 70's and also the fact that they were built in an offical wetlands area. They have since removed the old structures and replaced them with newer villas that were built off site. The footprint for the new villas actually reduced encroachment on the surrounding wetlands by 70 percent for each site. Now they have been incorporated into the Saratoga Springs Vacation Club property.

The DISNEY INSTITUTE as a place was short lived. THey built a mini college style campus on the back side of Downtown Disney. But not too many people wanted to come to Disney and spend hundreds of dollars learning about photography or how play basketball. The short lived project was mostly torn down and Saratoga springs Vacation Club sprung to life. The core buildings, Spa and Restraunts are from the old Institute, but the Villas are all new. Actually, the pool, used to be an ampitheater intended for plays and concerts. . .Oh well. 'The Institute'still exists in the form of buisness development classes and inconjuction with Disney University, however.

As a castmember, there're terms and places that have came and gone as well. Back when we didn't take our 'costumes' home, we had WALK TIME. If you were scheduled till 5:00, your could leave your location at 4:40 so you could change clothes on the clock. In late the 1990's Disney had a change of heart about cast members wearing their costumes into work, and CASTZOOMING was the cutesy name they gave to the process of making us responible for our own clothes. As a result, walk time went away. After all these years of taking your clothes home, Castzooming is a term that only the old timers know about.

During Pocahontas (at the studios), one of Poca's lines was 'Wingapo, that is how we say hello'. So of course we'd always say, "WINGAPO" to each other. Now, people would just think I was weird. At Hunchback Of Notre Dame, we had SNOWBALL the black life size puppet horse. We all talked to him at one point or the other. Several years after the show was gone, I saw Snowball being used as a prop. Of coure I had to go talk to him. People thought I was nuts. During the run of the Muppets shows,there was a breakroom specially built for them and dubed ANIMATION STATION. Wardrobe had a piece of the room and the rest was lined with mirrors and couches. As the muppet shows faded away, the perfomer breakroom turned into a costuming mini warehouse and the costuming room was taken over by either foods or merchandise. We also had a specially made box pargo that we all nicked named to ICE CREAM BOX PARGO. We used is for years after the Muppet shows went away. I beleive it's final demise came when the 'box' part fell off the back. (Yes, Yes we were hard on pargos.)

In the days before Tower of Terror and Fantasmic!, we had the STATUE CAST PARKING LOT, RED LOT and the ORANGE LOT. Statue lot was called that because they stored the Swan and Dolphin statues there while they built the hotels. That parking lot is now . . .Fantasmic!. I'm not sure where the names Red lot and Orange lot came from, but nevermind that, they're both gone. In the old main cast lot sits Rockin' Roller Coaster and in the other parking lot is the new and improved "Fort Knox" style security gate.

In the begining days of the Studios, they filmed the new MICKEY MOUSE CLUB in the soundstages. In the area of the buglalows there was orginally a production only COMMISSARY. It is now just an office. Under the water tower was a Mouskateer class room trailer. I believe the trailer is still there, but who occupies it varies with the wind.

Let us not forget one final thing from years gone by "the E-TICKET RIDES". Back when you had to buy a book of tickets, the E rides were always the first ones used because they were the thrill rides like Space Mountian or the Haunted Mansion. Dating back to the 1950's at Disneyland it carried over to Magic Kingdom until 1982. Today the E- tickets maybe gone, but the term still lives on in pop culture.

And thus ends part three of my history lesson, I now return you to your regulary scheduled blog. :)

EXTINCT DISNEY PT 2

2009-09-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

As if the concept of having two studio themed amusement parks in one town didn't confuse the guests enough, the park formally known as Disney-MGM Studios changed it's name to Disney Hollywood Studios in 2007. Although MGM never really had any presence in Orlando, Disney barrowed the MGM name so we could use the movies in it's attractions and we briefly had the Tom and Jerry characters at the park. They did a promotional video where Tom 'chased' Jerry across the top of the Animation Courtyard arch, but never really went much further. You know it's going to be an interesting video shot when they schedule folks based on whether or not they're afraid of heights. The big question we always get is "Why?" We were told the contract ran out with MGM, the soundstages were being converted into the Toy Story Mania ride and 'film production has left the building'. . . I mean 'the park.'

When the studios opened there was a BACKSTAGE WALKING TOUR (which closed in 2001) that went through the a tour tunnel over looking the soundstages. It was hard to keep the facilities filled with projects. Maybe it was because they didn't like being watched by tourists, or maybe Florida has always been a bit of a step child when it comes to film and television production. The tour snaked it's way through a mock special effects workshops and ended in a real post production house. HOWEVER, again, people editing thier projects don't like being in a fish bowl, so alot of the time the editing rooms remained empty or closed off to the public. Now the Post Production building is independently run and the production tour tunnel has been turned into ONE MAN'S DREAM museum which opened on October 1,2001 to celebrate Walt's one Hundreth birthday.

Soundstages 2 and 3 housed WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE from 2001 to 2006. The closing of Miilionaire was probably the death neel for the "film industry" at Disney Hollywood Studios. In 2008 the stages were gutted and converted into TOY STORY MANIA ride. By the way, Millionaire was not the first big named game show to be shot in the Disney soundstages. Waaaay back in the begining of the park, a revival of LET'S MAKE A DEAL, was made there as well. Sadly it didn't last too long. I believe it was closed down around 1991ish. (i'.m still looking for the actual dates)

The BACKSTAGE TRAM TOUR has had a similar fate of it's walking tour cousin. Though it's still there, it's a mere shadow of it's former self. It's pretty much a drive through Creative Costuming and stop at catastrophe canyon. Oh yeah, they drive past the 'the award winning Earfel Tower'.(As the tour guide's script says). I've asked the guides "what kind of award did the water tower win ?" No one ever seemed to know. In it's day the tram drove past the soundstages and down residential street, but the home To The Golden Girls House, among others, are all gone now.

RESIDENTIAL STREET, opened in May 1, 1989, gave way to a new stunt show in 2005 called Lights Motors Action. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty cool show, but it's a bit heart breaking to see the 'studios' loose it's identity like that. If you ever wondered what was behind the house facades on residential street, it was storage. Mostly horticulture and other items that weather wouldn't hurt since there was only half a house there.

A little further up from Lights Motors Action, in a spot that used to be home to Norman the Cow from the City Slickers Movie, is BACKLOT THEATER. Built in 1993, it was originaly meant to be a temporary stage for BEAUTY AND THE BEAST while the old THEATER OF THE STARS (TOTS)was being relocated to make way for Sunset Blvd. Over the years TOTS was home to a number of song and dance shows including DICK TRACY (1990 - 1991), HOLLYWOOD'S PRETTY WOMEN (Sept. 9, 1991 to Nov. 3.1991), and various Star's of the Day Question and Answer sessions. When B&B got their new snazzy home, 'the powers that be' didn't want to tear down a perfectly good building AND we had a new Pocahontas movie coming out.

Thus the SPIRIT OF POCAHONTAS show was born June 23, 1995, but sadly, it closed on Feb. 24 1996, after a very short run. Casting issues. Staging issues. Staffing issues. They all played a part in it's demise. The intent was to have a totaly native american cast and crew. It ended up being maybe half the cast and a couple of the crew. For a few of the cast, it was in thier contract to either wear thier hair long or keep it in mohawks. If you know anything about 'The Disney Look', it was like an act of congress to get that passed Greta Groom (I'll introduce you to her in another blog).

Hot on Poca's heels was a new show DISNEY'S HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE. (June 21,1996 to Sept 28, 2002)Since everything else in that theater had an extremely short life span, Hunchback spent most of it's life in fear of being closed. At the third year anniversary, we realized that maybe we might just be okay for a while. I personally always felt like we were the step child to B & B. Lasting for seven years, it seemed to take on a life of it's own. The movie was Ehh. . .it was okay. Disney, (as Disney usually does) took liberties with the story that didn't sit well with die hard Victor Hugo fans, but the show itself had a huge following.

After Quasimodo rang his last cathederal bell, the stage sat empty for a while. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles invaded the space briefly as did other character sets using the old greenroom. Starwars weekends used the green room as Starwars Central for two years. Meanwhile, the Spectical of Lights (Christmas lights) crew claimed squatters right's to the stage area for storage. In Dec. 2007 the guts of the building were demolished and a full fledged 'new special events venue' was born for things like Night of Joy, Grad night, conventions, ect.

Next door to Hunckback was an odd stage. From the front, the two stages seemed to be on level ground. From back stage, however, the Muppets theater was a flight of stairs higher than the Backlot theater. This elevation difference, we believe, is what contributed to Hunchback's demise because all of the rain water drained down under the Backlot Theater and eventually rotted out the stage's supports. According to my tech sources the support posts under the stage were beginning to look like swiss cheese.

Working costuming at MUPPETS ON LOCATION: THE DAYS OF SWINE AND ROSES (Sept. 16 1991 and 1994)meant lugging costumes up a flight of stairs every morning and (I hate to admit it) throwing bags of dirty costumes off of the flight of stairs at the end of the day. We worked smarter, not harder, or at least that's what we told management. Since then, the stage has been host to numerous character sets over the years, now it's Buzz and Woody's home when they visit Al's Toy Barn.

Muppets costuming was also home to several of the music groups like the TUBAFOURS and The HOLLYWOOD HITMEN(closed April 7, 2001). During one of the "Oh my God the economy is tanking, must get rid of things' moments, we lost all of our musical groups to layoffs. A few years later they brought music back to the park with Mulch, Sweat and Shears rock band.

THe Studios went through numerous parades over the years. DINOSAUR (1992)(tv show version)was more of a street party complete with Dino whores. . .I mean scantily clad Dino girl cheerleaders, ALADDIN'S ROYAL CARAVAN, (Dec. 21, 1992 - Aug. 27, 1995) The spitting camels are now spitting once again by the Aladdin's Magic Carpet Ride at the Kingdom, TOY STORY (1996 - 1997)To Infinfity, the International Space Station and Beyond, HERCULES (June, 27, 1997 to 1998)Hero to Zero, I mean Zero to Hero, MULAN (1998 - 2001) I miss seeing the Perchuran horses everyday, DISNEY STAR AND MOTOR CARS (october 1, 2001- march 8, 2008) Which I hear is coming to Disneyland Paris and last but definately not least, BLOCK PARTY BASH (March 9. 2008) . . .Uhm, never seen, know nothing about it.

SUPER STAR TELEVISION,(1989 to 1999)(Ahh, my home for many years), took guests from the audience and put them in scenes with famous co-stars. Using split screen, green screens, unique costumes and some old fashion imagination, guests were able try their hand at acting with the Golden Girls, Three stooges, David Letterman, Lucille Ball and several others. I'm not sure why it closed other than possible lack of interest/knowledge it existed due to limited advertising.

THe ABC THEATER stage sat dormant for a several years. The show DOUG started in 1999 was there briefly, but he, Patty Mayonaise, Skeeter and Pork Chop soon moved back to Nickelodeon. The cluttered up storage area in the back was given a new coat of paint and turned into a meet and greet area for Mike and Sulley from Monsters Inc. until Jan. 2008 when they were moved to the Streets of America. ABC THEATER was also used for special events like ESPN Weekends, Super Soap and Starwars Weekends. Its many years of neglect finally came to an end when, in 2009, Fox's AMERICAN IDOL Opened up shop. So the 'poor little stage that could' is now alive and kicking again.

Next door the MONSTER SOUND SHOW started May, 1989, where actors Martin Short and chevy Chase introduced guest to the world of sound effects. On July 1, 1997 the format changed and it became the ABC SOUND STUDIO. Along with the name change came a new animated film clip. SOUNDS DANGEROUS with Drew Carey later replaced the second reincarnation on April 22, 1999.

Across the park, at home of the Voyage of the Little Mermaid was the original Muppet Show called HERE COMES THE MUPPETS(May 25 1990 until Sept 2, 1991). Many people believe Jim Henson's ghost haunts the Mermaid stage because he passed away while the Muppet show resided there. Across the Animation Courtyard used to be the SOUNDSTAGE RESTAURANT. A quick service pizza and burgers place, it was closed to make way for Henson's BEAR AND THE BIG BLUE HOUSE-LIVE ON STAGE in June 7,1999. For the first month or two, our "break room" was the old steel food service counters and the now closed Cat Walk Bar that was over head. They finally decided that Bear or some variation there of was going to be there for a while and did a huge renovation to create a real break room. The far side of the stage still has food service counters and is pretty much untouched from the restaurant days.

Then there is a list of, as I call them 'honorable mention' shows. The small, short run, limited set creations that were never intented to be long term commitments. R.L. STINE'S GOOSEBUMPS started in Sept. 1998 and lasted until Dec of that same year. ACE VENTURA PET DETECTIVE arrived in late 1995 and was gone a few months later. SCREENTEST was an itty bitty 'show?', 'experience?', maybe a little of both located in one of the stores near the front of the park. A Streetmosphere performer would pick people and auditon them. It lasted a few years. I'm not really sure why that one died. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES emerged from thier specially made Turtle Van on New York Street on June 30,1990. They did a brief martial arts routine them signed autographs on the loading dock. If I remember right, they later moved to other locations aroud the park for their sets until 1996 when the Turtles went back to thier sewers for good.

And finally, I bid a fond Rest In Peace to the ANIMATORS. The very real animation studios was shuttered soon after the release of the Mulan movie as yet another cost cutting measure. What used to be an animation tour is now just a character meet and greet area. THe rest of the building is more corporate offices. Fancy corporate offices, but just offices none the less.

Of all the parks, I think the Studios has seen the most change. Now with Disney buying Marvel Comics, I know we haven't seen the last of it.

EXTINCT DISNEY

2009-08-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

OKAY I need everybody's help. If I miss listing something from a by gone era at Walt Disney World (Orlando), PLEASE, email me and let me know.

In a company that's been around since the 1970's there has been alot of things that have came and gone. Some, like Norman the cow, have been forgotten(or eaten). Some have been sorely missed like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So follow me down memory lane as we rediscover Extinct Disney Places.

Magic Kingdom:

The building and structures for 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1971-1994) were left overgrown and rusted for years. When Anehiem revitalized thier 20k Leagues as a Nemo ride, we had hoped Magic Kingdom would be next. Then they built a Pooh play area over a large chunk of the space. At one time, Disney bragged that 'We had more submarines that the US Navy.' The only difference is thier's actually went under water. . .I guess that would make Disney's, uhmmm. . . glass bottom Boats.

I came across this link to old, old, old pics of the 20,000 leagues ride
http://www.20kride.com/photos_behind.html

The SKYWAY(1971-1999)was a great way to get from the back of the park to the front at the end of the day. For some kids, it was also (-I was told- because I would nnneever do this when I was a kid) a great way to annoy people by dropping popcorn, spit balls and other things on any one who walked underneath it. I'm not sure what brought it to it's final demise, but when a maintenance cast member fell to his death after being hit by a moving ride bucket, it was taken down shortly afterwards. The last time I was in the Kingdom (early 2009), the passanger loading structure in Fantasy land was still in place and pretty much untouched (at least from the outside). The one in Tomarrowland, I hear, wasn't so lucky. As recently as summer 2009, it was still there, but now it think it's being torn down. Now, there are large painted medallions on the concrete to hide the fact that there used to be a huge pole there.

August 2009 I learned that the GALAXY THEATER in tomarrow land was torn down. I have to admit that I never saw a show there. I was told that it was hard to get guests to make the sharp right hand turn around the Buzz Lightyear / Dreamflight / If You Had Wings ride to fill the theater. I was also told that time has not been kind to the stage and safety was a bit of an issue as well. I'm not sure what's going into that space other than a temporary cast parking lot while they work on some office rehab. After that. . .

EASTERN AIRLINES - IF YOU HAD WINGS(1972-1987)/ IF YOU COULD FLY (1987-1989) / DELTA AIRLINES DREAMFLIGHT (1989-1998) was a 'must see'. . . but mainly because it was always a free ride back in the E-ticket days. It's pretty much unchanged structurally, but in 1998 it was turned into a Buzz Lightyear target game. Personally, since there's a Toy Story target shooting ride at the Studios, they could bring the If You Had Wings. . .no wait, I guess they can't since Eastern Airlines is defunct. . . Darn.

Here's a link die hard fans will like: http://www.omniluxe.net/wyw/iyhw.htm

FLIGHT TO THE MOON (1971- 1975) / MISSION TO MARS (1975-1993). . . Yeah, it was wwaaay past time to change that one out. ALIEN ENCOUNTER (1993 - 2003)was supposed to be a scare your pants off, 'too intense for little kids' attraction. Maybe they succeded a bit too well, because it turned into a toned down STITCH'S GREAT ESCAPE pretty fast.

According to Wikipedia, the days of the MIKE FINK KEEL BOATS ended 5:30 May 17, 1997. Apparently one of the boats in Disneyland started rocking and was capsized. THey were taken out of service and inspected for seaworthiness. They never returned to the Rivers of America. In fact it says one ended up on ebay and sold for $15,000. The other's (One in D-land, one in D-world) were moored to Tom Sawyer's island. THe D-land one eventually sunk due to a split hull and was removed from show completely in
April 2009. After looking at some old video on youtube, i agree with the verdict. They seemed a bit top heavy. I included a link to one of the videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIJMglGrsM8&feature=related

DAVY CROCKETT EXPLORER CANOES were 35ft long canoes in the Rivers of America. it opened oct. 1 1971 and ran to 1994. This was another ride i never took the time to try out. Another example of being a day late and a dollar short.

In researching the web, I came across an attraction that for some reason, i never knew existed. THE PLAZA SWAN BOATS. They left from a dock near Tomarrowland and tooled around the park's inner canals from May 1973 to August 1983. The website Widen Your World said it was based on the Boston Public Garden's boat ride from 1877. If you see a vaccume boat claening the canals that is one of the last remanents of the Swan boats. The rest of the fleet was removed from the park and later sold.

CIRCLE VISION -AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL (1971-1974 & 1979-1984) / MAGIC CARPET AROUND THE WORLD(1974-1975)/ CIRCLEVISION 360 - AMERICAN JOURNEY (1984-1994)/ TIME KEEPER (1994-2006) had 360 degree view of the world via movie screens encircling you. It went through several name changes and variations of films, but it was always the same concept: Stand in the middle of the room watching a panoramic movie and try not to get vertigo from all the moving. The TIMEKEEPER reincarnation of the attraction included an animatron with Robin William's voice.

DIAMOND HORSESHOE REVUE (1971- 1986)/DIAMOND HORSESHOE JAMBOREE (1986-1995)/DIAMOND HORSESHOE SALOON REVUE AND MEDICINE SHOW confuses me. I vaguely remember as a kid, that they served food and had a vaude ville style show, but then it closed. Then it was an ice cream parlor. Then it was a special events space. Now as a concierge I see they use it as a seasonal dining option again (around the holiday). It's a case of 'Is it open? Is it closed? Now it's open. No wait, now it's closed.' I give up.

Now, the 3D movie MAGICAL JOURNEY'S(1988- 1993) I could swear was the same 3D movie I had seen years before at a since defunct Circus World theme park near I-4 and US 27. I was a warm and fuzzy 3D Imax movie about a couple of kids fantasies, but the best thing in the middle of summer is. . . Air Conditioned theater.

The LEGEND OF THE LION KING (1994-2002)was considered by some to be the forefather of the Broadway show, much like the Beauty and the Beast seemed to be the grandmother of the Broadway show. It definately pushed the bounderies of puppeteering. With the opening of the Nemo show at DAK, some of Broadway's ideas found thier way back to the parks.

MICKEY'S STARLAND /MICKEY'S BIRTHDAYLAND (1988-1996)was expanded into TOONTOWN FAIR. I believe there was talk of creating a Toontown in the Studios to corrilate with Rodger Rabbit, but those plans fizzeled down to a gift shop and a Disney character Toontown popped up at the Kingdom.

KING STEPHEN'S FEAST is still technically there. It's just a Cinderella dinning now.

And finally, let us not forget MR TOAD'S WILD RIDE(1971-1998) (which I almost did). That was one ride that when they announced is was going away, people actually got upset and protested. I later realized that the Pooh ride was exactly the same thing, it was just with a stuffed bear instead of well dressed frogs.

EPCOT

COMMUNICORE (1982-1994)still exists, it's just renamed Innoventions.

All I have to say about SPACEHIP EARTH is 'I miss the tommarrow's child song' as you're leaving the golf ball.

My notes say that the MAGICAL JOURNEY(1982-1987) 3D movie was made by Disney for Epcot's opening, thenmoved to Magic Kingdom. I still say I had seen it before that at Circus World. I must dig deeper into my research.

CAPTIAN EO(1986-1994), Ah yes, the 3D movie hit the internet after Michael Jackson's death. I heard he was hanging around Disney quiet a bit for a while. . . pre legal trouble and pre fatherhood days. Maybe Captian EO will resurface some where else, some day.

