Disney World
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 10/27/95
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IMPORTANT NOTE: This article was written and published years before I met the lovely Carolyn Kelly, who was the lady in my life for twenty years. The Carolyn mentioned in this story is a different woman named Carolyn. Proceed…
As anyone who cares knows, for several years now, I've been writing/producing/doing stuff on the Garfield TV cartoons. March of '94, all the important folks involved with The Cat gathered at Disney World in Florida for an important conference and, for some reason, they wanted me there. Deciding that there are worse things in this world than a free trip to Disney World, I agreed to attend.
I flew first to New York and spent a week there on business and show-going. Then it was off to Orlando, Florida…my first time-ever in that state.
A special shuttle bus picked a group of us up at the airport and drove us to the hotel where we were all convening. One moment I recall from that trip came when our driver — a chatty fellow, not entirely without things to say — explained, "We will soon be leaving Florida state property and going onto property that is owned and maintained by the Disney organization."
Someone else in the shuttle asked how we would know when we crossed that line. He answered, "You'll know…believe me, you'll know."
Sure enough, a mile or two later, though there was no marker of any sort, we knew: The street was suddenly spanking clean and perfectly paved. Up until that point, there had been litter and potholes and debris and, worst of all, billboards for non-Disney enterprises. Then we crossed some imaginary, invisible line and everything was immaculate. "We ought to let Disney run the government," someone said. (Frankly, I thought they were already running California and that all the floods and quakes and fires were parts of an oversized Splash Mountain…)
In case you've never been there, as I hadn't, Disney World is not one amusement park with a bunch of bad hotels around it like Disneyland.
Rather, it is a tourist community of several amusement (or "theme" parks, as they call them), surrounded by a dozen or so Disney-run hotels. You can stay at the Swan or the Dolphin or any of a number of inns and then, by Disney bus, shuttle boats or car, travel to the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, the MGM-Disney theme park, the nearby Universal Studios Tour…even a Disney-operated collection of nightclubs called Pleasure Island. On the outskirts are many non-Disney hotels and attractions as well. It all makes for a very clean, commercial tourist environment; I found it especially comforting that there is no location in all of Orlando, Florida where you ever more than twenty paces from someone who can sell you a Goofy t-shirt.
Our shuttle took us to the Disney Yacht Club, a lovely beachside hotel, located directly next to the nearly-identical Disney Beach Club. I checked in, hooked up with other Garfield people and we spent a nice evening dining at the nearby Dolphin Hotel. Then I returned to my room for a few hours' work on this here laptop computer with which I travel.
Before I went to bed, I phoned Los Angeles to verify plans with my friend Carolyn. After the Garfield conference was over, I was going to spend a few days exploring Disney World and, that not being the kind of thing one wants to do solo, I invited Carolyn to fly to Orlando and accompany me.
Carolyn is an actress…very charming, very attractive. She has but one flaw and I'm not insulting her by mentioning it here since she readily owns up to it. She is incapable of being anywhere on time.
I've known her for about two years — ever since I directed her in a stage production of California Suite — and we have been through all the obvious jokes about taking three hours to watch 60 Minutes or twenty minutes to make three-minute eggs. Actually, Carolyn's problem is a complete inability to decide what to wear. She cannot leave her home without trying on every possible combination of everything that could possibly adorn her body.
This might conceivably make some sense if she had a wide array of styles to her clothing but, 99% of the time, the choice between one outfit and another is like deciding between eating the light brown M&M's and eating the dark brown M&M's. She looks equally good, equally cute in anything she owns; still, she plows through every possible item in her closet as if the right blouse will make her look like Kathy Ireland and the wrong blouse will make her indistinguishable from Abe Vigoda.
If I am there and waiting, the routine is always the same. She will try on the first outfit and model it for me. I will tell her it is fine. And it always is….though, simply because she tried it on first, there is no earthly way it will ever be worn into the public arena.
