Animal Kingdom

Because I taught a workshop at the Epcot International Festival of the Arts, I was issued two free tickets to the Disney Theme parks as a thank you. Cleaning up around the house, Pam Schwartz and I found the tickets and realized that there was just one week left before the tickets expired. We decided to go the next day which was a Sunday. The Animal Kingdom was our destination which I had only been to once before. We watched the movie Avatar the night before, and made a commitment to go to the new Pandora Land in the Animal Kingdom.

As we drove south toward Disney it started to rain. We wanted to get some breakfast at Panera Bread, but when we got there the restaurant had evacuated the building. We got crummy overpriced breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks instead. I checked the radar and realized that it would be raining all morning. We put a positive spin on this by thinking the park might be empty when we arrived. We were dead wrong. Nothing stops the flow of humanity to the theme parks. Parking was $25. As I had my bag checked by security, a waterfall suddenly poured down on my shoulder from an umbrella that gave way its weight of water.

The first order of business was to get a plastic bag to protect my sketchbook. With that done, we wandered the park towards Pandora – The World of Avatar. The land is impressively designed and landscaped. The floating islands were amazing and I wanted to sketch, but not in the rain. The wait time for Avatar – Flight of Passage was like 190 minutes, How many hours is that? We skipped that ride and decided to find rides with shorter wait times. Every ride we tried was shut down. We also had fast passes to some rides. The fast passes kept getting canceled. As we got turned away from attraction after attraction we both got pretty grumpy. WTF.

Then we decided to get some food to get away from the rain. All the sit down restaurants we approached had insane wait times. Clearly every family in the park had the same idea of using the restaurant as a place to stay dry for a bit. The smaller food carts weren’t much better, I couldn’t stomach the idea of paying $15 for a hot dog. A majority of the “affordable” quick grab food stands were also closed. We would have to hide under a gutter overhang to try and stay dry as we ate. We finally did split a macaroni and cheese.

My sketch is of Up, a Great Bird Adventure in Asia. We went in simply because the audience had cover from the rain. The stage however was still getting soaked. The announcer wasn’t sure the show would go on. The Disney cast did come out and performed at the front of the stage which was barely under the awning. Russel and Doug from the Pixar movie, Up were amongst the cast. A bird flew out and turned on the radio on stage. A green parrot did manage to belt out a tune. But the peacocks were divas and refused to go out on stage in the rain. The show was cut short and everyone was ushered back out into the rain. I kept working on the sketch until the cast practically had to drag me out.

Theme parks are a special kind of hell. Screaming children were having tantrums everywhere. You got to see the worst in parenting. We were on a theme park death march from land to land in the endless rain. My feet were soaked all day. We sought cover in every stage show we could find. In the afternoon the sun finally broke through. We waited for an eternity going through endless switchbacks to get on the back of a Banshee and fly. I have to admit that the all too brief ride was the best thing we did that day. It was a 3D motion simulation ride that really did an amazing job of making it feel like we were flying. I kind of wish there was truly some control so that each ride was unique, but it is what it is. We ended the day at Rivers of Light which was impressive, but could have used a story line to tie together the animal-themed projections. Would I return to Animal Kingdom any time soon? Hell no. Disney would have to pay me (again) to return.

Wednesday Open Words

Every Wednesday at Austin’s Coffee, (929 West Fairbanks Avenue in Winter Park FL) Curtis Meyer hosts an Open Mic called “Wednesday Open Words.” The evening starts at 8pm but I was in Winter Park and decided to go to Austin’s Coffee early to grab some diner. Students sat on the makeshift stage immersed in their laptops. The young woman seated across from me lounged on the couch intently reading a real paper bound book. I watched her expression as the read and at times she was visibly upset. Something horrible was going on in those pages. I imagined she might be reading “The Catcher in the Rye.” As I recall it had a red cover. When she got up to leave she noticed my sketch. I had to ask her what she was reading. It turned out that “The Hunger Games” was required reading for one of her classes.

Curtis arrived and gradually he cleared the stage and set up a microphone. The theme for the evening was Disney Animated Films. Having worked at Feature Animation, I had to be a bit of an expert on the decade of films I worked on. Curtis was very stoked about the film “Saving Mr. Banks” which stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. He insisted I go see it. To warm up the crowd, Curtis had everyone repeat, “Pink pajamas, penguins on the bottom.” It is a tongue twister which is rather fun to repeat again and again in succession. There were trivia questions between readers and I managed to guess the name of the dog in Disney Pixar’s “Up.” The dogs name was Dug. I won an odd green feathery pin with a yellow skull from “The Princess and the Frog.” It is now partially stained with black ink from one of my pens.

One particularly fun poem used all of the Disney made up words. It turns out that besides Supercalafragalisticexpialadoshus, there are many others that are just as strange. Curtis wanted to find one word that defines each Disney film plot. For instance Rapunzel, the word is Tangled. For Snow Queen the word is Frozen. For Little Mermaid the word might be pants. For Beauty and the Beast the word would be Stockholmed. This might make a good drinking game to whittle each film down to one word. One line from someones poem stuck with me, “The beauty of the world makes demands on us.

Curtis was great about being sure the audience respected how brave all the speakers were. Public speaking is a universal fear. Snapping fingers were encouraged when the poems were profound. Seda Gay spoke about four grown women who returned to the Disney theme parks together. Two of those women were now divorced but they all stepped back to their childhood relationships discovering where they left off. One poet was accompanied by a guitar player. He said most of his creative ideas were formed by the age of 11. He imagined flying being an everyday occurrence to get through our heavy Earth bound days. He was of course speaking as Peter Pan. Curtis chimed in, “All you got to do is believe.”