Maybe some day, Disney can find a new sponsor for the WONDERS OF LIFE Pavillion(1989-2007). They use the building off and on for special events and it makes a great obstacle course for SEGWAY classes, but sadly, Body Wars and Cranium Command have sat idle for way too long. I had a guest bring thier child to Disney just so she could learn about the birds and the bees in the "Making of Me" movie. Needless to say she was upset when she found out that the whole pavillion was closed. Maybe they should just market the movie for parents :)

The Land Pavillion had a show called KITCHEN KABARET (1982-1994). It was an animatronic show about eating healthy. Honestly, I think I only saw it once.

HORIZON (1983-1999) was a bit redundant, I have to admit, but it was still one of my favorite rides. I think mainly because of the huge IMAX screen at the end. Sadly the Horizon building was torn down for Mission Space. I recently saw where you could buy a Horizon ride car online, if you were a die hard fan.

UNIVERSE of MOTION (1982-1996) is same building structure as Test Track, just different stuff
inside and from the rumors i'm hearing on the street, probably a new sponsor by the end of 2009. . . Toyota, maybe. But that's just a rumor.

ODYSSEY RESTAURANT is still there and still pretty much looks like a restaurant, but it been years since they've served food there. I know they've used it as a Flower and Garden lecture center a few years. Who knows, maybe it was just too far off the beaten track to draw people. I bet they throw a few princesses in there and a couple steak dinners on the menu and they'd be packed. It worked for Le Celliar (in Canada) and Princess Storybook (in Norway).

The DOUBLE DECKER BUS around the world showcase is now just a character thing. Everytime I saw it, it was packed with people. I never did get to ride it.

TAPESTRY OF NATIONS (1999 - 2001)/ TAPESTRY OF DREAMS (2001-2003) was as far as I know, the only parade Epcot ever had. The drummers were pretty cool. The giant walking puppet people always freaked me out. It was a very artsy parade. T OF NATIONS had a rather intimidating Sage of Time. . . In their defense we were coming up on the new Millenium at the time and it was all about TIME. Later they revamped it and turned the Sage into the Dreamseekers. I think logistics and a massive need for man power is what finally killed it.

I love seeing how Disney recycles show elements. The Mexico Pavillion opened with a boat ride called EL RIO DEL TIEMPO(1982-2007). In it there was video of street vendors trying to sell you stuff. They moved that from the If You Had Wings ride in Tomarrowland.

The building formally known as MILLENIUM VILLAGE (1999-2000) is located just outside the park. Now it's a convention and special events space, but from October 1999 to January 2001 it housed several mini pavillions from countries not presently included in the world showcase. Here's link to more indepth information as to what countries, ect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Village. I remember there was even a few minor international spats between neighboring exhibits. . . Really? at a theme park. . . You've got to be kidding.

It makes you just want to say 'OKAY EVERYBODY, COME ON, LET'S HOLD HANDS AND SING 'IT'S A SMALL WORLD'

on that note, I'm going to bed. . . to be continued-

TAKE A MOMENT TO LAUGH

2009-08-11T18:28:00.000-07:00

Over the past several weeks I've been accumulating random thoughts and little snipets of stuff i've seen around property.

Here's my top ten:
YOU KNOW YOU'RE A TOURIST WHEN-
10. You put your kids on leashes, but not your dogs.
9. Buying the paintng of a neon Mickey on velvet
sounded like a good idea at the time.
8. Your back is as red as your lobster dinner.
7. You're willing to trade your 1st born child
for a cigarette lighter (or a lit cigarette)
at the airport arrival terminal.
6. You cry at Kermit singing Rainbow Connection
everytime you walk past the Muppets movie
theater at the Studios
5. When you get into an argument with a cast member
about why they 'Moved the Hulk Roller Coaster'
from the Magic Kingdom.
4. When you get into an argument with a crew member
about why they 'Moved Space Mountian Roller Coaster'
from Universal Studios Orlando.
3. When you circle Animal Kingdom several times wondering
where they 'Moved the Shamu the Killer Whale Show' to.
2. You put squeaky shoes on your toddler so you can find
them in a crowd.
1. You tell time by what dining reservation is next.

OKAY, So I Have two more:
You know you're a tourist when- your wardrobe is matching
neon pinstrip tie dye and you're following triangle shaped
flag with the words 'TOURISMO' on it.

You know you're a tourist when- you voluntarily allow your
body to be thrown into complete darknes at break-neck speeds
while being strapped to a tiny rocket shaped ride car that is
being controlled by an unknown indvidual who is wearing a
dorkey space costume.

POLITICS AND DISNEY:
It has been brought to my attention, that when comes to politics
we are all a bit like the seven dwarfs:
-We meet them and we're Bashful.
-You soon realize the cost for a political meeting is nothing to Sneeze at.
-When we hear their promises we're Happy.
-We hear thier political rhetoric and we're Grumpy.
-After hearing too much political rhetoric and we become Sleepy.
-We get all worked up over the issues and have to call our Doc.
-In the end, if we actually believe them were all a bit Dopey.

Sadly, i didn't come up with this next one, but I've seen it around for years.
Since I worked in shows, this became a relevant piece of my daily life.

THEATER LOGIC
In is down, down is front.
Out is up, up is back.
and of course -
Right is left and Left is right
A drop shouldn't
A block and fall does neither.
a prop doesn't, and a cove holds no water.
Tripping is OKAY
A running crew rarely gets anywhere;
A purchase line will buy you nothing;
A trap will not catch anything, and
A gridiron has nothing to do with football.
Strikes are work (and lots of it)
A green room, thank God, usually isn't.

And in closing, I'd like to say
BREAK A LEG . . . But not really.

YOU DID WHAT?

2009-07-16T18:06:00.001-07:00

The fondest memories are those where you should have gotten into big trouble, but didn't. I was at Epic one day and my coordinator said, "Do you want some ice cream?" Normally that would sound innocent enough, but this was during a show. We walked over to the dinosaur ice cream stand outside Epic and ate ice cream, then strolled back to the stage in time to finish the show.

During the run of Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of my cast was a Michael Jackson impersonator. To look at him out of make up, you would never know it. I am a photographer on the side and had started making a name for my self as such at several of the stages that I worked at. He wanted pictures of him as MJ, so one day, he dressed up and did the hair and make up. Let me say he looked exactly like MJ. We went out on stage and shot some pretty good pictures. The techs saw what we were doing and turned on the fog machines and fans. It was pretty darn cool.

HOWEVER, it didn't stop there. Back in the day, before lights motors action stunt show, there was residential street and a backstage studio tour that ran right next to our stage. MJ impersonator walked off the Hunchback stage and into view of the tour tram. People started to talk. He walked next to the tour tram. The tour guide lost her train of thought and started stumbling over her lines. We, meaning MJ impersonator, myself and half dozen members of the hunckback cast walked into the park. Now, mind you, the cast was wearing shorts and t-shirts with 'Hunchback' written in sharpie on the front. They were playing the body guards. . . . God help us. Seeing how the crowds mobbed MJ, this as not a smart idea.

We heard a few guests say "Hey MJ!" "Is that. . .no it couldn't-" "Look who it is." You could feel the electricity start to build in a matter of moments. Seeing a stir start to build, we ducked out the back gate as soon as we could. End of story ? Not quiet. Later our stage manager came up to us and said,"Please tell me that you did not walk through the park like that." We said, "Of course not." WE knew, that he knew, that we knew.

Speaking of being in place you probably shouldn't, as a photographer for several of the Indy Stunt doubles, I have been in places on that stage that I KNOW I should have neve been in. Like the Mayan temple set in the ball(rolling boulder) track. In a prop rock during the show so I could get pictures of the Plane scene. At the top of the market place buildings, so I could get shots of high falls. At least I never went up in th rafters like the boys did one day. THey were bored and moved the high fall pad to under one of the beams in the rafters and decided to take flying leaps from the roof of the stage.

If you have ever seen the Indy stunt show, then you'll know that scene two is the cairo marketplace. In that set above the awing is a little niche. They use this niche for DJ's at times during convention shows. One day two of our Epic/Fantasmic! cast got bored between Fantasmic shows and decided to climb into the set and pretend they were eating dinner. . . during the Epic show. One was wearing one of Marion's shirts as a diguse. At the end of the scene, he knelt down to the other and pretended to propose. (By the way, both guys were married with kids.)

THe cast and crew about died laughing. The stage manager, thank goodness was awesome. She came up to them and said(paraphased) "That was the funniest thing i have ever seen. Don't you ever do it again."

Fantasmic! stunt perfomers meet at Epic, use Epic's pargo to ride over to the stage. Every so often they'll give ride to a character or two as well. One day the driver took a short cut through the creative costuming tunnel (part of the backstage tour) and turned a lliiitttle to soon. Because setting outside of the tunnel are prop planes from the movie Pearl Harbor. On this particular day, the Epic driver plowed into the wing of the plane an crumpled the top of the pargo. No one was hurt, from what I can remember, but they did have to use the jaws of life to get one of the character girls out of the front seat. And wouldn't you know, the driver still works at Disney.

I had my own personal "You did what ?" moment one day at Fantasmic!. I was not in a good mood that day. I had one precious darling cast mamber get all over my case one day because she said "This is not my costume. My costume does not have this piece in it" (it was a snap in, snap out removable piece)
I said,"you're the only one doing this role today. Not one else has worn it. It's identical to the other costumes in the trailer."
She still said, "This is not my costume, I don't use this piece."
Now, mind you, we are on the steamboat. The cross bridge is pulled back and the boat is about to start moving. I snatched the costume from her hands, ripped out the unwanted item and handed it back to her. "Here it's doesn't have that strap anymore."
She went out and did her part, but ran to the stage manager afterwards and said "costuming was being mean to me."
And 'bless his soul', he stood up for us and said,"Did you check your preset ?"
She started to cry.
I went to my manager and told her what happened. All she said was, "Yeah, you probably shouldn't have done that."

Ah, those were the days.

STARWARS CENTRAL

2009-07-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

If you think Star Wars fans swarm the Disney MGM Studios (aka Disney Hollywood Studios) for four weekends in May and June, you would only be half true. In fact, some of the biggest fans are actually backstage. At least for the first few years, there was stiff competition to be in the cast. The first character coordinator took ownership of the event and continuted to live, eat and breathe Star Wars for the first four years of it's existence.

We had Imperial Guard uniforms that were hand me downs from the Star Wars on ice show. We never intended to use these costumes until Coordinator "T" saw them. He got permission to use them and for years they became the official coordinator costume. Sadly, we lost coordinator "T" to cancer during the fourth year of the event. The following year as we unloaded the road cases, we resealed the Imperial Guard costumes and no one used them that year in honor of our friend and colleague.

Coordinator "T" established the greenroom / breakroom as Star Wars Central. He made posterboard size placards to hang around the room, each with a character's picture, history and thier autograph. Every year we had a TV /DVD player set up to play the movies. . . all day . . . non stop. . . over and over and over. Don't get me wrong, I love the movies, but when you start receiting the movie word for word, it gets to be a bit much. The first few years espescially, we'd have the walls covered in character development information, the movies running in one corner and people reading the books in another. Needless to say it was total immersion in the World of Star Wars.

I consider myself a fan of the film, but not a fanatic. However, I was training a new costumer one year. While I was showing her who was who and who did what, I caught myself sounding like a fanatic. "Darth Maul was a Sith Lord who killed. . . . Bobo Fett is the son of Jango Fett who fought in the. . . . Before Anakin turned to the dark side he and Queen Amadalla . . . . " NOoo!!!. I refuse to be a fanatic !!! Okay, there I said. I'm better now. Let's move on. :)

Star Wars was always a bit of a step child when it came to setting up for the event, we were rarely had the same venue twice. One year Star Wars Central was the character's warm up room. Two years it was in the old Hunchback of Notre Dame stage (Until Spectitcal of Lights - the christmas lights people moved in). One year we were in the parade car barn, which got nice and toasty during the day, even with fans and AC blowing. My last year we were over in the lighting and grip building with an outside costume drying room that kept tripping breakers.

Besides the greenroom area and wardrobe, Starwars Central also had a sizeable Cosmotology department. Four o'clock in the morning call times, some of our cast would stumble into work, throw on a t-shirt, climb into the make up chair and fall asleep while the makeup artists worked. Sometime around 8 o'clock they would find caffine, thier costume and THEN thier day would begin.

Packing up such a large event was always an adventure. For the first few years, we used cardboard moving boxes. They work great if you're moving. They don't work very well when you have to pack and unpack over and over. Our poor beat up boxes were eventual replaced by five or six snazzy new roadcases. The only problem is you needed two people who were not afraid to drive 16 ft box trucks across town to the warehouses.

I am proud to say, I met that challenge and won. The first trip however. . . .Let's just say, bouncy box truck + speed bump = unhappy driver. . . and passangers. The first time I drove the truck, I went to the gas pumps near central shops to fill up . . . alone. I wanted to get used to the brakes, ect with out anyone kowing how badly i drove. That was my first lesson on speed bumps. On the road across town to the warehouses (no, I'm not telling you where), I had two people in the cab and the back end filled top to bottom with stuff. Altough it wasn't a speed bump, I learned quickly that MR Box Truck didn't like rough railroad tracks either. My passangers also learned where the 'oh shit grips' were. Sorry guys. I made it up to them a little when we decided to play hooky our way back and stopped at a buffet for lunch.

While Disney Hollywod Studios had a Disney Stars and Motorcars parade, they included a Star Wars car. Luke and Leia would ride in the car and a remoe controlled R2D2 would drive along ahead of it. The day R2 arrived at the studios for a test drive it was like a homing beacon went out to everyone who had ever worked Star Wars weekends. What started out as five or six people grew to nearly twenty in minutes. "There's a real R2 unit." "We have an R2D2." "Can we keep him?" We had a manager who was scared to death of it, so the robot operator made sure he (R2)chased her around backstage every chance he could.

One final thought on Star Wars but sadly, I can't take credit for coming up with this saying.

The Force is like Duct Tape - there's a light side and a dark side and it holds the world together.

Star Wars Gay Days and the Eternal Fan

2009-06-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

Star Wars Weekends just so happened to land right in the middle of Gay Days at Disney. Now, Gay Days isn't so much a sanctioned event at Disney, as it is the theme parks taking advantage of a golden opportunity. It all started when some people met on line and decided to meet at Walt Disney World. (Since then Sea World, Universal and Downtown Orlando has gotten involved as well.) The group of men then decided to wear red shirts at the parks so they could find each other.

Enter Star Wars Weekends. Among the characters at the event are three Royal Guards dressed head to toe in red. Red helmets. Red velvet capes. Red gloves. Red wellington boots. Lets just say, there were certian individuals scrambling to be Royal Gaurds on Gay days.

In the beginning years, adult fans were not allowed to dress up, but as time went on they started to lighten up on those rules. One year I saw Obi Wan Kenobe pushing a baby stroller. I often wondered why he didn't just use his Jedi telepathy to move it along. We had one fan that came every day of every weekend dressed like a Jedi. She even legally changed her name to one of the character's last name.

Let be known here and now, not every 'body' is meant for spandex. After seeing my fair share of chunky Storm Troopers, I am convinced that some friends need to warn thier Star Wars fan friend that 'maybe you should consider being. . . say, a Tuskin Raider.' When the one of the stars was an ewok, we had a fan try to bring a tiki torch into the park. Management put a stop to that at the gate.

The one fan that kind of gave me the creeps was dressed in a blue velvet cape with a silver hair barrette pulled down over his eyes. He kind of looked like Jordie from Star Trek. I'm not sure if he got his movies confused or what. We had a fan give Darth Maul the creeps one year when she sat next to his autgraph cue line and told everyone that they were married.

As usual, with every good thing, there has to be those dim wits that take things too far. We had a group of high schoolers at Disney on a school function that decided to corner Greedo and attack him. Needless to say the teens were sent home (up north somewhere, so it wasn't cheap airfare) and thier school was banded from Disney invited functions for three or five years (I believe). Lessoned learned: Don't Mess With the Mouse, or in this case The Bounty Hunter.

Most of the fans, however, were just in awe of seeing thier favorite stars. We had one star that played young Anakin. He kept his VIP tour guide hopping. One day before the motorcade, our cast had loaded into the pargos for a ride to the parade step off. Young anakin comes flying around the corner on a bike he had found back stage and was racing the pargos to the front gate. About three minutes back you see his VIP guide in her plaid vest and skirt pedaling her bike for all she's worth trying to catch up
to him. The kid was old enough to know were he had to be and when he had to be there, so in between those times he . . . was being a kid.

I have to say it was amussing to watch one of our stars deal with the throngs of adoring fans. . . when he was hung over. THe VIP host said it was a bout of food poisioning. . . rrright. No one believed it for a minute. As fast as he ran from the motorcade car to the bathroom, he should have been a track star.

Most of the Star Wars stars were great to work with back stage. Down to earth. Easy to talk to. One however, decided to smoke in the covertible before the motorcade and came pretty close to smoking out the ewok that sat nearby. We were more worried about an ash landing on him and setting his fur on fire. He survived. The motorcade went on. And there's one more story for the record books.

Star Wars Weekends - "In a galaxy Far Far away..."

2009-06-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here we are, nearing the end of another Disney's Star Wars Weekends and it's been three years since I've had any involvement with the event. Do I miss it ? . . .Not really. . . Okay, maybe a little.

For several years i was heavily involved with the Star Wars event. The first year we did it, I saw an audition notice go up in the greenroom and literally pestered the heck out of the manager until he officially assigned me to work on it with the Costumer and Costumer assistant.

Long hours. Late night and early morning rehearsals. Rooms filled with glue fumes filled my days for five years around April through June. The first week of the 2009 event and mother nature dumped buckets of rain. From my past experience, I know the cast and costumers were NOT having a fun day. Jawas, The Emperor and Tusken Raiders's costumes are all made out of a type of burlap-y, loose weave cotton, a.k.a. they soak up rain like a sponge. Jawas are little. A strong wind could blow some of them over. One year, when it rained, the poor Jawas could barely walk beacause their costume has become so heavy with rain water. And once they become soaked, they take DAYS to dry. I believe a Jawa robe was put in the dryer one year and it shrunk because we suddenly had a baby Jawa robe. It took trying to hand wash a Tusken Raider costume one time to realize they were meant to be drycleaned.

One of my first duties on the very first Star Wars event was a road trip. I saw paperwork on the manager's desk from a circus / traveling show producer in my home city. They weren't just from my home town, they were literally next door to my dad's office. I told my manager that I knew exactly where they were and "I'd love to go pick up the Star Wars on Ice costumes from them." That's right, I said Star Wars on Ice. . . Yeah, I never heard of it either.

Since they were still packing up the last of the costumes when I arrived, I had lunch with my brother and did d speedy "Hi, How are ya?" to everyone back home before heading back north to Orlando. Most of the pieces were used for years. . . until Disney invited THE Star Wars fan club, 501 Legion, to join our parade one week end. My manager and the costumer were checking out the 501 Legion's costumes and realized our Storm Troopers had to have an over haul.

The next year, we had all spiffy new Storm Troopers. Funny how we all of a sudden 'finally had the budget' to get new costumes. One last thing, before i leave the Star Wars on Ice costumes. The people that wore those were itty bitty people and we had to get inventive about how to make plastic bigger. Also, some one had glued a stip of wood inside one of the leg pieces, as if wearing plastic wasn't uncomfortable enough, they now had a chunk of wood banging them in the shin. . . We threw that piece away. If fact we threw alot of those pieces away, since PVC plastic costumes tend to crack easily.

Life hasn't been easy for the Storm Troopers. When you wear spandex and plastic armour in public, the PUBLIC tends to get a little frisky with the roaming hands. . . you get the picture. When it rained, some characters couldn't go out, like Queen Amadalla, a drop of rain would damage the velvet. The Storm
Troopers, however, had no such luck. Rain, shine, they never missed thier sets. . .EXCEPT for the frequent wardrobe malfunctions. The only thing that could keep the costume together was a glue that literally melted the plastic together. A squeeze of glue, squirt of activator and quicklyputthepiecestogether. The first year we had clone troopers and sand troopers, I should have bought stock in the glue company.

An Oh the 5 am Storm Trooper on the Turnstiles rehearsals. We had to be at work at 4:oo-4:30 in the morning, get the characters out the door with thier stuff, then follow them to the front of the park with the Pargo with many tubes of glue and activator. For those who have never seen Star Wars Weekends, 'The Powers That Be' decided to enhance the event by putting three Storm Troopers up on top of the gates entering the park. This is kind of an "A" cast event since they wanted to make sure who ever was up there wasn't going to fall off.

The troopers would heckle the guests coming into the park and try to look menacing. One year, when the state was trying to burn down with hundreds of forest fires, the poor Storm Troopers could barely see the edge of the roof, much less any of the guest down below. Everyone was wearing painter's masks to block some of the smoke. When we all starting to cough when by mid morning, the coordinator called it quits for safety reasons.

There are many more stories to come.

THIS IS HOW WE DO IT . . .

2009-05-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

Backstage at Walt disney World has it's own lingo, that we often forget is not normal for the rest of the world. Sometimes it's as simple as calling a glorified golf cart a PARGO, or as disturbing as telling a guest that thier hotel package exploded incorrectly.