She will then try on the second outfit and model it for me. I will tell her that it also is fine. (And it is.)
She will then try on the third outfit and I will tell her it is fine. I will tell her the next outfit will be fine and the one after it and the one after it and that the only thing that is notfine is missing our dinner reservation and the play for which I have $65.00 tickets.
"Okay, just one more," she will say, which means at least six more. She will try on another outfit, then another, then this one with that belt, then that one with this belt, then the last two outfits again, this time with no belts. Then, just to make sure we both remember what they looked like, she will try on the first three outfits again.
At some point, she will start getting creative and she'll try on the top of Outfit #1 and the bottom of Outfit #2. Then she'll try the bottom of #2 with the top of #1. Then pieces of #3 will be filtered into the sampling. On one trip we took, I limited her to only three outfits. Somehow, defying all laws of mathematics, she managed to get eighty-four different combinations out of them.
(That was the trip to Las Vegas for the Video Software Dealers convention. We were an hour late for the show and she was down to deciding which of the three pairs of shoes she bought would go best with the outfit she had — finally — selected. After twenty minutes of shoe-pondering, I lost it. I yelled, "The place we're going, there will be thirty Playboy Playmates and three-dozen Penthouse Pets walking around in string bikinis! There will be porno actresses with seventy-inch bustlines putting on mud-wrestling exhibitions! NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON WILL BE LOOKING AT YOUR SHOES!!!")
When I invited her to come down to Orlando, I suppose I knew what I was getting into. I have no one to blame but myself. Still, I never dreamed it would come out precisely the way it did…
Friday morning and afternoon were taken up with Garfield business meetings. A big party was set for Friday evening. I had booked Carolyn's ticket so she'd leave L.A. at 8 A.M., get into Orlando at 4 P.M. and then, allowing an hour for the shuttle to the hotel, half-an-hour for her to freshen up and two-and-a-half hours for her to decide on an outfit, we could be at the party at eight.
Around 3:00, when I figured she'd be somewhere over New Orleans, Carolyn called from Los Angeles: She'd missed the plane.
Why did she miss the plane? Well, if you got up at 6 A.M. and spent two hours and ten minutes trying to decide what to pack, you'd miss an 8 A.M. flight, too. They had her rebooked on the Noon plane, which meant she'd be getting into Orlando around eight…and might make it to the hotel in time for the end of the party. Sigh.
Around eight, when Carolyn's plane was near touchdown in Orlando, I arrived stag at the party. Somewhere up in the skies, my date — determined to miss as little of the party as possible — had actually decided what to wear to the party and had donned it in the airplane restroom. (Don't ask me how she managed it in one of those tiny cubicles; I can barely manage to do the stuff you're supposed to do in an airplane restroom in an airplane restroom.) Moreover, she somehow talked a flight attendant into helping her curl her hair so she came off the plane around 8:15, ready for the party.
There was no shuttle to the Yacht Club at that hour but there was one to the Beach Club and she talked them into going slightly out of their way and dropping her off at the hotel next door…which they did. Around 8:45, she was dropped off at the Disney Yacht Club. She handed her luggage and a tip to a bellhop, gave him our room number and asked him to check her bag. Then she headed straight for the party…or what was left of it. Dinner was long gone but I'd gotten them to save her an entree and, since the band was still at it, we actually had a pretty good time.
Around Midnight, we strolled back through the hotel and wandered through the Disney Gift Shop — one of those ubiquitous spots to buy Mickey Mouse t-shirts and other, more upscale clothing, as well. Carolyn started pointing to almost every item in the place: "Ooh, I want one of those…and I want to buy one of those for my nephew…and one of those for my friend…and two of those for me…" It was starting to sound very expensive.
We went up to our room and I called down to have her bag brought up. Twenty minutes later, I called again. And again, ten minutes later.
A little after one A.M., I went downstairs to see what was keeping Carolyn's luggage. What was keeping it was that they couldn't find it. The lone night bellman and I searched the storage room, several closets, the stand outside where she'd checked it…everywhere. No sign of Carolyn's bag.