I can only assume that the term PARGO started many many moons ago when the company that supplied the modified golf carts called them Pargos. Most of them are Club Cars ot Tiger Trucks now, but the name PARGO has been drilled into our Disney Speak over the years. To call these vehicles golf carts is an understament, however. In costuming they were equiped with flat beds and side boards for carrying costumes. (A little side note: The side boards were removeable and some how they seemed to disappear over the years. Although they wouldn't have helped the day I had an Esmerelda dress fly out of the back in a gust of wind, get wrapped up in the wheels and was literally ripped in half. )

Some are gas, but with the electric ones, it always a game of "where's an outlet". AND if the closer had problems locating a vacant working outlet to plug it into, the morning person had the fun game of "Where's the Pargo?" At All-Star resort, Each of the three resorts have a front desk runner who is assigned a certian Pargo for the day. Since thier Pargo's are all gas powered, their game of "Where's the Pargo?" is because they kept breaking down.

A phrase we tend to use that disturbs many a road weary tourist is "your package didn't EXPLODE properly." Before 911 terrorist attacks, I don't this this term was such a big deal, but now people are more sensitive to words like EXPLODE and DAMAGED Reservation. Basically, when a guest's resevation downloads to the individual resort, all of the elements scatter to their proper place, like dinning plans, tickets, deposits, ect. In pre-911 days, the creators of this system would say a package Exploded correctly. Now, there is a shift in terminology and we're trying to say "The package was ACTIVATED properly". It's a softer, gentler front desk.

If you hear a group of cast members talking, don't be suprised if you hear them say it's 'my Monday' when it's Thursday. As with any 24 hour, 7 days a week operation, we have various days off. As that old country song always used to say, "It's 5:00 somewhere." Every day of the week is somebody's Monday, and every day of the week is is somebody's Friday. . . even if it's monday.

Here's a short list of Disney Speak: Cast member = employee / Guest = Customer / ER = Early Release of shift (a.k.a. I don't want to be here any more.) / Schedule Bid = time to pick your days off according to seniority (a.k.a. every six months management's attempt at stirring up people's life's)/ Costume = uniform (a.k.a. You Want Me to Wear What ?!!!)

Costuming has a special place in our lives. . .somewhere near the pit of your stomach. The designers sit in their office scouring novels of information to design a fabulous 'looking' costume based off the turn of the century National Parks from the Pacfic Northwest for Wilderness Lodge folks to wear. The result is smashing long skirt with Navajo print and a long sleeve shirt. . .Rrright. Let me point out that A) it is not the 'Turn of the Century' anymore, B)We are not in the chilly Northwest. We are in 90 to 100 degree Florida. I will not wear this to work for fear of having to stop somewhere on the way and looking like a 'Little House in the Prairie" refugee. When i worked at Boardwalk resort, I had a wool blend tight fitting skirt. I learned real soon that tight skirts and driving a Jeep to work, didn't blend. Again, I changed clothes at work. The All Star resort costumes made us look like a run-a-way from a clown circus.

You would think that costuming cast members would have nice clothes, because after all, we were COSTUMING. Wrong. We got everyone's hand me downs. Our shirts were the same ones used at Downtown Disney merchandise. Ours just had a different logo on the front. Our pants were Entertianment tech pants. And to top it all off, one year they made this announcement that we were getting a snazzy fleece jackets for winter wear. . .It was the spare fleece linning from the Security Jackets. They embroideried Costuming on the front, but we knew it was another hand me down.

In a final thought, for most people EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomarrow. . .for a cast member, it means Every Paycheck Comes on Thursday.

When you work for the vacation capital of the world, where do you go on vacaction ?

2009-05-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

When you work at the vacation of the world, where do you go on vacation? I get that question often. Since I just returned from a vacation to San Francisco, I thought I'd give you an answer: As Far Away From Disney As I Can.

My first vacation from Disney was to Australia. Twenty-four hours into my Disney escape and we walked into a restaurant that was giving away a free Disneyland vacation. It was at that point I realized that I could never truely get away from the Mouse. In my nineteen years since, I have a running bet with myself to see how long I can go with out seeing the Mouse or some variation there of.

My best 'Where's Mickey?' moment was during a small group tour I did to Greece. We stayed in a little port town called Gerolominas (sorry if i spelled it wrong). During our hike up the mountian to see an ancient temple, we saw very few locals. In fact one town we walked through was practically a ghost town. The only person we saw was a young child standing on the door steps of her house. She must have heard there was a bunch of Americans walking through her village that day, because she wore Minnie Mouse head to toe: Minnie dress, Minnie tights, Minnie shoes, A Minnie hair thing.

We were going the Parthenon, the cradle of civilization and philosophy, and we ran across a vendor selling plastic Mickey junk. . . .I mean merchandise. That's just not right.

Several years later, a friend from work and I decided to go on a volunteer trip to Montana. For two weeks we'd be helping to build a playground at a school and various other projects on the Blackfoot Reservation. Since Disney managed to piss off many Native Americans with thier depiction of Pocahontas, I figured there would be no way I'd run into that Mouse on this vacation. WRONG. During the tour of the Headstart school where we'd be staying for the next two weeks, the second room we walked into, on the wall, bigger than life, is a hand drawn picture of Mickey and Minnie in Indian buckskin. My friend and I busted out laughing.

A different friend and I did a driving tour through England, Scotland and Wales. In Edinburg we were really late getting to our bed and breakfast stop for the night, but the family's little girl waited for us to get there because she had to meet the people who knew Mickey Mouse.

A side note: My friend had brought a Disney-MGM Studios jean jacket she had relocated from the wardrobe building. When we got back, we realized there were very few pictures of our trip we could show anyone, since my friend wasn't supposed to have had that patrticular jacket. Now, it doesn't matter since we take the clothes home. Back then, she had to smuggle the item out. . . .She was such a rebel. :)

THE PRACTICLE THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM DISNEY

2009-04-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

In all of te years I have worked with Disney, I have learned a few practicle things that everybody can use in daily life.

A product called JINX INX is absolutely fabulous for getting ink out of everything. Unfortunately, I have never seen it for sale to the general public. Basically, it's industrial strength acetone. . . nail polish remover. We have several characters with white gloves. From the Head Cheese (Mickey) himself on down to Shitty Kitty(Sorry, I mean Gideon the cat from Pinochio). Sidenote: We sometimes have pet names for certian characters. Gideon is basically a drunk cat with just one line in the whole movie. . . a drunken hiccup, thus the nickname.

Anyway, kids want autographs. This means kids often come at the characters with sharpies, felt pens, ball point pens and everybody's favroite. . . gel pens. At the end of the night there's always a large basket of gloves that have to be specially treated for ink marks. What Jinx ink dosen't get out, Alcohol will. (no not the drinking kind. . . that comes later.) Rubbing alcohol does wonders at getting ink out of things. Mixing Alcohol and Jinx Inx creates a nice little chemical reaction in the laundry area. A quick fix for ink marks is, believe it or not, hair spray. I don't understand how or why, I've just seen it work.

One costuming trick that we were never allowed to try is Vodka (HMmmm, I wonder why?) I was told that touring shows and professional theater troops spray Vodka in their costumes. When it dries, any body odor is gone. It also works pretty well when dealing with Divas. After a few shots of Vodka, who cares, who's yelling at who.

Sometimes I feel like I've led a deprived life. As a kid I never heard of PEEP Jousting, Dry ice bottle rockets and Mentos in Soda bottles. Easter has just passed and of course packages of PEEPS, chicken shaped marshmellows were everywhere. Some cast members decided to 'blow one up' in the microwave. This was done covertly, so I never actually saw the after math. Since it was in a manager's microwave, i assume the microwaved PEEP just expanded to three times it's normal size before deflating.

The next day, I heard about PEEP Jousting, where you put toothpicks in each PEEP and Microwave them. The winner is called when the toothpick of one stabs the other and makes it deflate. . . some of my fellow cast members really need a hobby. :)

I recently heard a story about dry ice, bottle rockets and pipe bombs. Apparently this happened several years ago when the Muppets On Location show was going on. One day it was raining and the show was downed. A wardrobe person was bored and put dry ice in a soda bottle with a little water. After a few minutes, the soft plastic popped a hole and the bottle shot off like a rocket into the air.

The next day, it also rained. Still bored this person had a new audience, so he did it again. This time, however, the only thing he could find was a harder plastic Evian bottle. He puts the dry ice in it, seals the top, the spectators peek out from half open doors and watch as the thing starts to crackle. Getting nervous that the bottle didn't shoot off, he decided to throw a seat cousion over it and stomp on it. (yeah, real smart) It still didn't do anything. Wanting to hide the evidence, he tired to kick it inside. Thank God it never made it that far, because the break room was wall to wall mirrors. The Evian bottle became wedged under the dry ice bin and literally blew up. It rocked the building and would have shattered the mirrors. Shrapnel flew every where. Manager types and security were checking roof tops after that. One person said they heard it half way across the part and thought it was Epic (Indiana Jones). Needless to say these cast members never played with dry ice again.

Ever since Blue Man Group arrived at Universal, I've been dieng to try the Mentos in Soda experiment. . . when i have a few extra bucks to waste, I mean, to spew every where, I'll try it and report back to you with my findings.

Have you ever tried signing the back of your brand new credit card only to curse out the ball point pen because it won't write. Next time that happens, try the 'ancient Disney secret'. Put a piece of scotch tape over the signing strip, rub it a few times and remove it. I'm not sure if it adds a layer of stickiness to it, so the pen can grab hold or if it removes some kind of oily residue from the manfacturing process, all I know is that it works.

As a way of amusing the hundreds of kids that pass through the resorts, our managers have supplied the bell service guys with the long 'Balloon Animal' balloons. When I was at All Star and had to work luggage, i learned that I should never quit to become a Circus clown. Making balloon animals is not my forte'. Some of the luggage folks got pretty darn good at it though. They were making life size figures of children holding helium filled ballons to keep it upright. Needless to say we were all very impressed.

At Boardwalk Resort, it's helium balloons in the lobby. I have a greater repsect for the balloon sales people that walk the parks. It takes skill to be able to walk from point 'A' to point 'B' with a handfull of helium balloons and NOT have a tangled up mess. I learned how to blow up the double balloons like you see in floral bouquets.
. . .And more importantly I learned how not to do it. When a balloon pops in a double balloon, it will flat make your ears ring. One day I was tieing the weight on a helium balloon for a couple of kids. It didn't touch anything, didn't get near anything, but it exploded. Unfortuneately, down the lobby was a soldier returning from Iraq, like fresh off the plane returning. I was told that the balloon popping about scared the $%%T out of him. . . . Sorry Mr. Army Guy, where ever you are, and Welcome Home !!!!

And my final bit of Practicle Things I Have Learned From Disney is a biggie:
NEVER ASSUME ANYTHING.

If you go on vacation, never assume the hotel, plane, car rental company, etc. will have your information or have the right information. When checking into a hotel, bring your confirmation papers. When getting a rental car, bring your reservation confirmation number. When boarding a plane, bring your confimation number, reservation number and your Photo ID. Every time some one says, "I didn't know I needed my comfirmation information," is usually the time the computer has eaten all traces of thier reservation.

So save yourself a major headache and bring your paperwork when you travel.

TaTa for now.

IN MEMORY OF . . .

2009-04-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

Most of my blogs i try to see the lighter side of Disney life. But as we approach Easter eve and my thoughts tend to drift toward life, death and the 'here after', i want to take a moment and make sure some of my friends who have passed on get remembered. In the past blogs, I have never use a person's real name for security and privacy reasons. But this one time i want to wave that.

Joel, entertainment technician, football player. I worked with Joel on the opening crew for Fantasmic!. He was a big guy with and even bigger heart. One christmas eve, he wanted to bring the tradition of reading the Christmas story to the Fantasmic! cast and asked if my Bible was in my car. That night he had a mini-church service in the green room. To see him you'd think he could crush anything. To talk with him you knew he was a big teddy bear.

He played on an arena football league for several years, but never achieved his dream of making it big. He had a part time job as a bouncer at a bar and it was assumed someone got ticked off that night. After hours Joel was sitting in his car and was shot several times in the chest. At last report, they still had no idea who did it.

Aeyrk was a dancer for Beauty and the Beast (B&B)and Pleasure Island. He was one of those people that every body knew. My fondest memory of Aeyrk was between shows when he was bored. He'd come into wardrobe, sit on the clothes dryer and keep us all amused with stories. One day particular, we got sex tips from a gay guy. . . it was very educational and kind of odd.

One afternoon, while riding his motorcycle, he was involved in a head on collision with a car. His was the first African-American funeral I had ever been to and it was the biggest emotional roller coaster I have ever been on. We laughed. We cried. We laughed some more. Disney management cancelled the morning's shows at B&B and any where else he had worked so people could go to the funeral. They also provided a bus to transport anyone who wanted to attend. For me it was very impressive that an individual was so well loved and respected by managment that they shut down several shows that day in his honor.

One last thing about Aeryk, when a friend of mine and I left the funeral, there was a car alarm going off. We were rather upset that some one would 'just allow thier alarm to keep going off'. Then we realized . . . it was her truck. She didn't even know she had a car alarm and had no idea how to turn it off. After fiddling with some wires and with some help from several of funeral attendees, we were able to turn the thing off. We decided that it had to have been Aeryk saying good bye to everyone in his own special way.

Joe, stage manager, was one of the sweetest, nicest guys you could ever meet. He worked at Epic for a long time and never once let the boy's shannigans get the better of him. Which is saying alot for that show. In fact, one day the boys had been watching too much wrestling on TV and started trying out wrestling moves on any one who walked through the door. Joe came in to announce 'Places' for the next show. One of the guys tried a few moves on him and he played along.

Joe had brain cancer. He was gone for a very long time while he had chemo, surgery and other treatments. I'll never for get when i saw him again for the first time. I said, "It is nice to see you back here again." His said, "It's nice to been seen." That really stuck with me, because that was his way of saying he was just happy to be alive. Sadly, Joe lost his battle with cancer a short time later.

Tom, Character Coordinator, was one of the most dedicated cast members I have ever seen. He lived, slept and breathed the Star Wars event at the studios every year. In fact, when he was sooo sick during his last Star Wars event that he could barely stand, we told him he should go home and take care of him self. He was almost in tears when he said, "If I do, they'll take the event away from me." Tom had terminal cancer and while in his thirties, in the middle of his beloved special event, he passed away. One of my most profound memories of his passing, was the fact that his fellow cast members rallied around him morning, noon and night. They practically moved into the hospital waiting room. They also put on a benefit show to help raise money for his mounting medical bills.

Donnie was one of the few managers who everyone respected. Things weren't good between hourlies and managers in costuming for years (but that is a whole other blog). Most managers, if they asked us to extent to cover a shift, we'd say, "nope, gotta go." If Donnie asked, we usually stayed because we could never tell Donnie no. Why ? He worked side beside with us. He backed us up and he respected his cast. One friday he left for the day with huge plans for his weekend. I was called Sunday and told that he had died from a heart attack. That week, we were all wrecks.

I want to end this blog on a high note and tell you one of Donnie's stories. He was in Bogota, Columbia with a bunch of costumes for a Latin America promotional tour. He realized too late that his driver's license had expired and the rental car company refused to rent him a car. After catching a cab to the his hotel, he decided it was not a good place to walk on the streets. He had no idea when he was supposed to meet his contact person, he was getting hungry and spoke no spanish. He tried to ask a housekeeper if the hotel had room service. She looked horrfied at him and ran away. Not knowing what he had said, the next day he told his contact person about the incident. He was told that instead of asking for room service. . . as in food, what he had asked for was to be serviced in the room . . . as in sex. Poor Donnie.

God Bless and Happy Easter

W T H Part II

2009-03-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

Working with the public from around the world, you see the good, you see the bad, then you see things that you can only classify as "What The Hell. . ."

The number one pissed off guests comment is "THIS IS NOT ACCEPTIBLE." I wish I could just once say. "I am sorry that you were too igorant to read the information that was sent to you, but the world does not revolve around you." But that would be un-Disney-like. You can make a room request, but I can not gaurantee requests. Why? Because they are requests. The more requests you ask for the less likely you'll get them, especially when a specific request doesn't exist. Three connecting rooms, poolside, on the 12th floor of the Wilderness lodge and everything is to be ready by 7:00 in the morning when I arrive on Easter Weekend. (here's your assignment, go to Disney.com and find out why that won't happen. . . ever) Yelling at a cast member or manager and pitching a crying fit in the lobby won't change the fact that a specific room is already occupied.

If you come to Disney from June to August, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Martin Luther King Day, March to end of April due your self a favor and Make Dinning Reservations as before you get here. Although we can usually find something, somewhere, it's usually not in a park or it's at 9:00 at night or 7:30 in the morning. Dining is the second biggest reason for a melt down. "Oh My God, My life is ruined if I can not eat dinner at 6:00 every night in my favorite restaurant." My answer to that, "You lead a sad, sad life if that's all it takes to ruin it."

I can not tell you how many times I have suggested a restaurant and have had a guest ask me," Do they have good food?" Do you really think I'm going to say, "No that place Sucks."

We had a guest come to the front desk at the Lodge in a fit of rage and screamed at the cast member, "I SHIT IN MY BED LAST NIGHT AND IT'S STILL THERE." . . . I have a hard time figuring out which is more disturbing. The fact that a grown woman would 'S!!T' in her bed AND admitted it. Or the fact that a houskeeper could make the bed with out seeing the stuff and change the sheets. Ewww. We're moving on.

On the Concierge floors at the premium resorts we provide breakfast, snacxs, wine, cheese, bottled beer and cordials through out the day. Recently we had some guests who were waiting for the elevator with a stroller covered in jackets. However, when they hit a bump in the floor, a bottle of beer fell out. These people had tried to wipe out the lounge's beer supply and stuffed it in their stroller.

In another case of the classic, give them and inch they'll take a mile, my managers will usually refuse to give a written guarantee to anything. Apparently people have taken the good will deeds of a manager or two in the past and photocopied it to give to thier friends or worse yet sell it on ebay. I'm not sure if it ever cost anyone thier job, but who wants to take that chance.

Disney offers discounts to Florida Residence for tickets. People try to con us by saying that thier Florida ID is in the room or it's in thier car and they get upset when we refuse to sell them tickets at the Resident rate. At this point, I wish I could say A)Unless you plan to support me the rest of my life, when I lose my job, I'm not selling you tickets at a resident rate, B) As a resident of this state and having to deal with all of you tourists, if getting into the park a little cheaper is a perk Disney is willing to put out there, I AM NOT giving that perk away to anyone who does not live here, C)If you can afford to stay in a premium resort, you can afford to pay for tickets to the park.

Not every W T H guest encounter is an angery one. We had a young guy hanging out in the merchandise shop one day and kept asking people if they spoke french. He didn't speak french, he just wandered how many people he could find who spoke the language. I believe he was asked to leave.

I was looking up a guest's record and asked for a first name. The lady's answer "His first name is Doctor." "Mam, that would be a title."

A Sheriff Deputy walked through the lobby and we started talking. He said most of the traffic stops on property are cast members who are late for work. However, they stopped a guest one day who got a $105 speeding ticket. When asked why he was speeding, the guest said, "I have to go pee." I had another guest so excited about being at Disney, even a little souvenier from the Florida Highway Patrol didn't dampen the mood. She admitted that when asked why she was speeding, she said, "We were trying to figure out the words to the song 'The wheels on the bus go round and round' and I wasn't paying attention." She said the Trooper was not amused when she asked him if he knew the words to the song.

While at Coronado Springs, one of my manaagers needed to walk guests to the Yacht and Beach club. (Simply, when we get over booked, we make arrangements at a different resort for them.) These guests refused to go. Coronado is a Moderate price resort. Yatch and Beach is a premium resort. Still, they pitched a fit. Next to them were some cast members checking in (using a discounted cast member rate). They said they'd take the room if the guest's didn't want it. Long story short, cast members didn't just get a room at a high end resort for just over $100, they got a water view suite. My best guess is that it was a $400 or up room. After the 'fit pitching' guests heard this, they said, "well, maybe we will take that room." My manamger said, "Sorry to late, thier names are already on the room." I know what he wanted to say was "You are such a LOSER."

Not all of the W T H momnents belong to the guests. I was in the elevator with a couple construction workers and over heard thier conversation. Apparently they just caught a painter dumping a five gallong bucket of paint in the a planter. We reached our floor, they went one way, I went the other, so I never found out what happened after that.

And on that note i must now go to work and gather more material for next time

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A PARADE CALLED 'ALADDIN'S ROYAL CARAVAN'

2009-03-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

Way back when, the powers that be used to have big, grand unveilings when a new movie came out. And we always knew we'd have a new show to open soon or a new parade to dress. When Beauty and the Beast hit theaters, we openned the Beauty and the Beast show. Which as of March 2009, it's still going strong. Since then, there's been Ninja Turtle shows, Muppet shows, Pocahontas shows and the much loved Hunchback of Notre Dame show. In between the stage shows we had a Dino parade, Mulan Parade, Toy Story parade and . . . either you loved it or you hated it, The Aladdin Royal Caravan parade.

The costume designers got real creative with this one. 'I know, let's put character performers in huge blow up cotumes and make them walk down the street while doing a dance routine'. And POOF . . . Inflatable Costumes came into being. Dressing performers in the inflatables was like building an erector set. There was alot of insert tab A into slot B and hope you don't whack someone in the head while doing it. Once the frame work was assembled we had to attach the batteries, zip the performer inside and watch it blow up. You'd think with fans blowing inside the costume to inflate them they wouldn't be as hot in the 100 degree August summers. Wrong, at the end of the parade route costuming was half dressers, half health coach. We had an arsenal of gatorade, water and wet towels set up at step down (end of parade) everyday.

THe Acrobat costumes were large and heavy two piece contraptions that we had to climb on a four foot high platform in order to put it together. Once together they looked like two or three cartoon clown acrobats on each other's shoulders. A good friend of mine fell off the platform one day. No, I take that back, she fell Under the platform. We were running late and the parade was leaving the park so my friend "S" ran to the Acrobat dressing area, missed the step and ended up underneath the thing. She survived.

THe Jewlery attendants were just kind of wierd and creepy. They were over sized shirtless men with baskets of fake gold and jewlery on their heads. They were simpler to assemble, but still really heavy. If you remember the movie, at one point Genie splits himself in half and the legs run around on their own. We had an inflatable for that too.

Because of the complicated costumes, cotuming had to walk the parade wearing a kaftan (sorry if i spelled it wrong) and a hat along with carrying a radio, so we could let people know when a unit went down and where we were. For me, the kaftan was always too big, the hat always fell off and the radio was always hard to understand what anybody was saying. By "a unit going down", I mean anything could happen with the inflatables. Batteries died or melted down (sometimes literally melting). The metal frame work would sometimes break. A performer would get over heated and have to be quickly removed from the Hefty Bag. . . . I mean costume. You name it. It happened. There were certian points in the parade route were we could exit a performer safely. Sometimes they made it there. . . .and sometimes they didn't.

Beleive it or not, the Aladdin parade orginally had concubines as well. They always cast the real butch guys to do it. The costume was a dress and coconut shells for breasts. Needless to say, they didn't last.

THe next time you go to Magic Kingdom, next to Tiki birds is the Aladdin Magic carpet ride. The two gold camels that are by the ride, used to be floats in our parade. I'm not sure if the still spit, but in our parade they did.

We also had an Elephant float that Aladdin and Jasmine rode on. The only way on and off the float was by fork lift. Aladdin's Prince Ali's costume is a cream almost pale yellow shirt, pants, cape and turban. The turban is supposed to have a big purple fluffy feather. One day, with a thunder storm fast approaching, Aladdin and Jasmine settled on thier elephant float. The fork lift was no where around and mother nature decided pour down the rain. We ran for cover and watched as Aladdin and Jasmine became completely drenched. Aladdin's feather wilted and rivers of purple dye ran all over his costume. Needless to say, we soon had a white feather for the possible rain days and the purple one for sunny days.

Speaking of rain days. One day the parade didn't go out because of bad weather. We were bored. The performers were bored. Being the mischievious children that they are,
a couple of performers talked us into letting them 'ride in the dryer'. By the second time around, they were ready to get out.

SSHhhh just don't tell the managers that someone went for a spin in the industrial dryer.

When cast members come out to play.

2009-02-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

As I've said before, most life time cast members don't spend a lot of time in the parks. We clock out and go home. I had one guest ask if they provided a place for us to sleep and live on property. Yeah, they do. It's called College Program. Several thousand college kids and international college kids are brought in to work at Disney for predetermined amounts of time. THey are the ones that "eat, sleep and live Disney". As for the rest of 50,000 cast members, we high tail it to the real world. As for me, I'm about 30 to 45 minutes north.

THe one event that probably brings the most people back to the property on thier days of is the Epcot Wine and Food Feastival, or as we refere to it, 'drinking your way around the world'. Some people don't wait for the festival in order to do this. For them any excuse to drink around Epcot is enough. During the run of Hunckback of Notre Dame, we had a show emergency one day. Quasimodo performers had called in sick and the show was unable to go on with out the star. The stage manager decided to call some one in to work who had the day off. THe problem was, this person had been enjoying the wine and food feastival, with much emphasis on the wine. He told managers he had been drinking, after all it was his day off. Manager said for him to come into work anyway. So we, in costuming, had to baby sit a tipsy quasi all day.

The Studios has a scavanger hunt / trivia game every year that they call Goofy's Mystery Tour. I did this a long, long, long time ago. My friend and team mate managed to get bitten by something that night and her face swelled up like a ballon by the next morning. . . it was fun. Any way, there are teams of four, bungeed corded together, running through the park in search of clues to solve a master riddle. In the process you can get bonus points for answering trivia questions along the way. THe year we did it. . .we lost, badly. I'll always remember a fellow losing team that night. THey too had realized they had a snowball's chance in h#$$ of winning, so they ended up skipping (yes skipping) through the park chanting "It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter." It wasn't until they scored the trivia test that we realized just how bad we had done.

Entertianment folks are always willing to "put on a show" in order to raise money for a fellow cast member in need. During the run of the show Doug, one of the cast was in a really bad car wreck days before his health insurance kicked in. Entertainment folks from across property gathered thier resources and put on a song and dance show (after hours) to help raise money for thier fellow actor to pay off some of his medical bills. THe character department did this again when one of thier coordinators came down with terminal cancer. Unfortuneately he was too sick to attend. He passed away a short time later.

During my time in Studio Costuming, it wsa like pulling teeth to get anyone to participate in anything. Even potlucks had sketchy turnouts. My current resort is the polar opposite. There's a baseball team, a marathon team, bowlers for Jounior Acheivement and pot lucks at a drop of a hat. In fact, one of the concierge folks was on the resort's soft ball team and decided to stop a line drive with her bare hand the other day. . . . She had a glove on the other hand, but for reasons unknown to her, she didn't use it. Have you ever tried to type with a broken finger ? Let's just say, it's not fun. At the Lodge you always know when there was a game the night before. Everybody's moving a bit slower in the morning. THe aspirin box is a little emptier. And people in their thirties and fourties are groaning like thier in their nineties.

As a concierge i really should spend more time in the parks, nahhhh, why start now. Although it is fun to seek revenge on stupid people. Case in point: when an attraction's host says, "Please move down to fill in each and every available seat," DO IT. I can not tell you how many times see people stopping in the middle of the row and totally ignore the cast member. Consider this a fair warning - If I see you and your party stop in the middle of the row and refuse to move to the end, I will step on your feet as I try to squeeze by you. It's all about courtesy folks.

I keep saying that "some day, I'm going to check out this restaurant or that show," but after a decade and a half of working for the company. . . why rush things. :)

WHEN OBJECTS OBJECTS. . . OBJECTIONALY.

2009-02-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

Not all of the stories from Disney involve people and animals. Some times inanimate objects are the center of attention.

Epic (Indiana Jones Stunt Show) has a very large bolder that chases Indy at the end of scene one. This "bolder" isn't a real rock, BUT it's no feather either. Think of a 500 pound basketball. The ball launcher mechanism gets the ball spinning to a predetermined speed then launches it onto the track. Indy sees it coming and runs for his life with the bolder just grazing his shoulder the whole way. Some times it doesn't quiet work the way it's supposed to. On at least one occasion the ball was launched too fast and it hit Indy, dislocating his shoulder. On another occassion the ball rolled up Indy's back and out of the track. Which meant a 500 pund ball was bouncing towards the audience. . . Seeing that coming towards you will make you wet your pants, I'm sure. Fortuneatly, some trap doors from earlier in the scene were still open on stage and the ball hit one of them and bounced away from the audience. Needless to say, the show was over for the day. I heard it took a fork lift to put it back in the track.

THey had bought a new Indy bolder one year and stored in the parade float building while it was being painted. We watched the painter/artist spend hours upon hours making it look just right. Eventually the management saw it and liked it, so the techs
moved it out side and set it next their props tent. In case you haven't seen the show, this bolder is about as tall as a one story building (if not taller). It was a hot summer day. Less than an hour later one of our Epic cast walked in the trailer and said "The ball just blew up." Of course we had to all go check it out. Sure enough, it looked like one giant flat tire. Apparently te painter had painted over the pressure relief valve and as the sun heated it up, it popped like a balloon.

Epic'c green room is the place were all furniture goes to die. They bought new heavy wooden couches one year thinking it could stand up the the extreme abuse of the trailer. WRONG. The railings on the armrests became good things to hold on to while stretching out for the show. . . until they all broke off. THen the railing pieces turned in to mini baseball bats, until they were all taken away. At one point, a leg fell off the couch. I'm not sure how, neither does any one else. Instead of calling maintenance to fix it, they shoved a water cooler bottle under the corner of the couch.

Not to think Epic had all the fun, In the late nineties, the costuming building had an event that will alway be known as "The Great Fall". Wardrobe building was wall to wall clothes and four tiers high. Bottom two tiers held clothes for daily issue. Any one who works the attractions, merchandise, custodial, you name it we had it. Third tier was back up storage. The four tier costumes hadn't seen the light of day in nearly a decade and if it weren't for the racking collapse, it would probably still be there. (Even though another department now has that building.) Anyway, I still had a few hours until i had to leave for work, when my friend calls me at home. "You gotta come into work, main issue just fell down," she said. Needless to say, i dropped everything and when to work early. To say it looked like a bomb went off would be an understatement. All four tiers of galvanized pipe racking tilted to the left and just kept on going. One of the rails even impaled the clock on the wall. I believe four or five people were trapped underneath mounds of clothes and pipes. No one was seriously injured, although one or two did go to the hospital just to be safe and one person was so traumatised she never came back to work. THey had trucks from all over property and every department gathering costuming and sorting out the mess. And of course it started to rain, so any sense of organization turned into "Get in it inside something." It took months for management to track down all of our stuff after that.

One sure fire way to wreck your day at Disney is to wreck a car at Disney. To REALLY wreck your day, try backing a truck up into the celebrity motorcade's parade convertible. Back many, many moons ago, during Aladdin parade (I believe), my coordinator had the lift gate down on the parade transport truck and was trying to reposition it for the parade. . . Let's just say, she missed her intended mark and creamed the side of the candy apple red Saab Convertible. She didn't lose her job over it, but she didn't stick around long after that either.

On a lighter note, I have a question. How hard is it to load a stapler? Apparently it's the equvalent to brain surgery. Wilderness Lodge back office and bank room is the place for misfit staplers. They never work and on more than one occassion, I have found staples put in upside down. . . HOW CAN YOU LOAD A STAPLER WRONG????

There I said it. Let's move on. I'm going to end with my friend the Segway. I had always wanted to learn how to use this thing. At All Star resort, I had my chance. In the short time that I used before I transfered I had only two 'Oh Shit' moments. Moment number one was when I learned to never, ever turn going full speed ahead. I didn't flip it, but it came pretty darn close. THe second moment was when I came close to hitting a guest as she walked out of her room. She scared me, I scared her. THe feelings were mutual. One of my fellow front desk runners learned the hard way how not to enter a building with wet tires. At one of the All Stars, the floors are a high gloss finish. Rubber tires, shinny floor and a dab of rain led to him not only falling off the Segway, he said it lost traction and threw him to the ground.

YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING WRONG, DO YOU? . . .THE TRICK IS JUST DON'T GET CAUGHT.

2009-01-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

While working at a place like Disney, it's really kind of hard to get fired. Not showing up for work with out 'Calling in' twice will do it. Too many 'call ins' will also do it. There's a matrix of how many call ins are allowed in a certain alotted time. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people play the game and get burned in the end. For the first nearly five years of my Disney career i had perfect attendance. At that time they offered a $500 bonus for perfect attendence. When I heard that they stopped the bonus. . . I Called in sick the next week.

Damaging property doesn't neccesarily get you fired. Story has it that one of my managers in costuming flipped a pargo (golf cart) yeaars ago. I never got the complete story on how she managed to do that. She probably got a reprimend or two, then it was forgotten about. I had another manager put the pargo in the 'area formally known as the swamp'. She to still works for the company. By the way, 'the swamp' has since been replaced by Lights, Motors, Action Stunt show.

When Disney MGM Studios had a working animation studio, they built them thier own parking garage. They have since left and the building is used for administration. The parking garage gets a work out during the holidays when hourly cast members have to park inside the park, so more guests can park in the lots. At various points in time, fellow cast members would give each other pargo rides to thier cars at the end of thier shift. After arriving at my car, I dared my friend with the pargo to just let it roll down the parking garage to see how fast it would go. He did. I followed with my car and clocked him at 30 to 35 mph. . .I didn't think those little things could take corners that fast.

While at Epic, one of the costuming folks had a huge delemna. Her son had to go to a doctor's appointment, but she knew he wouldn't go unless she took him. However, she couldn't get out of work. We had all worked together for a very long time and tended to watch each other's backs, so we told her to go and we'd cover for her. So she left work (still on the clock) for four hours. The show went on with out a hitch. Our manager came in we told him that she was at Creative costuming picking up repairs. She came in while our manager was there and panicked. I took her to the back, told her everything was fine and just act like you got back from a supply run. She did. He never suspected a thing.

Similarly, one of the dressers did something that started simple enough, but soon turned into a monster: Go get chinese take out for everyone. Two problems, the restuarant was around fifteen miles (45 minutes away) and the number of people ordering kept growing each week. The epic cast,which is a huge cast, started adding thier orders. Soon Hunchback of Notre Dame cast and crew would stop by the stage on thier way to work and drop off their orders too. THe driver always got a free lunch out of it, but the fact that we were off property for nearly two hours could make for a short Disney career.

Don't get me wrong, you are allowed to leave property for your 60 minute lunch break. However, it usually takes much longer to get to your car, drive to a restraunt, order, eat and get back. When you work in shows and miss the 15 minute 'places for show' call, you're toast. Just ask the performer at Beauty and the Beast who was at Taco Bell and completely missed the show. For character integrity sake I won't say which role he played, but lets just say, he was a huge part of the show. They replaced him on the spot. The only thing that saved his job was, while they were in the process of terminating (firing) him, the replacement performer fell off the stage during the next show and was pretty badly injured. So Taco Bell Boy went back to the show, finshed the day AND saved his job.

It's not uncommon to see people sleeping under the clothes line duirng show breaks. It's out of the way, noises are muffled and managers can't find you. . . usually. One day back in the mid-nineties, we had a long time cast member come to work at Epic and she was sick as a dog. She asked to go home, but the manager wouldn't let her. (Why is the subject for a whole other blog). It was at a time when Epic was in the boondocks (the park had since grown and EPic is in smack dab in the middle of everything) and it could be literally weeks or months at a time with out seeing a manager. So we told our co-worker the go to the back of the trailer and sleep it off. In case i failed to mention it, sleeping on the job is another immediately fireable offense too. But in this case the wardrobe person slept most of the entire shift and we coverd for her.

I'm sure making pipe bombs would be considered and immediate fireable offense as well, but on a bored rainy day someone desided to see what would happen if they put dry ice in a hard plastic Evian bottle. Let's just say, it crackled, and clouded up, and crackled more. The master builder got a bit nervous over what he had done and desided to kick it inside the building. Thank God it didn't make it that far, since inside the break room was wall to wall mirrors and I know the precussion that followed would have shattered them all. Any way, in the process if kicking the bottle up the ramp, it got wedged under the dry ice bin. It exploded with such force that I know half the park heard it and most people I talked with thougth it was pyro from Epic. Hard pieces of plastic shrapnel went everywhere and not a single part of the bottle was reconizable. Needless to say a lesson was learned and I believe we all probably needed new underwear afterwards too.

YOU'RE KIDDING . . . Right ?

2009-01-16T18:07:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been scribbling down notes from various people's stories, waiting until I had enough to blog about. So with out further adieu. . .

Did you know the Buzz Lightyear is on the International Space Station ? In 2008, the astronauts brought a Buzz doll with them to leave on the station. Apparently there is an on going kid's educational program and Buzz is the spokes-doll (is that a real word?)

I heard today, on the news that Barack Obama's girls was going to be wearing Disney made, princess inspired dresses for the inaugauration. I can see it now, we'll have a Princess line of dresses AND a Presidential line of dresses in our stores.

If it looks like pot and smells like pot, it must be . . . pot, right? Well, according to Disney Horticulture folks, maybe not. I was working crowd control for the Pirates and Princess party in 2008. Stationed in front of the train station, I began smelling something rather strange. Several other people I was working with thought the same thing I did. The plants around the flag pole looked like marijauna, smelled like marijuana, BUT apparently, was not marijuana. Believe what you will, I think the Horticulture people were messing with us.

Guests are what keep this blog going. THe things we see and we hear never cease to amaze me. Disney Vacation Club. (a.k.a. Disney time share) has a representative in the resort lobbies. One of the DVC reps mentioned that they have turned into the non-official information booth. I asked him what his most absurd question was. His answer: "If my dad buys a vacation club, does he get a monkey ?"

A tree had fallen across the boradwalk leading to the ferryboats to Magic Kingdom at Wilderness Lodge. A front desk cashier was working part of her shift at the bus stop helping people find thier way on the right bus. She had a very irrate guest confront her and demand that SHE move the tree, right then. After being yelled by the guest, the cashier left her post, walked in side and informed managers that she was never going back to the busses again. Thanks the the 2008 economy issues, that post was perminately eliminated.

A story about Port Orleans comes from many years ago. The person who told me this believed it happened back when it was still two separate resorts (Port Orleans and Dixie Landings). Apparently they have a place called Alligator Bayou and a brainiac was feeding an alligator. Let me remind you, a) this is Florida, gators are everywhere, b) it is a criminal offense to feed alligators, c) Gators are not the sharpest tool in the shed. When this guest ran out of food, the gator was still hungry and followed him to the building. The building had automatic doors. When the gator reached the door, it opened and yes, it went inside the building. Needless to say, they removed the automatic door opener soon there after.

At All Star Resort, I had a lady who had just got off of a very long and trying plane flight. They took her cigarette lighter from her a the airport. The fight was delayed. She was aggitated one moment and crying the next. When she asked if I had a lighter or cigarettes( of which I had neither), i knew her problems had little to do with us and more to do with nicotine withdrawls. It made me really glad that I did not smoke.

In closing I want to leave you with a recent story to start out 2009 right. One of the concierge Cast members was helping a guest, when someone came to the counter and said, "there's a naked child running up and down the hall way." THe cast member looked at her guest, who told her to "go do what you need to do, we'll wait." By the time Disney staff got there, another guest had corraled the child, wrapped him in a towel and had him sitting down. The managers used the master key to open the door to the child's room. There was nobody in the room. One of the managers noticed shoes by the balcony door. He pulled back the curtian and quickly closed it again, but he had seen WAY MORE than he had ever cared to. Let's just say, junior was about to be a big brother. Junior's mom and dad were, of course, a bit miffed at being caught with thier pants down. . . literally and figuretively, but the manager explained to him that his son was running up and down the hallway buck naked. Apparently, they laid Junior down for a nap and decided to expand thier family out on the balcony. When Junior woke up, mom and dad were gone, so he walked out of the room and the door locked behind him.

Tuned in next time for more tales of the absurd.

THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEARS, OH MY

2008-12-30T17:25:00.000-08:00

Living in a town with three major theme park companies, you start to see where each develop their special niche. Universal Studios it's Halloween. With all of the classic monster movies to pull from, they have became the masters of the things that go bump in the night. During Holloween Horror Nights they scare the snot out of normaly sane individuals with deranged clowns, Bloody Mary, demented nursery ryhme characters and thier own creation: The Chain Saw Drill Team.(zombies chasing people around the park with real chain saws. . .with the blades removed of course.) I have heard of many occasions where half drunk guests try to challenge the cast for thier chain saws. Word to the wise, unlike at Disney and SeaWorld, scare characters at Universal can and do fight back.

Sea World always seems to have a 'We are the World' feel. For a while anyway, Fourth of July was thier niche. They had special patriotic Shamu shows and firworks. At the time I'm writing this, they had just been bought out by a foreign company, so time will tell if that will still be thier niche. A side note, they have a Shamu show called 'Believe'. My friend saw it the other day and said it was really cool. . . until the whales stopped believing. Apparently something happened and they started aggressively circling the tank. Needless to say, the trainers bailed out of the water until they get them calmed down.

Disney's niche in the holidays is Christmas. Nobody can even come close to all of the details that Disney puts in thier displays. There's a Forty Five foot Christmas Tree in the lobby of Wilderness Lodge. Although the uneven placement of the Teepee ornaments has bugged me all Season. Yacht and Beach club had a chocolate carousel. Boardwalk had a gingerbread gazebo with a moving train set running around it. Why a Gazebo? I'd like to know. If anyone has an answer, emial me. THe Grand Florida has a huge ginger bread house in their lobby. Our guests in the campgrounds who set up for the whole season have taken it upon thier self to decorate thier motor homes with lights and christmas displays to such a degree that is has drawn the attention of a travel channel television show.

The Millions of lights in the Osbourne Family lights display at the Studios lost alot of it's charm once residential street was plowed over for the new stunt show. The Spectical of Lights, or as we call it, S O L . . .(Yeah we have a few other choice discriptions as well), anyway, it all started in Little Rock Arkansaw. Mr Osbourne managed to tick off some neighbors with his massive Christmas light display every year. Law enforcement was called in to manage the crowds and government officals fined him for disrupting the peace and creating traffic jams. Story has it that a particular neighbor got mad, so he bought their house and threw lights on it as well. As this battle was spinning out of control, in steps Disney. They offered to pay off his fines and in return Disney would have the rights to the displays. And thus a Disney legend is born. A little side note, I was told that in 2008, as the metal globe that sits above the display was being installed, it was accidently dropped from the crane and it rolled several hundred yards into the park before stopping. It survived. Dented, but survived. One of my favorite memories of SOL, was back when they used to hand out 3D glasses. With them on, you'd see angels every where. One day, I came across a five or six years old child, standing inches away from a tall lit up candy cane. She'd put the glasses look at the lights. She'd take them off and look at the lights. Put them on, take them off. She must have done this five or six timed in a row. It was like she was trying to figure out where the angels came from.

Epcot always has the warm fuzzy 'all is well with the world' shows. Besides Illuminations, during chriatmas, they have a retelling of the Christmas story by guest celebrity narrators. It's always standing room only, which is why i haven't seen it yet. When you work for the mouse, you tend to not wait around when the lines are long.

Magic Kingdom, being the grand daddy of them all has a Christmas parade, an electric light parade, fireworks and characters out the ying yang. One year back in the nineties, it was a rainy, nasty mess here in Orlando on Christmas day. But the Disney Christmas parade that was televised showed bright sunny skys. So we had guests from Tampa decide to take a drive over to Orlando and get into the sunny side of the state. . . I mean after all, it was sunny on TV. Ooops, Faux Pas. Most, if not all of the Parade is filled in advance. This year Millie Cyrus was supposed to host it. I didn't have the heart to tell Millie's fans that her parts were aleady taped.

New Years has it's usual fireworks and confetti. On the eve of the new millenium, however, Disney had planned for everything from a mild hiccup in the computer systems to an all out Armaggeddon. They had high powered construction lights at every intersection in case the Y2K struck down our power grid. THey had lengthy plans in case of senario A, B and X. THEN. . .nothing happened. Universal Studios, in contrast, gave us one sheet of paper with some meager instructions in case of power outages and/ or Y2K mayhem. Again, nothing happened.

Poor Thanksgiving tends to get over looked alot. Management always gets a turkey and/ or ham for us and we potluck the rest. One year, Epic had several turkeys delievered to the stage on a tall, metal catering cart. The cart was pushed outside to give us room in the trailer. And there it sat . . . and sat . . . and sat. It had to have been nearly a month that it was forgotten outside of the Epic trailer. When one day, some one decided to send it back to catering. It was then that we realized we still had aleast two roast turkey's in there. Needless to say they were a bit fuzzy.
Martin Luther King day, I never really thought much about him, UNTIL his day turned into a paid holiday.

November is Native American Month and at the Wilderness Lodge, we have a tribal leader bless the lodge. Maybe that's why we're staying busy in the slow periods. In our lobby we have two totem poles. Since it is considered to be bad luck to have them face each other, ours are off set just a bit, but I was told that the totems almost facing each other is another reason we get it blessed every year, in order to keep all of the bad spirits, karma, ect away.

Another November memory was the year Disney decided to float the Macy's Thanksgiving day ballons over New York street. I was told that there had to technicians on the building roofs 24/7 to keep the helium ballond from tearing up or getting tangled up since they would sink in the cool night air and could possibly over inflate in the heated up day time air. We still managed to kill the a few ballons. I can'r remember if we did that one or two years, but when the Osbourne lights moved in the Macy's ballons moved up the road to Universal.

THanks for readiing. Keep coming back each month for more inside the insider's view of Disney

OH THE LIFE OF SHORT LIVED SHOWS.

2008-12-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Just like tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, you'd miss some shows and events at Disney over the years if you blinked. Did you know that Norman the Cow from the City Slickers movie used to live at the Disney MGM Studios backlot ? . . . Yeah, i never saw him either, but they say he did.

Norman's field was turned into the temporary stage for Beauty and the Beast. . . then the new home of Pocahantas. . . then the new and jazzed up home of Hunchback of Notre Dame . . . then the new, new home for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . . . then new temporary home for Star Wars Weekends (deep breath) And Now after much gutting, rebuilding and remodeling that space is (drum roll) a convention space . . . and I believe a venue for Night of Joy, Super Soap, Ect, ect, ect.

But first let us go back in time to some other one hit wonders like the Dinosaur Parade. Do you remember the television show with Earl the Dinosaur and his family ? The most famous member of the cast was the baby whose only line was "Not the mama." Well, we had a Dino parade with about three or four floats and the infamous Dino - Whores, i mean Dino - girls. THey got that nick name because of the itty, bitty costumes and a dance routine that was straight out of a night club, but then most of our parades seem to have a unit or two of scantily clad girls. I guess you have to do something to keep the 'little old men' coming back.

Although it was a relatively short run, we did manage to be around long enough to have the only float wreck I can remember at the Studios. Sure, we had plenty of floats clips a few trees and trim a few branches, but during the Dino parade, we had a float actually hit the fence. Fortuneatly no one was hurt, although a few people did go to first aide.

Disney had a way of creating shows and events that are not quiet in step with the modern trend. When they opened the Goosebumps Horrorland show / attraction, the series of children's books was already on the decline. Although i never worked at the show, I was told the grand finale all hinged on young childern volunteers doing a certian bit part in order to release everyone from a curse. It all sounds well and good. You pick the most enthusiastic kids in the audience, take them back stage, dress them up and give them a couple lines to say. Easy. Right? Wrong. When taken out of thier element, some kids melt like the wicked witch under water. SO. You have a show that "can't end until the kids say the secret words", but often times you'd have kids that wouldn't say the secret words. Gotta love kids.

The fact that the audience was outside, standing on hot asphalt with out any sun shade pretty much gauranteed that it was only going to be a short run show. They also had a spooky maze for kids to go through. THe cast loved it because they could scare the bejesus out of little kids and get paid for it. Where the maze area is now an enterance to a gift shop.

Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, or Epic, had an ultimate top to bottom over haul back in the late nineties or so. While they were on hiatus, the cast did an odd ball kind of show out on New York street. Good guys and back guys fight it out, some one falls to thier death (not really) and heros save the day kind of show. Right next to the New York Street Show was the Pocahontas show. (Another short lived wonder.) During the Pocahontas show there is a touching scene between John Smith and Pocahontas where John offers her his hand in friendship and trust. Nice sweet, touching moment. Expect during Epic's street show.

On several occasions it went something like this. John Smith offers to shake hands with Pocahontas, "This is how we say Hello." This is abruptly followed by rapid gun fire from the Indy show out on the street. Hey, for once Disney got history right. . . get it ? "this is how we say hello", white settlers killing off the natives. . .anyway. After a few shows like this. The cast of Pocahontas wanted go on the War Path and raid the Indy street show. Stage managers called a truce, adjusted show times and peace was restored. To bad it wasn't that easy back in colonial times.

Ace Ventura was another one hit wonder at the studios. Since it was also considered a stunt show, there was some over lapping of cast. One particular day, a cast member at Ace was also a cast member at Epic in the same day, practically at the same time. In order to make it from one show to the other, a costuming dresser was assigned to play pargo chauffuer all day as the stunt guy was laterally changing costumes in the pargo on the way from one end of the park to the other.

Always remember. . . "The Show Must Go On."

MEANDERING THOUGHTS FROM A WONDERING MIND, or this is a blog after only four hours of sleep.

2008-11-26T14:59:00.000-08:00

People always tell me, "It must be so exciting to work for Walt Dianey World." If you like getting yelled at by cranky nicotine deprived guests, playing map quest for the cachillion times and slathering on hand sanitizer everytime a precious child sneezes all over the counter, it's Super kalli fragil- - -, super cali fragelis - - -, you get the idea. When I was new (and nieve,) I vowed that i'd never get bored with going to the parks. Now, when a friend wants to play in the park, I let them in with my pass and ask when they want to meet for dinner that night. It was a good ten to twelve years that I never stepped foot in the magic kingdom. I had come and gone from costuming in the tunnels regularly for work purposes, but avoided the park like the pleague.

In fact most life time cast members clock out and leave the property like bats out of hell. This adds an extra dose of fun to driving at Disney World. First you have your basic Tourist. Lost or nearly lost, they stay in the middle lane because driving in the slow lane would be admitting that they were lost. Then you have the foreigners. Any one that drives on the left side of the road, gets a crash course in driving on the right when they turn into on coming traffic with out realizing it. A couple of near death experinces usally resolves the right/left driving rather quickly. Cast members, I hate to admit, tend to tail gate, hit the speed bumps a fast as thier car will allow ( with out leaving various parts behind in the road) and swerve in and out of traffic like they're playing a game of Frogger. Throw in a few smoke belching, gas guzzling busses that seem to crawl slower that a snail in summer, and you have a driving situation that is a thrill a minute. Word to the wise, Use The Mgical Express from the airport. It's a free bus service to and from the resorts.

Parking at the studios was always fun around the holidays, cheer leader competions, major show rehabs and any other time management wanted to mess with our minds. :)In the beginning, our parking was where the Tower of Terror and Rock'n'Roller coaster is now. The old security check point and the costuming building are still there, but catering has taken over the building. Except for a wee, itty bitty corner in the old men's bathroom. Yes I said Men's bathroom. That was turned into a "puppet hospital." The entertainment techs laid claim to the space years ago. That's were the broken Voyage of the Little Mermaid. Playhouse Disney and several other puppets go to reglued, re-sewed and re-habed. When the new rides were built, our parking was moved to the guest parking lot, except during holidays, when we park inside the park in any space big enough to fit a car.

During cheerleader competion, they put up a huge tent in our parking lot and we have to park way, way, way in the back. The common joke was, "Yeah, parking was so bad, I ended up in Germany." "You mean at Epcot." "No the country." Certain Cast working at the studios would see just how fast we could go when leaving the parking lot. The furthest back guest parking was rarely used, so it turned into a massive free for all short cut. . . until the powers that be put in speed bumps, and barracks, and a few well placed county police.

South of the Magic Kingdom parking lot is a race track. Disney tried to start up their own auto race, but it fizzled after a few runs. This track it now used for a Petty driving experience and more recently an Indy driving experience. The edge of the track it right next to the main road leaving the Magic Kindgom. On many occasions I have been caught off guard as a race car on the track speeds past the line of traffic on the road and scares the $h!t out of me.

When you work for the vacation capital of world, where do you go on vacation ? For me, it's AS FAR AS WAY FROM ORLANDO AS YOU CAN GET. I have traveled around the world and have not been anywhere that I didn't run into the mouse some where. At the foot steps of the Parthenon in Athens,Greece, a road side vendor was selling plastic Mickey junk. . . I mean stuff. The group I was touring with was hiking through a small, mostly abandoned town on our way to a ancient historical sight. The only human being I saw in this entire town was a young 7 or 8 year old little girl wearing a Minnie Mouse dress, Minnie tights, Minnie hair band and Minnie shoes. I did a volunteer vacation to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana, one year. I thought i was safe from seeing the mouse there, since Disney make alot of Native Americans mad at the company's potrayal of Pocahontas. WRONG. I was there no more than thirty minutes when we walked into a school class room and there, larger than life, on the wall were two cut outs of Mickey and Minnie in Native American style buckskin.

My quest continues.

HOLIDAYS AT THE MOUSE HOUSE

2008-11-13T15:54:00.000-08:00

I often said, "I now know what kind of job the Grinch had that made him hate Christmas." Don't get me wrong. I love Christmas, but holidays in costuming was like a chaotic fire drill. We had row after row of toy soldier costumes (most of which had to be repainted every year), a thousand and one santa-ish costumes(all of which had to be dry cleaned and altered before, during and after the holidays), several inflatable snowmen and women(who always seemed to be missing parts from one year to the next) and a plethera of scarves, hats, mittens (a large chunk of which never found their way back into storage come January.)

For a while we had a Christmas Beauty and the Beast "Holiday Enhancement" show. Belle's dress was a beautifull bugundy and gold ball gown. Heavy as a ten ton truck, but beautiful. Along with Belle and Beast, the holiday show also had several kids from the park dressed as big round Christmas ornaments. Cute idea. Cute kids. A royal pain to deal with. We'd put the large balls of foam on the pargo at night to take them back to the building and one bump in the road, they'd all tumble out like dominoes. On a few times a custodial person would find a wayward ornament and bring it back for us.

You can always tell the state of mind of an area by how they treat the holidays. Fansatmic! was not having a good year back in the early 2000's and it showed. For our Halloween pumpkin carving contest, thier's was uncarved with a cut out of Mickey's ears, hands and feet sticking out from underneath it, as if he had been squashed. On the side of the pumpkin was the words, "Some imagination, Huh?" (those familiar with the show will understand where that came from). It's pretty safe to say that when your cast symbolicly squishes the corporate icon. . . They Are Not Happy.

We used to have Christmas Pargo Parades. A cast only thing, each department dressed up thier pargo in holiday themed decorations and they would be judged by the Studio's Executives. First year was a year for venting. Coordinators had lost thier status(demoted)a few months earlier. There were cut backs, shortened work weeks to save money and we saw a ton of money being spent on a new ride (Tower of Terror) that was having a lot of problems. Since all's fair in Love and Pargo Parades, the cast let management know just how unhappy they were when the evening's entertainment included thier version of the Seven Days of Christmas.
"On the second day of Christmas our managerment gave to us. . . a new exciting thrill ride." A chunk of dry wall was dropped from the catwalks of the stage signifing one of the many problems Tower had in the testing stages. (all was fixed and it's been running flawlessly ever since.) "On the fifth day of Christmas our management gave to us. . . Five disgruntal leads." -Insert explative of choice here-. . . you get the idea.

It wasn't all bad though. One of my all time favorite pargo's was the year a department got permission to use one of the Fort's draft horses and hitched it up to the pargo. On top was a crate of chickens and other hillbilly stuff. It was titled "A Country Christmas". Costuming's pargos were . . . let's just say, we never won. After a few years, the parade turned less Christmassy and more odd. THe year the character department provided the "floor show" entertainment that looked like it was straight out of a sleazy bar was the last year we had the pargo parade.

Another holiday tradtion that's still going strong is the 70% of cast sales, or as I call them Grab and Growl Sales. They open the doors and it's like a stampede. People drag around boxes overflowing with mickey shirts and Nemos dolls for pennies on the dollar. I saw one lady almost get jumped by another when the first lady mistakenly started looking through the other's box of stuff. "THAT"S MINE!" she said. A bunch of us slowly backed away, but an eye on the rabid shopper. Most of it is surplus from the merchdise shops although one year i managed to ge a nice four piece luggage set for $100 bucks.

On the upside, Disney at Christmas is awesome. When I worked at the Boardwalk the lobby smelled like gingerbread for days after they built the train gazebo. I've heard there is a chocolate carousel at one of the resorts. I think I'll have to find it this year.

EPIC - More Shananigans

2008-10-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular. . . or as we call it EPIC, has a reputation for being a wild and unruly place. Just because it was the place where second hand furniture would go to die and there was always clothes hangers flying through the air didn't mean they don't follow the rules. They just tend to bend them every chance they get. Around 2003 or 2004, two tumblers we'll call 'P' and 'S', were working at Fantasmic! one night and decided to come back to the Epic trailer between shows. During the Epic show, they crawled into an upper window of the scene two set and pretended to be eating dinner. The crew was dieing laughing. To make it worse, Tumbler 'P' knelt down and pretended to propose to the other tumbler. After the fact, the Stage Manger said she had never laughed so hard in her life, then she threatened them with thier life if they ever did that again.

A few of the cast were moving the tumbling mats one day and they found a HUGE black snake. Of course they had to catch it. It was like watching a bunch of boys in a school yard as they brought it in the breakroom trailer. One of the girls screamed and ran. The boys followed her the dressing room with the snake. I'm not sure, but I think she promised to do permanent bodily harm to them if they didn't get the "%$&" snake out of the green room. Believe me, this particular Marion Stunt double would have kicked the tumbler's @$$ too.

At various times through out the years we have had several husband / wife cast members. I often wondered how many times personal marital desputes were settled on stage. The girls could beat up her husbands and say "Ooops, huney, sorry, didn't mean to hit you that hard." When the first Marion got pregnant, it seemed so strange to have 'maternity clothes' in a predominately male cast show. Then the next married couple got pregenant, and the maternity clothes moved on down the clothes line. After a few years of revolving pregancies, I decided there must have been 'something in the water' and stayed away from the water cooler. The boys in the cast quickly learned to stay away from any 'milk' in small bottles that was in the refridgerator too.

The first lunch table in the room was the designated 'Public Access" zone. If you accidently left your lunch there, it was eaten by some one. One year on July 4th, I wanted to bring something colorful in for every one, so i mixed Skittles and M&M's since they looked similar. Taste however. . .not so much. The boy's would grab a handfull, thinking it was all chocolate. SURPRISE! (Note to self: lemon and chocolate didn't really go well together.) One of the guys brought a bunch of crawfish back from his family's place in Louisana one year and made crawfish etufee (i know i spelled it wrong), the green room was turned into a feeding frenzi. A large crock pot filled to the ring was empty om mear minutes. During convention season, they do a Cairo themed dinner show at the stage. Afterwards, the catering people would let us have the left overs instead of throwing it out. We'd have a full rack of lamb and couscous for days.

The great thing about being involved with a stage show, is when you need help, your friends are there by your side. One of the tumbler's blew his knee out doing a mini- tramp stunt and had to have surgery to re-attach everything. He said he got up one morning when he heard a mower running in his front yard. With out asking and with out being asked, one of his fellow cast members was outside mowing his yard.

In the same token, when some thing good happened, everyone joined in the fun. One of the German giants (tall guys that beat up Indy), was in the movie Speed Two. The Epic cast rented a limo for him so he could be chauffered to the theater. We filled up at least three rows in the theater. The cast member that was in the film roamed up and down the isle taking to everyone. THe rest of the movie goers wandered what was going on. When our friend's scene came up, we all stood and cheered. After the film, our friend had a couple dozen new fans.

It doesn't take long to learn to not dare these guys to do anything, cause they'll take your dare. One of the Indy's came into wardrobe, one day, wearing only a towel. We told him we were washing towels and needed that one too. He dropped that one and walked off bare behinded. My first thought was, " Hey that worked, let's try that again." Actually, it was more like. "Oh YEAH, I like my job." Then it was, "Hey that worked, let's try that again."

Speaking of towels. I was bored one day and decided to throw a few pair of red tumbler pants in with the white towels. Sure enough. they came out the prettiest pink. What's funny is that the macho stunt guys always used those towels first.

The boys love to mess with people's minds. They'd walk through the back of the Epic theater and do a prac-fall. This usally meant a cup of water would fly into the air one way and papers would fly off in the other as they'd hit the ground. Every time they'd fall, I'd see a half dozen guest's come close to wetting themselves. If several of us were going to the commissary, at least one would always walk into the door and smack it so hard that the entire room would hear it.

One of my favorite memories was when I was giving a couple guys a ride to the commissary, when we could do such things with out getting in trouble. Our pargos, or modified electric golf carts, was a flat bed. Back when we were an actual studios, we had various places were the guests could see back stage. On this particular run, one of the stunt guys laid down in the back of the pargo and the other pretended to do CPR as we passed by a line of guests. The whole way he kept yelling, "Can't this thing go any faster !!". I ducked my head and just kept driving.

W T H

2008-10-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

In today's Blog I'm starting a 'W'hat 'T'he 'H'ell moments section. I'm sure I will have many additions over time.

Anything political brings out the best in most people. The day of the last Obama/McCain presidnetial debate I had a gentleman (I use this term losely) come to the desk and question why we didn't have FoxNews on the cable system. I told him we had Fox Network. He blew up. "I DIDN'T SAY FOX NETWORK. I SAID FOX NEWS. IT IS NOT RIGHT THAT YOU DON'T HAVE FOX NEWS. I WILL NEVER COME BACK TO DISNEY AND I WILL NEVER STAY HERE AGAIN. He had his finger in my face as he yelled, then stormed off. I was floored and speachless. I went to the back office and the only thing i could say was, "What the Hell was that all about ?" I later found out that FoxNews has the reputation for being ultra conservative Republican. So Mr MadMan had to have been McCain Repulican Supporter Poster Child.

As I have said before, we are a swamp state. We have bugs and we have reptiles. That's not to say we like them, BUT most of us under stand that there are more roaches and mosquitoes than humans and bug spray can only due so much. I had a guest at AllStar get upset about a cockroach in an out side laundry room. I tried to explain that it had rained alot recently and bugs, like people, tend to move to drier ground. He said, "Is that acceptible to have roaches around here ?" I said, "No, but bug spray can only do so much." He came back with, "So you have roaches in your house." "No i Don't." "Then why is it acceptible here ?" . . . basically he wanted to pick a fight, so I sent him to a manager.

I love the "My plane broke down. We're 12 hours late. How are you going to compensate me." comments. I tried to explain to this guest that we are not an airlines. We don't have anything to do with the airlines. "It was Disney that booked this flight." "Mam, Reservations books alot of people on a lot of different flights." She came back with, "It's not my fault I lost a day. You are the ones that booked me on that flight." ". . . Did I mention that WE ARE NOT THE AIRLINES."

My first day back from several weeks vacation, I had a guest at the Wilderness Lodge ask me, "Where's the Geshia ?" He spoke with a heavy spanish accent, so I could barely understand him, but he kept asking about the Geshias. I kid you not, in the back of my mind I kept thinking, 'I know I've been gone for a while, but I didn't think it had been THAT long.' When the elderly gentleman asked again he made a hand motion for water. I FINALLY understood. He was asking about the Geysers. The Lodge had our version of Old Faithful down behind the pool.

I got this guest moment second hand. Apparently, at All Star Resort, a lady has a wee bit too much to drink and on her way back to her room either fell into the bushes or passed out in the bushes. However, she was wide a wake when an armadillo decided to run up her leg. She came to the desk and claimed she had been 'raped' by an armadillo. The terrified animal could not be found for questioning.

I was working at the bus stop for Boardwalk Resort one morning and heard a child tell her mom. "I finished my Goldfish(crackers)." I didn't too much about it, until the buses came and the crowds left. Then I realized that her version of "I finished my Goldfish." meant she had dumped the bag of crackers on the ground. After the large group of guests waiting for the bus trompled through them, the entire bus stop floor was covered in orange cracker crumbs.

Bless thier hearts, some people get so confused. I can't tell you how many times I have had people ask me where The Hulk Roller Coaster is, or where is the Beetlejuice Show? I can really mess with thier heads when I say, "about ten miles north of here." "Huh ?" Sometimes when we tell them that a particular ride isn't at Disney, people will want to argue with you. I have been known to say, " Look I work at Universal Studios too. Trust me when I say that ride (or show) is at Universal, not Disney."

Jumping over to our Studios for a moment. For those old timers who may remember Super Star Television, I have some precious children moments to share. Did I say Precious, what I meant to say was, W T H moments. Super Star would pick 20 to 24 people out of the audience, costuming would dress them in costumes then send them out on stage for thier acting debute. As the moms of the entertainment world, costuming people became pretty darn good at preventing melt downs with the younger kids, most of the time.

In the Bonanza scene we'd put a vest and tie on a child and the techs put them on a fake horse. In the camera shot it's supposed to look like they're one of the Cartwright brothers. One day I tried to put the tie on a girl. She said, "No." I said, " Can you try it for five minutes ?" "NO." "Well, then you need to go sit back down." "NO." "You're going to get stepped on if you stay in the middle of the floor." "NO." I gave up. I don't think she ever did move.

After Little Ms. NO, we had Damion child. Super Star had three large turn tables with large sets on them for the differnt scenes. Damion child kept trying to jump on the turn tables everytime they moved. During scenes he'd stomp around back stage with his Mickey ears in one had and a pair of Mickey glasses in the other. Apparently, he wanted more attention, so he threw his hat and glasses down and fell to the floor. The other guests thought he was hurt. He wasn't. Finally one of the techs literally picked him up and said, "You're staying with me for a while." . . . or at least until the end of the show.

A ride operations host working at Star Tours was bored one day and began acting like a animatron as the guests were leaving the ride. One guest stuck her hand down his shirt to see if he was real and in the process, ripped several buttons off his shirt. When questioned later, she said she wanted see if he had nipples. (I don't elaborate on this stuff, I just report it.)

I have been told that Guest Relations, you know them as them complaint people, have been asked why Disney World wasn't covered so that people wouldn't get rained on.
Speaking of rain. Can anyone tell me why people Keep Running for Cover in the rain after you're already soaked to the bone ? You are already wet. You can't get any wetter than wet.

Though I have never worked there, i was told that a typical day at Honey I Shrunk the Kids playground consists of:

HISK Cast Member
(clears throat)

"Get down from there. Get down from there. Don't climb on
that. Get down from there. You lost you mom ? Don't worry
we'll find her. Get down from there. Get, get, get, get,
down. Yes You!. "

HISK Cast Member exists stage left with mental break down eminent.

HISK Cast Member
"What The Hell !!"

WHEN MOTHER NATURE COMES TO VISIT . . . AND STAYS

2008-09-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, wildlife is everywhere at Disney. In the late nineties I was leaving the studios one afternoon and had to come to a complete stop. The car behind me wasn't too happy about this, but I saw a bobcat tooling around in the bushes. It looked around for a few moments, then slipped back into the woods. Just the other day at the Wilderness Lodge some guests said, "We just saw the coolest thing." The cashier said, "Oh, really, what was it ?" "We were watching a rabbit out the window, then from out of no where a bobcat snatched it and vanished into the woods." My first thought was," Atleast they weren't upset about seeing Thumper get eaten."

Squirrels are often called 'Rats With Good Press Agents'. While at Epic, we, the cast, did a very bad, but contagious thing. We fed the squirrels. In case you don't know, if you feed these little beggars, they become brazen and fearless. In fact Epic had to be stopped. . . in the middle of show . . . because of squirrels. There is a flame affect that floats on a sheet of water at the beginning of scene three. A squirrel thought the water was it's own personal fountian and stopped for a drink. . .a long drink. It's kind of a 'Guest Dissatisfier' to see a little furry woodlands creature get torched in the Dragon Burner flame effect, So every one got over time because the show ran long as the techs tried to herd the squirrel off stage. It's kind of fun though, watching a performer try to stay in character as a villian when two love smitten squirrels are racing around his feet.

I think the final straw, however, was when the squirrels discovered food in the parked strollers out side of the stage. The little theives would trash the guest's belongings during the show, then afterwards, it'd run up the leg of an suspecting guest trying to beg for more.

I never knew until recently that the Pirates of the Carribbean ride wasn't totally enclosed. Apparently, after the Johnny Depp rehab work a guest was talking to a cast member about the improvements. They said they were so impressed with the new animatrons. . . 'even the Alligator looked so real'. The cast member played it off well and asked which one they noticed. The guest described with scene it was in and went on thier way. The ride was shut down as the 'powers that be' removed the very real alligator that had found it's way into the ride. (Disneyland may be older, but our Pirates ride have real alligators. . . at times.}

Any building with massive amounts of people coming and going and the doors left open most of the time is bound to gather some uninvited guests. The character costuming builing had a nest of finches in the rafters one year. It was small, they didn't bother too many people. The next year, how ever, it turned into a condo. After nesting season and the babies were gone, we were vigilant about keeping the doors shut. WELL, that didn't work. They discovered a new exit point above the roll up door. The year I left, they were about to enter the third finch season and the third year of covering the costumes in plastic.

At one point, the character costuming building had a black bird who was drawn to our coffee pot. He would follow us in and go straight to the back of the building. My fellow cast members tended to over react and tried to chase him out of the building. You can not 'chase' a bird out of . . . anyhwhere, but he was smart enough to find his way out. The dove at the Boardwalk Resort was another story. The floors had been revarnished and the fumes were over powering, so we openned the doors to air out the lobby. A dove found it's way in and spent at least two days in side. Several of us called pest management and insisted they do some thing before it died. The operator said "it would be okay because she was sure it had found water". I ensured her it had not and that this bird was going to die if some one didn't do some thing. Long story short, that night, my manager said they had, had enough and decided to chase it down. The theroy 'if it was going to die, at least it would do so trying to rescue it'. He said they tired it out to the point of barely being able to fly and they were able to catch it and returned to the out doors.

Anyone visiting Florida has to realize, we are a swamp state. As a swamp state we have reptiles. I almost ran over a black snake with a Segway at the Allstar Resort. Scared the fool out of me. A few days later another runner had parked his pargo (modified golf cart) in the same area and, I think it was the same snake, tried to get into the pargo. When I used to work in the phone bank, I had a guest tell me that she was trapped in her room because a snake was curled up on the sidewalk in front of her door.

When I did my orientation tour of the lodge, there was a pair of Mallard Duck bopping around in the pool with the guests. I was surprised that no one gave them a second thought.

I'm sure there will be more critter stories. If you have heard of any, please let me know and I'll add your stories here too.

P.S. Today I had a lady asking where they could find bugs. She wanted to bring some home with her. I'm not making this stuff up. As we talked, I realized her daughter had a school project due on bugs.

BRAZILIAN (BRASILIAN) SEASON, CHEERLEADER SEASON AND VARIOUS OTHER GROUPS

2008-09-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

If you're at the parks and see a large mass of people dressed in neon orange, neon green or neon yellow shirts being led by someone carrying a TOURISMO flag, I suggest you just step back and let them pass because it's Brazilian season and you will get sucked onto their wave if you try to cross thier path. In fact in the mid to late nineties, Disney had special events called Brazilian nights where we'd have some of the shows in poutugese. This would encourage the tour groups to come later in the day and not be quite so over whelming to the non-brazilian guests. These groups are loud and haven't seemed to grasped the concept of waiting in line. In fact at Epic (Indiana Jones Stunt Show), a Brazilian group forged a trail through the landscaped que line and tried to come in the back of the theater, the operations people escorted them out of the theater. Management made them go to the back of the line.

While I was working at All Star, a Brazilian group gathered in the hotel lobby and were so loud I felt like I was working in a stadium. Then thier leader decided to use a whistle to get his group's attention. My managers quickly put a stop to that. The complaints from the regular guests about these groups ranged from, "Do they ever sleep?" and "they're running up and down the halls all night" to "My young child just saw two of them 'doing it' in the elevator". Extra security and a portugese speaking lobby greeters have helped to tame them some.

The darling Cheerleaders aren't much better. Except, instead of running up and down the halls at night, the Cheerleaders would have thier boom boxes blasting at the wee hours in the morning so they can get that last bit of practice in before thier competion. When management and the Varisity leaders made a rule that they had to 'X number of feet' from the rooms to practice, that calmed down those complaints a bit. What always amazed me was, for being an athletic minded group of people, they complained endlessly about how far thier room was or that they had to carry thier own lugggage if luggage service was being overwhelmed by other guests. I finally told a few people, "You're young and supposedly an athlete. Pick up your own suit case." She said, " It's too heavy." I responded, " Well, maybe you shouldn't have over packed." . . . Needless to say she wasn't happy with me, but I was just a nameless opeerator in a phones room at that time.

I was at All Star Movies one day and heard Phantom of the Opera music drifting across the resort, so of course i had to go check it out. In the Mighty ducks building the icons are three story tall duck shaped hockey masks. A high school show choir was using the acustics inside of the hockey masks to practice. I had to stop and listen. Then for the rest of the day I had Phantom music in my head.

I picked up a shift one morning at the studios thinking it was going to be for the Star Wars event. I was wrong. There was a jump rope competion in the Theater of the Stars. When they told me that, i said "Jump Rope Competition. You've got to be kidding." They weren't. It was a small group compaired to the Cheerleaders, but they put thier heart into it. On my way out for the day a group of four jump ropers were behind me talking. "Some one asked me if we were cheerleaders. I said DO WE LOOK LIKE CHEERLEADERS ? WE'RE JUMP ROPERS". I wanted so bad to turn to her and say, "Why, yes. Yes you do look like Cheerleaders." But I was sill in costume with my name tag on, so I behaved myself and just kept walking.

Pop Warner Football always manages to stir things up a bit at the resorts too. THe year before I started at All Star Resort there was a brawl in the food court between the teams. And the year after I moved on to another resort there was a brawl in the food court. You can always tell when there are sports teams on Disney property. Security is stationed at every corner.

The first weekend in June every year is Gay Days at Disney. It started as a group of guys chatting online and they all decided to meet up at Walt Disney World. Someone in the group decided they should all wear red shirts so they could find each other. And Presto-Chango a new special event was created. A side note: When this first made headlines, the pastor of my church, First Baptist of Orlando, was the president of the Southern Baptist convention. The Southern Baptists were offended by the concept of Gay Days at a family place and decided to call for a boycot of Disney. How ever, when my pastor returned to Orlando and realized that a very large population of his congeration worked for the so called Evil Mouse, he started back peddling pretty fast and quickly stopped the protests.

Let's not forget the convention side of the property. There was a resturant company who had a yearly convention at the Wilderness lodge. Not to mention specific names, but it was an Italian-style grill and steakhouse company. They checked into thier rooms with buckets of beer waiting for them. Not to say they drank like fish, but before the end of thier convention, security was fishing a few of them out of Bay Lake when they decided to go skinny dipping after thier night cap.

Speaking of a night cap, i think it's time for a little Jamacian Rum, then off to bed for myself. My goal is to do at least two blogs a month, so See you next time.

SPORTS, DISNEY'S FINAL FRONTIER . . . MAYBE NOT

2008-08-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

When the Walt Disney Company bought ABC and it's various other entities, it also aquired ESPN. This opened the door to massive amounts of professional sports programing, events, tournaments and you name it, we now do it. Several years ago when Disney 'Uppity Ups' decided to build the Wide World of Sports complex, Most of us said "Huh?" "Why?" and "What a waste of space and money." I have to officailly say that, "I was wrong and they were right." There, I have now eaten crow and addmitted i was wrong. :)

The sports complex is one busy place. It mostly has tournaments that only those involved would be interested in seeing, but the people involved in scheduling events there keep it buzzing. The the most popular event has to be the Atlanta Braves spring training. After that would be the Tampa Bay Bucs training camp. From what I was told, the Bucs facility in Tampa was in really bad shape a few years ago. In fact, the newspapers said that when a player got up in the morning to brush his teeth and found a frog on his tooth brush, the officials knew they had to do something. IT'S DISNEY TO THE RESCUE ! They were invited to the sports complex for training camp while thier Tampa facility was being overhauled. Of course the rest of the league gave them grief. "Ah, your training camp is at Disney World. They're going to make you soft." Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that year they won the super bowl. Talk about eating crow. Needless to say, Disney hosts the Bucs training camp every year now.

Pop Century resort took for ever to complete. Located across the road from the Sports Complex, it was started before Sept.11th. Since the attendence dropped like a rock after the world turned crazy, the construction at the new resort ground to a crawl . . . an extemely slow crawl. They finally finished most of it and it was opened a few years later. EXCEPT for the very last building. they put up the walls, windows and door and shuttered the rest. The people involved in bringing sporting events to Disney property saw an opportunity to turn the weedy construction site into a BMX track and snagged a long standing BMX competition from California.

Most of the tournaments at the complex are leagues people have never hear of. I picked up an extra shift working crowd control for some kind of basket ball tournament. All I know is they where inner-city kids from up north and NCAA people were scouting for thier colleges. The floor of the arena was actually split up into four courts using a heavy curtian-like divider, so they could have a round robin style play offs. A team that had finished playing decided to bring home extra souveniers from the teams on the other side of the curtain and stole ipods, cell phones, ect, from thier backpacks. Needless to say the victims were pissed and chased the thieves out of the complex and into the parking lot were they almost had a riot. The county sheriff's department had to be called in. I guess you can take the kid out of the inner-city, but you can't take the inner-city out of the kid.

The Disney Marathon is huge. I always knew it was a big deal, but i never knew just how big it was until I worked it a few years. I have been told it ia a qualifier for the Boston Marathon. An estimated ten to fifteen thousand people run this thing every year. I picked up a shift at Epcot one year, so we saw them coming and going. . .so to speak. At 7:00am the teeming masses were happy, energetic and talkative as they entered the back gates of Epcot and headed off towards Magic Kingdom. I lost track of how many people were wearing Tinkerbell wings and Minnie or Mickey costumes. But the images of a guy with a scruffy, patchy beard wearing a Minnie dress will be forever burned into my mind. In front of the pack was a few wheel chair participants. Let me tell you, these people were flying. The year i worked it, the lead wheel chair guy was probaly finished and back at his resort sipping Margaritas long before the runners even hit Magic Kingdom.

A few hours later and less than a mile from the end, how ever was a totally different story. I was just behind Spaceship Earth and the park was open to guests as the Marathoners ran passed. I have to say MOST of our day guests understood the concept of 'wait for a break in the runners before crossing the marathon line'. Key word here is most. We did have a few individuals with the 'I paid my $75, I'm going anywhere I damn well please'. It was our job to prevent collitions. Since you can't physically stop someone, we did have some near misses. The sadess thing i saw that day was two different runner fell on the track and had to be taken off by paramedics. They ran all that way and were less that a quarter mile from finishing and their bodies just ran out of steam.

Speaking of running out of steam. . . keep checking back for new updates.

2008-08-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

TALL TALES, URBAN LEGENDS AND GHOST STORIES.

First I need to correct two urban legends that I heard years ago. I’m not sure where they started, but it is obvious it did not come from any one who has ever been to the parks. The first one is “In the event of a hurricane, they deflate the ball (Space Ship Earth) at EPCOT to keep it from blowing away. . . . WRONG. It is not a giant bouncy ball, it’s a building filled with . . . Stuff. An entire ride to be exact.

The second urban legend is that in an event of a hurricane, they can disassemble the Magic Kingdom castle. Also Wrong. The buildings that you see as a guest at Disney are tough, solid structures. A.k.a. they ain’t going anywhere. If fact, when a hurricane gets close, I tell the college kids and other ‘new to Florida’ apartment dwellers, to volunteer for the hurricane ride out crew just so they are in a safe place. Now, behind the scenes is another story. Near the warehouses is a place I refer to as the trailer trash section, but more on that in a later blog.

By the way, if you missed see the Magic Kingdom castle when it was a pink birthday cake, you can take a look http://www.pansophist.com/cascomp.htm . I was told that the wedding pavillion at Grand Floridian lost quiet a bit of money, because who wants a pepto bismal pink castle in thier wedding pictures. christmas 2007 they made look like an ice castle. Now that was cool.

And the final one, NO, Walt is not cryogenically frozen beneath the castle.

Working at All Star resort, you soon learn at least one stereo type is true. Cheerleaders are. . . well. . . how should I put this ? Well, they’re a bit Blonde. I don’t want to step on toes, but the facts are facts. As a front desk runner during cheerleader competitions in January, February and March, my days were one key assist after another. “I lost my key.” “I locked myself out.” My daughter left her eye lashes in her room.” “Have you seen my coach ?” “I can’t carry my suit case THAT far.” In fact, one day I was driving a pargo(modified golf cart) through All Star Sports to answer cheerleader’s key assist call in All Star Music, when another cheerleader’s mom literally jumped out in front of me to make me stop. Her tragedy was that her daughter had left her eye lashes in the room. Now, mind you, I told this lady that I had a mother needing to get her daughter’s diabetic medicine. She insisted that I help her first. I guess all’s far in love and cheerleading.

After the cheerleaders were done and the team sports came in like softball, lacrosse, baseball, ect. it got so quiet around there I had to keep checking my dispatch radio just to see if it was still on. I did have one major team faux pas though. A girl's lacrosse team managed to lock, deabolt and safety latch thier door
then walk out of the room through the connecting door AND lock that one as well. When I got there the entire team was waiting, the coach was pacing and everyone was getting pissy thinking it was Disney's fault for having a bad lock. I had to call maintenance and they had to literally break into the room. Once the coach realized it was the player's fault, she a closed door "coaching session" with the girls involved. They almost missed thier tournament.

I love how nobody takes responsibility for their actions at Disney. “I left my camera at the restaurant, how are you going to compensate me?” “My tickets are at home. Why can’t I get in to the park with out them.” Well, All Star had a guest who drank a wee bit too much at the pool bar one day and stumbled his way back to his room where he turned on the water in the tub. Then he passed out on the floor. Fortunately for him, he did so face up, because the tub overflowed and flooded out six rooms. He was later quoted as saying, “If you didn’t want me to get drunk, why did you sell me the beer.” They fined him $500.00 for damages to the rooms.

At All Star Movies there is a Herbie the Lovebug section complete with a little white VW. I don’t know if it is THE Herbie, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same one that used to be parked on residential street at the Studios before Lights Motors Action took over that space. During school group season. . . wait, at All Star that’s everyday, anyway we had a school group at the resort that hot wired Herbie and went joy riding. Needless to say, Herbie was briefly taken away to make it inoperable. Speaking of vehicles at Disney, the Beverly Hillbillies truck that hangs from the ceiling at the Planet Hollywood restaurant gave guests a little something extra in the beginning. Story has it that since they rushed to get the restaurant opened, they didn’t take the time to prep the truck properly and it dripped motor oil on people as they ate. (don’t worry it was later fixed.)

I looked on the internet one day for ghost stories at Disney and came across a story about the spirit of a little boy that’s at the haunted mansion. A real one not the animatrons. Recently I worked with some one who came from that ride and he said he was in the off load area on a slow day. Not wanting to walk the treadmill for nothing, he stepped back into the curtains where he could still see if guests were coming. A little while later, he heard the laughing of a little boy. He stepped onto the treadmill expecting to greet guests, there was no one there. There is also a story of a lady caught spreading a white powder on the ride. They were never sure if it was ashes of her son or not, Hmmm.

Speaking of ashes. We had a character coordinator that passed away from a brain tumor and was later cremated. Tom ate, slept and dreamed Disney. I was told by a very reliable source that one night Tinker Bell didn’t JUST spread pixie dust across the Magic Kingdom as she flew out of the castle.

While working at Epic (Indiana Jones), I had my own ghost story. One day I told my co worker that I was going to the commissary to grab lunch before a huge thunder storm hit. . . .I didn’t make it. On my way back across the park, lighting was popping everywhere. Rain was pouring down and I was drenched. As I crossed the Epic stage, which at this point is a giant wading pool, lighting struck near by and I felt it in the water. That was near miss number one. Because of all the water, the techs had to blow the water out of the flame affects before the next show. I almost walked into the flames because the spotter wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Near miss number two. Later, I was standing at our counter watching television. Beside me was a stack of supplies, tee shirts ect. Next to that was the coordinator’s desk. Someone asked me for a tee shirt. As I turned to get it, until the day I die, I will swear I saw some one sitting at that desk. I gave the shirt to the cast member, looked back at the desk and there was nobody there. The chair was even pushed under the desk.

Rumor also has it that Jim Henson’s ghost is backstage at the Little Mermaid show. Why Little Mermaid ? Because that stage was originally a muppets show when he died.

If you have any urban legends, ghost stories or tales about Disney, i'd love to hear them and i may include them in my next installment.

FANTASMIC!. . . enough said.

2008-07-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Being apart of the opening crew for Fantasmic! meant being apart of one of the biggest shows on property, having no fear of heights or of the water and enduring nearly four months of sleepless nights. Our rehearsals were from sun down to sun up and from what I was told, the guests in the Swan and Dolphin hotel were getting pretty miffed at hearing Maleficent (I never could remember how to spell her name) dieing evey night around two in the morning.

One of the first things the character performers had to learn was how to paddle a canoe for the Pocahantas scene. From our stand point, it was rather amusing watching them go round and round in circles. It became clear that none of these people had every been a Boy (or Girl)scout. The canoes were actualy gas powered, they just had to steer. Once thier trainers got them going in one direction, then came the fun of seeing bumper boats as they tried to pass each other in the begining of thier scene. What was even more fun was watching the Princess Barge's collide with each other or the wall and that was the entertainment techs driving them. Speaking of the barges, we had one sink due to a maintance error. . . . as in a maintainence men siphened water into the barge by accident. If I remember the story right, There was some work that had to be done to one section of the moat, so the mechanics siphened the water into the other sections. Except the huge siphen hose crept up the side of the barge and manage to completely fill it with water.

Have people fallen in the moat? Yes. At least one time, that I know of, it was intentional. In order to give the Rescue Boat training time and to answer the question "what would happen if a character falls in ?", Mickey took a walk one day. . . off the front of the stage. What we didn't know was that his shoes are made of an extremely bouyant material. He went in, his feet went up and his head went down. It became known at the 'Day we almost drowned Mickey'. But Never Fear, The Rescue Boat Was Near! I'm sure there has been more incidents of unintentional swimming since I have left the show, but one of the first times was when a tech took a dive. The canoe people are, when approaching the docks, supposed to put out thier oar and the tech pulls them into the dock. One night the character was a little impatient and tried to hurry it along. However, instead of the tech pulling the canoe in, they pulled the tech into the water. During the show the canoes stop on the sides of the stage and let thier passanger out. Whether or not the pocahontas indian makes it to the stage is based on how good the canoe driver is. Some times they fall in when they stop too far away from the platform.

A windy day at Fanstasmic! is always fun. For those who have seen the show, there is a huge purple and orange snake that comes out on stage. Each snake section looks like and inflatable pup tent. On more than one occasion, i have seen the wind blow a section into the moat. Then the techs have to go fishing for it. At one time costuming used a huge cloth bin to move costumes from point A to point B. This bin was later preset for the characters to throw their costumes in as they ran passed. The bin was set. We went to lunch. We came back to stage. It was gone. I looked over the edge and there it was, on the bottom of the moat. THe tech guys stood around and discussed how to get it out. One the tech girls came up with a grappling hook and helped us retreive it. (Score one for the girls!!). During a show, the wind can be brutal. The water screens soak everything and everyone. It may be my imagination, but I always felt like I was covered in a oily film after one of those nights. Heaven only knows what's in that water. Every so often a pair of ducks would find the moat. We'd always try to scare them off. I'm not really interested in seeking a three headed duck.

Fantasmic! is not a show for those afraid of heights. 66 steps to the top, and when you are carrying Mickey's Sorcerer costume to the top, it feels like 666. (no pun intended) In the middle of the mountian is a fairly good size deck, but it's all metal slat floors. You look down and see people running around below you. At the very top it's a pretty cool view of the park. . . and with more metal slat flooring, it's a good view of every one else two floors down.

Lighting in Florida summers is pretty much a given. We are the lighting capital of the Americas (I think one place in asia, Japan maybe, has more). Take my advice, If it's lighting and thunder immediately follows, don't remain in the Fantasmic! theater. You are surrounded my high voltage power lines for the stage lights. You are sitting on metal bleachers. Can we say "TOASTED" ? Not long after the show opened, we had one of those wonderful Florida thunderstorms and the show had to be cancelled. We alomst had a riot. The audience was yelling profanities and BOooing. I actually heard some brainiac scream "F*** Mickey". Except he used the uncensored version. Now, I understand that these people have been waiting for a long time . . . However, IT'S LIGHTING PEOPLE.

One last tip. FANTASMIC! is supposed to be spelled with the exclaimation mark. As the show was opening, we got word of some merchandise that was printed with out the exclaimations mark. Several of us stocked up on the misprint items. So if you see something written with out the '!' grab it, it could be worth something. . . in a hundred years or so.

Puppets, Puppeteers and the "Golden child"

2008-07-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

First off, I have to admit that I really don't like puppet shows. There is just something about them that's strange and disturbing. Disney, seems to love puppet things. Working at shows like Bear and the Big Blue House (which later became Playhouse Disney) and Voyage of the Little Mermaid, I did manage to learn a few things about the craft along the way. First of all, if you are comfortable while you're working the puppet, you are probably doing it wrong. Most puppeteers have to be a bit of a contortionist to get the puppet seen by the audience while they are not seen.
At Playhouse Disney, the puppeteers are all scrunged up under the stage and spend a good chunk of thier time on thier knees. They slide from one side of the stage to the other on hard shell knee pads and old gerry-rigged office chairs. Bear and the Big Blue House was an eight week experiment that lasted several years. Story has it, that the Disney powers that be saw bear during a mall tour and wanted him at Disney. The Playhouse stage used to be the Soundstage Restaurant. Our very first breakroom was the old stainless steel serving station counters from the restaurant. We eventually found some blankets to sit on. Above the stage was the old Catwalk Bar. Decked out with odds and ends furniture and a big screen TV, we often invaded the space during our lunch breaks. In fact, for a while, the Bear and the Big Blue House television show came on a few minutes after our first ended, so we'd book it upstairs to the bar and watch the show. To recap, a cast of puppeteers were sitting at a bar watching a show for preschoolers. . . Only At Disney :)

Playhouse also had a host in front of the stage to engage the kids. Thier job was to get the kids up and dancing at the right time, settle them back down at the right time and to keep the little rug rats off the stage all the time. This job they have done quite well over the years. However, as with all best laid plans, there is the occasional slip up, or as we call them "The Golden Child". The Golden Child is the one individual who has made it passed all of the obstacles and managed to run up on stage. This is bad for several reasons. Bear can't see very well. There are numerous trap doors through which a child can fall through. And finally, but not the least of which, the show had large moving set pieces that can squish a child like a bug. On at least one occasion, a puppeteer opend the trap door and had a child fall into his lap. The performer then quickly shoves the child back up on stage and quickly locks the trap door. I can't help but wonder if, in that child's later years of life, he would have some vague frightening memory of seeing the dark underbelly of Walt Disney World. Who knows, maybe he now has a fear of creatures under the bed. I was walking back stage one day and a toddler's shoe came flying out from under the stage. I asked the stage manager if Bear had started eating the children and spitting out thier shoes.

To call Voyage of the Little Mermaid (VOLM) a puppet show would do it a great dis-service. it has one black light puppet number and Ursala. There are several puppeteers on stage during the "Under the Sea" number and it can be quiet amusing when the performers train wreck and you see all of the neon puppet fish pile up on each other. When the show first started, a dresser would walk out on stage during Ariel's transformation into a human and take her sea shell bra. (the curtain was down). I was always afraid of falling off the stage or getting ran over by Ursala, so I'd find Prince Eric and stick close to him as several of us would go out on stage. Why Prince Eric ? Because I could see him. He wears a white shirt that glows in the black light. On one occasion (this happened to another dresser), Ariel's hair got tangled up in the bra strap. The curtain was about to back up, in a panic, the dresser shoves the shell bra in the back of Ariel's dress and runs off stage. Ariel finishes the show looking like Quasimodo.

VOLM incorporates lasers, black lights and numerous other special effects. Not the least of which is a water curtain to symbolize going under water. Once, when one of the dressers was leaving the show, the cast wanted to tell her good bye, so the darlings taped her to a chair, set it under the water curtian and left her there. When others leave shows there are similar going away surprises as well, like being thrown in the mote when you leave Fantasmic or being covered in baby powder when you move from an area.

On that note, I'll sign off until next.

p.s. don't for get to keep checking back for new stories to come.

The Fans, The Fanatics, and The Fanatic Fans

2008-06-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

You hear about rock stars and boys bands dealing with crazed fans, but what you may not realize is that Disney is a magnet for the odd and sometimes extreme fans. We've had families up and move to the area, just so they could get closer to a performer. This happened when we had a show called Doug. It originally was a Nickelodeon show that Disney bought. They made a movie out of it that did poorly and created a show at The Studios that was short lived. Basically, Disney almost killed the franchise. Nickelodeon bought it back after a couple of years though. For those who are not familiar with Doug, it was a show about a pre-teen boy with a huge imagination. The cast wore various colors of make up like Skeeter was Green, Rodger was blue, Patty was orange. A young girl had a huge crush on Rodger and convinced her mom to move to Orlando so they could get closer to Disney. In fact, the cast member had to start leaving through different doors each day on his way home because she'd wait for him at the stage door. We never knew if she wanted Rodger 'the person', 'the person' who played Rodger, or if she just had a thing for blue people.

Hunchback of Notre Dame seemed to have the freaky fans coming out of the wood work. We had one fan, a young lady, we refered to as cape girl. During the show, she'd spin around with her jacket and pretend to do the gypsie cape routine. But Wait, there's more. She later got hired as a costuming cast member. Let's just say she scared the cast. One day she was in the green room and showed someone the secret compartment in her ring. I kid you not, she said, "This is where I keep my poison to kill people." Needless to say, managment moved her very quickly.

One of our Quasimodo cast members got a fan letter one day. It started out normal. "I love your show. I think you're a great singer. . . " . Then it got odd. She said that 'she was new to the area and we were the closest thing to family that she had and that she was coming back on her birthday to spend all day at the show,' and she gave us the date. THEN it got weird. she asked our Quasimodo cast member, 'are you into paganism ? If you're not, that's okay.' Needless to say, we were a bit alarmed and intrigued. In the greenroom there was a dry erase board that listed who where the equity cast members and who were the gypsies for the day. In the middle of those two lists someone wrote COUNTDOWN TO W##F3N DAY (I don't want to use her name, but let's just say it was not a normal name.) Sure enough, on that day, half way through the day, one of the operations people came to the green room and told us she was there. I have never seen that green room clear so fast in my life. Everyone ran out to the stage to see who this girl was. It scared her and she never came back.

We have a gentleman who insists on putting disney performers on his body. Across his back is a tatoo of one of our Streetmosphere performers. The face of one of the Indy Stuntmen (the German Giant) is tatooed on his knee. During the Star wars Weekends we have a lady fan who has legally changed her last name to Skywalker Quigon Kenobi. She'd come every day to the event and stay all day dressed in her Jedi garb.

The Studios is known for it's special events. StarWars Weekends has seventy to eighty Star Wars characters from various Jedi's to three different type of troopers (storm, sand and clone). Storm troopers wear spandex and plastic armour. Guests tend to get a little frisky with some one in spandex. . . I wonder why? Not all Storm troopers are guys. One of the female storm troopers got pinched by a couple of flirty girls. The Storm Trooper informed them she was a girl and embarassed the snot out of these girls. Supersoap Weekends is a time I was glad to be behind the wall. When the park opens, they do a little rope drop ceremony. During Super Soap, it is like the running of the bulls, or as one of our stage managers put it, the running of the house wives. They open the gates and literally thousands of normally sane individuals turn into steam rollers and book it to the back of the park so them can get numbers for the autograph sessions. While I was working as a runner at a resort, I had to drive a guest to the Studios during Super Soap. The whole way over there she kept saying, " I'm not one of those crazed fans." Then she'd turn to her daughter and say, "As soon as we get out you have to run." Not a crazed fan . . . rriiight. ESPN The Weekend is a testostrone version of Super Soap. It's very amusing to see all these guys try to act calm, cool and collected, but as soon as one of the sports stars walk past, they turn into a twelve year old. That's okay, Mr Armchair Quarterback, no one saw you get all giddy when the cheerleaders came out.

Then we have the Dead Dog Lady. Yes, that's right I said the Dead dog Lady. When she and her daughter come to the park, her husband stays in the car all day. He thinks Disney is evil or something. The mother and daughter go to Beauty and the Beast and sit down front center for all five shows. In her lap is a plastic grocery bag. In the bag is a freeze dried / taxidermied little black poodle. Needless to the say the cast gets a bit un-nerved knowing that there is a dead dog in the front row.

Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular

2008-06-02T07:25:00.001-07:00

Or as we call it EPIC. The oldest show at the Studios, it opened shortly after the park opened. I can best describe Epic as working in a 'Boy's Club'. A good chunk of the cast has Peter Pan syndrome. . . they refuse to grow up. You never knew what was going to happen next. It took a certian personality to be able to work at Epic: not easily offended, ability to go with the flow and most importantly 'Shy People Need Not Apply'. Not to say that my cast of 'Lost Boys' was difficult to work with, but on more than one of occasion we had costuming dressers get trained at Epic and never come back.

With a cast of close to twenty guys and three girls per day, testosterone and bravado filled the room. And "oh the things you learn about guys when you're the only female in the room." I'll never forget, we were on a long break between shows and only a handful of people stuck around the green room. One of the cast, who grew up in Alaska, started talking about peeing into the wind and watching it freeze. I was eating lunch. All I could say was "Thanks for THAT visual." Working with a bunch of half dressed men, we had a lot of visuals. One of the guys, who had been there since day one, walked into wardrobe with only a towel wrapped around his waist. That's it. Nothing else. We said, "We're putting a load of towels in the washer, we need that one too." He dropped it and kept on walking. Now THAT WAS A VISUAL.

A costuming job at Epic was mostly presetting clothes, replacing worn out costumes, sorting laundry and dressing the guests which were picked out of the audience to be in the show. Sounds pretty easy. . .right. Wrong. Getting the 'boys' to give up a worn out costume was like getting Linus to give up his blanket. The conversations usally went something like this. "You need to try this on." "Later." "You need to try this on." "Why? I have one already." "It's falling apart. You need a new one." "I like my old one." " You look like you were on the losing end of a dog fight." "No I don't." Basically, you had to wear them down. . . in a nice, big sisterly way. One of the worst was Tumbler "P". I called him the brother i never wanted. He harrassed me. I harrassed him. One sure fire way to teach new cast members to put up thier shoes, hats, ect, was to put them in the freezer. The next day he had to wear frozen shoes, but he never forgot to them away again. Everyone expected the clothes to be ripped to shreds, the shoes to fall apart and the hats to eventually disintegrate. It was the unexpected wardrobe malfunction that kept life interesting. Indy has a monlogue where he explains the difference between a stunt double and stunt actor. Indy 'E' happened to be wearing a pair of button fly pants that wouldn't stay buttoned. He did his whole speach not only with his fly open, but his shirt sticking out. Dark brown pants. Light tan shirt tail poking out. Enough said.

I often thought I had the wierdest job in the world. I helped people change clothes during shows. Then, during the show, I'd see the six tumblers walking towards me taking thier shirts off for thier costume change, and think "I like my job." One day, a group of girls (guests) discovered they could stand on the handicap ramp and see the guys as well and started whistling. Amazingly, the guys turned shy all of a sudden. Thier one costume change was by no means a quick change. In fact, they had time to get into water fights, feed the begging squirrels, torment the new dressers and throw each others costumes in to the Mayan cart. (Scene one is a Mayan Temple scene, afterwards the set separates into three sections and rolls off to the side.)

Thier shenanigans didn't stop there. In the green room, if you heard the phrase, "Hanger in flight", you learned to steer clear of the costume rack. They loved to throw the heavy costume hangers at the rack and see if they could make them stay on the rail. They rarely made it. For several years they had a ping pong table and, for a while, full contact ping pong games dominated the greenroom. They'd hit the ball so hard, it'd ricochceted off the walls. Then there was Mote Ball. I am not sure where the name came from, but it's hybrid of a shortened tennis court, using racquetball racquet with elements of jai lai thrown in for good measure. The techs and certian cast members had mini-tournements between shows. The court was actualy a driveway leading to the the stage. The backstop on one side was the high stage wall/gate. The back stop on the other side was what ever car happened to be driving past. The sides were marked out by the Tech break trailer to one side and the tent storing the extra rolling boulders to the other.

The most awesome thing about working the show for the number of years that I did, was I saw kids with little to no experience come in and learn how to be a stunt performer. Now, I can't watch a movie with out sitting throught the credits to see if I know any of them. I'll always remember a kid from south Florida. He was a high school football star. The first time he sauntered into the trailer, he wore a big cowboy hat and had his shirt halfway unbuttoned. Well, let's just say, boot camp had begun. That training session there were six new tumblers, (I think), one or two new Marions and a couple new Indy's. Thier trainer was Tumbler "O", or as I called him Sargent "O". He ran that bunch of new hires ragged. During training they ran circuits, which consists of climbing the buildings of the market place (scene two sets), running across the tops of the buildings to the Indy high fall, do the high fall and run back to the begining. Between shows they'd learn about throwing punches, the slide for life and three-man pyramids. At one point in time when the Indy high fall wasn't high enough, they went all the way to the roof of the stage and jumped out of the rafters. Absolutely, utterly insane. One day, in the greenroom, they were watching a home video of someone on fire. Only at EPIC does that not seem wierd. That week end one of stunt captians had an unofficial training session at his home on how to do fire stunts.

By the way, the high school football star stuck around for a three four years, then moved to L.A. and became Toby Maguier's stunt double in Spiderman. Not bad, eh. I found an interview with him on You Yube http://www.anthonyplascencia.com/video/stuntman.html Another rags to riches story has to do with a guy who started in costuming. He went to the casting center and told them he wanted to be in costuming at Epic. They tried to taking him out of it. He insisted. His goal was to see what it took to get cast in the show from the inside out. He auditioned, but didn't make it. He auditioned again. He still didn't make it. In between auditions the Indy's would work with him on what he needed to improve for the next time. I believe it took four or five times before he got cast. Once he broke through, he was contracted as a primary Indy stunt double for a while, then he moved to L.A. Long story short, he landed work on a Tim Allen movie as his stunt double. Now, he's Mr. Allen's primary stunt double.

The tell tale signs of an Indy in training: knee pads, elbow pads, butt pads, brand new timberline boots all while wearing eye protection and the leather jacket in 90 degree Florida summers, just so you can learn that dam whip routine. Oh, yeah, throw in a few character performers running for thier lives because they're afraid of being accidently hit by the thing on thier way to the parade trailer.

There are plenty of more EPIC stories to come, so come back and check it out.

So, Did You Hear The One About The Guest Who Said...

2008-05-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

Wierd stuff happens at Disney. Yes guest's really do ask."What time is the three o'clock parade?" and "How much are the two dollar ballons?". For those who missed the news, there was a parental throw down at the Tea Cups near the end of 2007 that ended up in court and I believe prison time. I can see it now, "What are you in prison for?" "Well, I was at a Tea Party. . ."

When I first transfered to the resorts I worked at the All Star Resort front desk. As part of that job we also answered the phones in a place we called DAKRA. (Disney's Animal Kingdom Regional. . .something or another). We were the ones that answered all the lost guest questions, the angery "where's my lost luggage?" questions and the "my child's lost his pacifier in the Animal Kingdom Lodge's savanna" panikced parent calls.

One of my favorite calls, wasn't even mine. One of the other operators had a call from a guest who insisted that there was a Zebra out side of the Magic Kingdom parking lot. We assured her that none of the animals from the Animal Kingdom had gotten loose and told her it was a deer. She became very upset . "I know what a Zebra looks like and I know what deer look like! This had stripes." We called animal services, because we said we would. They were highly amussed.

Speaking of animal services, those people must be ran ragged 'fetching things from the Lodge's savanna'. Usually kid's stuff, once it gets thrown over the railing, most parents agree it was time to wean Jr off the pacifer anyway. Numerous cameras are pointed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge balcony's to prevent people from harming the animals. Knowing that, parents are pretty quick to call us about lost items. It's amazing how few pacifiers parents want back after it's fallen into a savanna filled with animals, and what animals leave behind. One lady was drying her plus size bathing suit on the railing and a gust of wind blew it away and it landed on a near by roof. Maintanence had to get a high lift to fish it off the roof.

Let me say a brief word about Love Bugs. . . the little black bugs, not the car. Love Bugs don't bite, don't eat anything, nothing will eat them. Basically they don't provide any useful purpose. According to pest management, they hatch, breed and die and their life span is only a few hours. These little pests wreak havoc for our guests twice a year. (spring and fall). The most common complaint is, " why didn't any one tell us about the bugs? I spend good money on this trip. . .yada yada yada." To answer that all I can say is, "We don't know when they will get here. It all depends on the temperature, rain fall ect." They tend to go for bright colors, so the hotel doors at All Star Resort are always plastered with them for that two weeks or so. Custodial tries to keep up with the dead bodies, but it's a huge resort. I had a guest irrate that 'A', one, Love Bug got into her room. Let me remind you, they don't bite and they will die soon anyway. This guest insisted that we get some one over there immediately to remove the one Love Bug. I called pest management, they told me that as soon as they were finished relocating the rattle snake, that they'd be right over.

We had a guest enjoy the pool bar a bit too much one day. He went back to his room, turned the water in the tub on and passed out on the floor. Fortuneately for him he passed out face up, because the tub overflowed and flooded out six rooms. When questioned, he said, " If you didn't want me to get drunk, you shouldn't have sold me the liquor."

It's been said that people loose IQ points when they get to Disney. They walk into lamp posts, leave thier cameras at the restaraunts, leave thier children behind in the car, all of which, in thier own minds, is never their fault. Blame it on Nicotine withdraws, Caffine withdraws, jet lag, stupid airlines, lost bus/taxi drivers, but they never seem to want to take the cedit for thier faux pas.
I recently had a guest demand that we compensate her because of a flight delay as if we're resposible for AirTran's plane breaking down.

That's alright honey, that's why we're here

Hunchback of Notre Dame: A Musical Adventure !

2008-05-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

Way back when each new movie was welcomed by fan fare and a new show or parade being added to the park, there was a show based on Disney's bastardized version of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame Classic. The animated film was 'ehh' and was kind of out of step with most of Disney's animated movies. The show however took on a life of it's own as a thirty minute retelling of the film and had a huge fan base.

Located in the back of the park, it seemed to always be under threat of closing. We were amazed when we lasted one year, much less seven. This show was and always will be one of my favorites. It was a show about outcasts, and being an entertainer you never quiet fit the social norms of society, anyway. We had a little bit of everything in that show: seven Equity performers (anyone who has special skills, talks or sings is Equity), nine character performers (pupeteers who in another life worked with Mickey, Pluto, Chip, Dale etc.), pyro techs (they burnt down Paris five times a day), six costuming dressers (who were always ducking out of the way of props, and dodging cast members who were late for enterances), two cosmetologists (it is amazing all the uses there are for doublesided hair and makeup tape) and one preshow juggler act (who had his own fan club following after a while).

It's petty sad when you'd rather be at Work on a holiday that with your family, but the cast and crew at Hunchback was my family. . . sort of. On our first Easter sunday, we turned the court yard between the stage and the greenroom into a little outdoor French Bistro. The techs had two hot plates in the back corner making omletes. We had electric skillets and waffle irons with pitchers of batter to make pancakes and waffles. Breads and pasteries of every size and discription was on another table. You name it we had it. Costuming put together an Easter Egg hunt. I found the quickest way to turn grown adults into children again is to hide something and tell them to go find it.

Costumes were alway an issue at that show. One of our gypsies (characters) hated his hat. He called it the "Herbie the Misfit Elf" hat. In one show it fell off, as it usually did, but this time he never got it back because his precious cast members kept kicking it around the stage like a hacky-sack. After that the stage managers made the hat go away. Costuming's claim to fame was a seven second complete Esmeralda costume change. It didn't have to be seven seconds, but we wanted to prove we could do it. Esmerelda would sneeze on stage and disappear behind a curtian and a poof of smoke. One of us would unzip her red dress, drop it to the floor. The second dresser would drop the blue dress over her head. The first dresser would zip it while the second dresser would snap the sash into place. Meanwhile, cosmetology straightened her hair and she was off.

The characters took being a gypsy to heart and were the mischievous bunch of people I have ever worked with. They had themed shows like the 'Riverdance Show' where everyone moved around on stage like they were in Riverdance. In one scene the gypsies where thrown in jail. The top of the jail was a stair way where the Gargoyles stood. We had certian gypsies that loved to torment the Gargoyles by untying thier shoe laces or pulling on thier tights.

As with most theater shows, Broadway and other wise, we had understudies. Everyone knows that. One particular day, we ran out of Quasimodos and the managers had to call in the under study. . . We'll call Quasi J. The only problem was, Quasi J, being his day off, was at the Epcot WINE and Food festival. (note the emphasis on Wine) Quasi J told them he was at the WINE and Food festival, but Stage Managers said "We'll deal with that when you get here, just come in and save the shows." I happened to be dressing that track that day and had to deal with the tipsy Quasi. . . lucky me. Quasi T wanted the lead in the show so bad, but there was one minor issue, a rope swing stunt from one side of the stage to the other that he was petrified of. He almost never landed right, in fact we refered to his rope swing as 'Bowling for Guards' since he usually took out several guards each show.

Props were a big part of that show. Let me emphasize BIG. We had a life size horse puppet we lovingly refered to as Snowball. Frollo would ride out on this thing being pushed by a puppeteer. I was always amazed the Frollo never took a header off the front of the stage. After his scene, we used Snowball to preset costumes on. His right ear became The Official Spot for the stiltwalking gypsy's dew rag. Since the show went away five, six years ago, Snowball turned into a convention prop. Just the other day I actually ran into him at some holiday promotion thing. I ignored the people working the event and told Snowball how much I missed him. The people thought I was nuts.

Back stage at Hunchback was 'all about no where to stand'. In our seven year run, we only had one costuming manager who wasn't afraid to be back stage during a show. In fact we had one manager (blonde . . .enough said) that came to see us right before the show. The music started. People started running. This manager was like a deer in headlights. When the 'burning buildings' were rolled back stage (real flames), she was gone and never came back to the show again. Between flaming set pieces, Snowball the life size horse, a Madonna and child statue, various size puppet racks, stiltwalkers and just the general wierd costume/props, we were always moving out of the way of something, not the least of which was running cast members.

Disney shows are live microphoned singers, so let me end with our blooper reel and Hunchback had some real doosy's.

One of the gargoyle parishoners was supposed to "ask for fame."
Instead he asked for "pain" one day.

In a touching scene, Quasi is supposed to tell Esmerelda that "I don't think I'm your type." Esmerelda replys "Nonsense, your sweet, intellegent (yada yada yada)"
However, Quasi T said one day "I don't think you're my type." Esmerelda had no response for him. Although it was interesting to watch her dig herself out of the hole.

Clopin in the opening of the show was supposed to say something about Paris "...and the cities awake."
What he said was yada yada Paris. ". . . and the titis awake." Hmmm wander who he was looking at in the audience.

Clopin in the Feast of Fools scene, he was supposed to say, "Tospy Turvy is when you shock the Prig and mock the Priest."
One day he said, no lie, "Tospy turvy is when you shock to prig and f##k the priest."

And the stories continue, but at another time.
I found a pretty good version of the old show on youtube. check it out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZrYogrA2Ao

Mother nature's fury meets the Magic Kingdom

2008-05-13T17:04:00.000-07:00

Pardon me if I seem a bit side tracked at the moment. As I am writing this, I am also watching my state burn down on the news. Florida is extremely dry and crispy right now and some idiot decided to light several forest fires. Back in 1998 we had a similar set up that got real close to home. A huge fire burned really close to the Magic Kingdom for serveral days that year. Disney, so far, has faired very well in the face of mother nature's fury, however.

Since there are nightly fireworks displays, Disney keeps every thing well watered and I mean everything. During the 1998 fires, I was working on a Star Wars event at the Studios. If you have never been to Star Wars Weekends and are a Star Wars Fan, you gotta go. We have seventy to eighty Star Wars characters, stars from the movies and hundreds of fanatical, if not a little scary, fans. But more on that at another time.

At the front of the park during Stat Wars Weekends they put Storm Troopers up on top of the turnstiles to torment and amuse the people waiting to come in. If you are familiar with the Studios, you'll know that just inside the front gates is a small information kiosk called Crossroads. On top of it is a spire with a Mickey statue. During the 1998 fires all of the smoke lifted up and over Magic Kingdom and dumped on the Studios. We could barely see a few feet ahead of us. The Storm Troopers on top of the turnstiles couldn't see Crossroads, if fact they could barely see the guests down below. They later said that they only way they kept from falling off the turnstiles was to follow the yellow caution tape marking the edge of the roof.

365 days a year, Disney is never closed. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Y2K scares we were open. However, a stiff hurricane and police ordered evacuation tends to stop us in our tracks. Disney has Hurricane Rideout crews that are made up of Cast members who volunteer to ride out the storm and to keep the place from blowing away(and it's huge amounts of overtime pay). I worked one Ride out Crew years ago. I think it was Hurricane Opal. We gathered in our main wardrobe building and watched one of our managers climb around on top of the fourth tier of the clothes rack as he spread plastic over everything, in case we lost a roof. (It was amazing how much dust he stirred up doing that too.)

That night, nearly a hundred of us tried to sleep on the floor of the Great Movie Ride. The following morning we were expecting destruction and mayhem. No, just branches down and leaves. After a through cleaning, the park was opened a couple hours later. We 'the Rideout crew' were expecting to go home that morning. Oh no. Because of call ins, we had go to work the shows that day. I walked into Beauty and the Beast and said, " I am here to just dress the shows. In between shows, you can find me sleeping underneath the rail of ball gowns."

Y2K, the disaster that never was. Disney planned for the Apocolypse, I think. They had pages of protocol and multiple plans if the world's computers were to crash on January 1, 2000. At every traffic intersection there were generator powered work lights. There were multiple generators staged all through out the parks. You name it, they did it. I also worked part-time at Universal Studios as an Entertainment Tech back then too. After seeing Disney's over planning, I was amazed at how non-chalant Universal was. I arrived at work December 31, 1999 and was handed a sheet of paper. One sheet, that's it. Basically it said, We are shutting down the rides at 11:30 pm. If all hell doesn't break loose at mid night, the rides will be reopened at 12:30.

One last thing, after our record setting four hurricane year with Charley, Francis, Jean and Ivan, the powers that be made pins to thank us for all of our hard work. It's one of my favorite Disney momentos. It's Mickey holding onto his Sorceror's had as the wind is trying to blow it away. http://eventservices.disney.go.com/pintrading/pin?id=34775

If All The World's a Stage, Why Am I stuck in the Dress Rehearsal

2008-05-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have never worked in theater, let me first of all say, "I'm sorry". There is nothing quiet like an entertaiment family. And we truly are a family. Wardrobe / Costuming is mom to everyone. We always knew when some one needed to have a shoulder to cry on or a confidential friend to talk to.

Creative Costuming, those responsible for making the stuff, always seemed to a little out of touch with reality. They could make the most beautiful garment. . . on a dress form, but put it on a living, breathing, sweating person and it would fall apart. Silks looked awesome, but when they were washed, they would bleed like a rainbow. Belle, from the Beauty and the Beast Show, her ball gown was at least thirty, forty pounds. I could never get the thing off the ground to hang it up.

The Technicians are always the dads, (male / female it didn't matter). The techs are the keepers of all things safety, all things flammable and all things that when used wrong or carelessly can injure and or maime someone.

When you hear the words "Pyro coming through..." you Move. The holidays around 2005 or 2004, (i'm keeping it intentionally vague for privacy sake) there was a holiday show that, it was said, the techs wanted the last show of the season to go off with a little extra flair, so they added extra pyro. The performers were not told this and several members of the cast were injured with minor burnes. Some costume pieces melted. I saw one of guys a short time later and he didn't have any eyebrows. They had been singed off.

Then we have our precious children 'The Cast'. I loved my cast . . . most of them. There will always be those individuals that have been seared in my mind that if maiming was legal . . . . sorry, let's move on. I always have a philosophy 'when in rome do as the romans'. Each stage has it's own ambience, it's own culture, it's own unwritten rules of order. Any show with equity dancers, tends to be a bit high maintenance. 'My gloves are not in the right place. OH, I can't go on. My life is ruined.' (disclaimer, for those dancers who will get upset when you read this, go out to the stage, check your preset, then come back and finish reading my blog.)

My favorite stage will always be the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, or as we call it, EPIC. The testostrone runs thick at that show. Predominately a male cast, teaching the boys to pick up after themself usually takes some unorthodox methods. When shoes, hats, etc. would get left laying around the greenroom, the offender would find his items in the freezer the next day frozen in a block of ice. My managers would always freak out when they heard that, but they were always to afraid too step foot in the Epic trailer, so they never knew about the other stuff we'd did. One of they boys newest games (before I left) was throwing hangers at the clothes rack and trying to see if it would stay there. The words "Hanger In Flight !" Usually meant "DUCK".

Parade performers and puppteers always seemed the be the children of the children. You had your old school performers that were awesome. They looked at a new costume and figured out how to make it work. Then some where along the way we aquired a new set of darlings that worked harder at getting out of doing the parade than they ever did in the parade. To watch a puppeet show like Playhouse Disney or Lion King from under the stage is pretty darn cool. From sliding on their knees from one side of stage to other at Playhouse Disney in order to make thier next enterance to learning to see in the dark at Voyage of the Little Mermaid, the puppeteers are usually pretty intense about their jobs.

Then there are the musicians, streetmosphere, face painters, convention performers, Epcot Cultural performers, the horse people, and . . . we'll get to them later.

Look Toto, we're not in Kansas Anymore. . .

2008-05-09T16:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, kids today we're going to talk about that deep, dark mysterious place called 'The Magic Kingdom Tunnels'. Simple answer to do they exist: Yes. Okay, we're moving on. . . . Kidding. Yes, there is a pretty extensive tunnel system under Magic Kingdom. NO, it's not the Emerald city. I have had people get all misty-eyed when they think about entering the inner workings of the great Magic Kingdom.

Reality check time. The Cast members park way behind the park and have to take a five to ten minute bus ride to get to the back of the Magic Kingdom. The mouth of the tunnel is actualy not far from the old 20,000 Leagues under the Sea ride. I believe it was most recently 'Ariel's Grotto'. Disclaimer time, don't try to sneek back stage to find it. First, there are fences and deep drop offs. Secondly, in the currrent light of global security, Disney takes an extremely dim view of extra curious guests.

As far as 'a city' under Magic Kingdom, well, not really. At the mouth of the tunnel is a commissary called the Mousecateria (probably spelled it wrong). All the years I worked at the Studios, we always refered to ours as the commi-scary. I'll elaborate more on that some other time, but let's just say, "baked chicken shouldn't be greasy and pasta shouldn't be crunchy". The commissaries have TV's, Microwaves, and way over prices sodas. One saving grace, most of the park's commisaries added a Subway Sub Shop. It's still over priced, but it's Subway.

The other side of the tunnel enterance is entertainment costuming. You didn't think Mary Poppins and the Princesses washed their own clothes did you ? Mixed in with costuming is the cosmetology department. Any one looking for them, just has to follow the smell of hairspray.

Back on the right side of the tunnel is a place called the Learning Center. There are several of these places scattered through out property. Basically, they are a Disney Cast Mamber library and computer lab. If you decide you have to learn Spanish, because everyone in your department speaks Spanish except you, the learning center has all kinds of resources. If your pay check was eaten by the payroll computer system, you can use the Center's computers to track it down. If you are custodial and you are tired of cleaning up after the 'precious, darling, crabby children that just stuck cotton candy to the seats of the dumbo ride for the THIRD time', you can use the Center's resources to learn a new field, like typing to be a secretary.

Now, you're at a cross roads in the tunnels. Right takes you toward adventure land. Left takes you to Tomarrowland. A left then quick right takes you to a short cut to Mainstreet. The halls are color coded so you know where you are. The stairs and elevators and numbered and labeled as to what's above you. In a perfect world it would work. The few shifts that I have worked at the Kingdom, I was always walking in circles.

Not to rain on your parade, but most of the tunnels are walkways, storage for the restaurants and shops above and a few scattered offices. The one thing that is pretty cool, is over head are various utility lines. water, electric AND a garbage collections system. That was a concept that was pretty darn futuristic in the 60's.

None of the other parks have a tunnel system. Although there are two places were you drive under a lake. One is going back to the Contemporary Resort. The Magic Kingdom Ferry goes over the road. The other one is back near Yacht and Beach club going toward Epcot.

Until next time.

Armadillos and Gators and Deer . . . Oh My

2008-05-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

Disney has always been known as an eco-friendly place. Inspite of major habitat desctruction, wildlife still runs rampant through out the property. Not long ago I was working as a Front Desk Runner for the All Star Resort. Between runs, I usually would find a shady spot and park the pargo (modified golf cart). The nice thing about All Star sports and All Star Music is that the designers incoorporated the natural landscaping into the suroundings. So there was plenty of old growth pine trees, palmetto bushes and other ground cover. On this particular day, I heard a noise crushing it's way through the palmettos. I stopped and waited. I thought it can't be anything dangerous we're in the middle of the resort. A few moments later an armadillo crawled out of the bushes went under my pargo, came out the other side, looked up at me then meandered it's way across the drive.

That's what wildlife does on Disney property. They know that no one hunts them (anymore), so they meander. The next time you go to Magic Kingdom, keep and eye out on your left (East. . .I think. The opposite side of the monorail.) I usually find anywhere between four to ten wild turkey 'meandering' along the open fields beside the road. I had to park in cast parking for an overtime shift last year and found that the cast members have learned to share thier parking lot with them as well.

I don't golf. I have never golfed and know I would be horrible at it. The only time I have ever been on a golf course was when my brother and two of his friends wanted me to get them a tee time on a Disney course. Since there was three of them and two golf carts, I tagged along. A little side note, I learned that they weren't very good golfers either. :) Anyway, the back nine of the Magnolia course is full of deer, rabbits, squirrels, you name it. I felt like i was in a Bambi movie. If you are ever driving around the back side of Magic Kingdom, you're not supposed to be that far back, but in case you are, take those curves behind Grand Floridian slow. That is prime deer territory.

Back a few years ago, I had just left the Studios on the way home, and in the wooded area between the Studios parking lot and Victory Way, I saw a large clump of tan scruffy fur on the edge of a swampy area. I came to a complete stop on the road. I know the people behind me thought I was nuts, but I had to stop. The clump of fur was a Bobcat. A real, life, top of the food chain Bobcat. He tooled along the edge of the woods for a few moments then disappeared back into the undergrowth.

I can't end this enstallment with out talking about one of our most meligned and misunderstood creatures. . . The Alligator. I can always tell when guests are from up north and out west. We usually get biraged with gator questions. I have had guests ask 'Disney relocates all of the gators, right?' 'Ahhh, No.' Logistically that would be impossible. I was flying back to Orlando from England a few years ago and a gentleman asked me, 'Now, seriously, do alligators really get into swimming pools ?' I had had to confirm that 'yes they do get into swimming pools', but I am pretty sure that you'll see them before you dive in the deep end. At that point I always go into my Gator 101 class. Number one, if you see a gator and it doesn't acknowledge you, that's good. It means that it's doesn't associate people with food. Number two, never, ever feed an alligator. There will be no Crocodile Hunter activities allowed on property. Number three, assume that all bodies of waterin Florida and the Southeast have at least one and probably more gators. However, if you are on Disney property and you rent a Sea Racer or other water craft, have fun and don't worry about alligators. They are usually very shy creatures, that when not fed by stupid people, pose very little threat.

We did have a guest paniced one day. She swore that there was baby alligator in her hotel room and that she wanted it removed immediatedly. . . . It was a tiny lizard, but more about our lizards, geckos and snakes later.

Until next time---

....above all else remember it was all started by a Mouse - Walt Disney

2008-05-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

At any book store you can fine literally hundreds of tour books about how to get from point "A" to point "B" at Disney's Magic Kingdom (or as we say 'Tragic Kingdom'), but there are very few places that will tell you what it's like to be trapped in a fireworks fall out zone. Seeing large balls of fire bouncing off the roofs of back stage trailers at the Studios is an experience you don't soon forget.

After many, many years of working for The Mouse, I've seen a lot of truly unique stories and I've worked a lot of exciting events. The opening of Animal Kingdom will always be one of my fondest memories. As the blog moves forward, I have no intentions of devulging deep dark secrets. . . like Walt is frozen in a cryogentics chamber in the Magic Kingdom castle (by the way, he's not) nor am I going to be just another travel log spouting 'warm fuzzy thoughts about the company'. Believe me, there is so much sugary fluff written about this company, you could choke a horse.

My goal is to relate the stories that you would only experience if you were on the inside. Stories like 'what's it's like to work backstage at Beauty and the Beast show', or the about the guest ' got drunk and passed out in thier hotel room with the water running in the tub."

So welcome, feel free to ask questions, make comments (keep it clean and tasteful)

Deydreem