She came downstairs in a robe and helped us look. No luck.
Around two A.M., Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, wandered into the hotel and saw us scurrying about. He wound up joining in the hunt.
Finally, we had searched every place that could be searched. There was one possible answer: The suitcase had been delivered to the wrong room and someone had it and hadn't reported it. Perhaps they hadn't noticed it. "In the morning, someone will notice they have an extra suitcase sitting there," the bellman said with enough confidence that we believed him. We all went off to bed.
Dawn broke over Disney World, Carolyn awoke and called downstairs to the bell desk. "Any sign of my luggage?" There was no sign of her luggage.
By ten, it still hadn't turned up, which presented this problem: A group of us were meeting at eleven to go over to the Disney-MGM Theme Park. Carolyn couldn't very well wear her party dress over there (although that was suggested…)
The Disney folks sighed and opened the Gift Store to her. "Take anything you like on the house," they told her. This then was the day that Disney stock dropped twenty-seven points.
She went through like the fussiest shopper in all the world: "I can't wear that…or that…and I especially wouldn't be caught dead in that." Somehow, in just under an hour, she managed to pick out the most expensive outfit in the store, including a hat, athletic shoes and a matching purse. When I saw the combined price tags, I had visions of Michael Eisner dining on Hamburger Helper for a month.
In the meantime, the Bell Captain at the Yacht Club summoned the entire day shift and told them that the hotel would be dismantled into individual pieces if need be but they were going to locate this missing suitcase. "We'll have it back before you return," he promised. He did not add but I know he was thinking, "…before we have to cough up another outfit for the lady."
Amazingly close to "on time," Carolyn and I journeyed over to the Disney-MGM Theme Park, along with a dozen others from the Garfield staff. A guidebook I'd consulted had cautioned that, on a Saturday this time of year, one could expect every attraction and eatery to have a line that backed up to Shreveport. Turned out, the guidebook couldn't have been more wrong: We got into everything with only minimal wait. At lunchtime, we practically had the park's largest restaurant all to ourselves.
I'm not a huge fan of amusement parks; I have trouble with the whole concept of "rides." An amusement park "ride" is where you pay them to let you undergo an experience that, if it happened on a bus or airplane, you'd never patronize that company again. I had a lady friend once who kept trying to get me on roller coasters, saying things like, "Oh, you'll love this one…when it makes the outside loop, it feels like your entire stomach is about to burst out through your ears." She couldn't grasp that I felt I could live my entire life without knowing exactly what that felt like.
Still, we all had a good time that day, even though I guess I seemed distracted at times. It was nagging at me that, somehow, I should be able to figure out where Carolyn's suitcase was. It was as if Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen had said to me, "You have all the clues you need…can't you figure it out?"
Finally, right in the middle of the Muppet 3-D Vision exhibit, it hit me: I suddenly knew where Carolyn's suitcase was!
Or, at least, I had a theory. I slipped away from the others to use the men's room, located a pay phone and called the Bell Captain at the Yacht Club to share my theory. He'd had his charges tearing the building apart to no success and, when I told him where I thought it was, he nearly leaped for joy. "Yes, yes," he shouted. "That must be it! I'll go check for myself!"
I returned to the Garfield entourage and our touring, saying nothing of my theory, the better to prevent false hopes.
Close to sundown, we returned to the Yacht Club and Carolyn asked at the Bell Desk about her errant luggage. "No," an assistant told her. "I'm sorry but there's been no sign of it."
"Well, I need something to wear tonight. We're all going to Pleasure Island."
"Can't you wear your party dress from last night?" the assistant asked…and foolishly, I might add. Asking Carolyn if she could wear the same thing two nights in a row was like asking Hitler to invade Poland a second time. Or something of the sort.
Carolyn said no and they were just about to give her the run of the Disney Store again when the Bell Captain came running up, the missing Samsonite in hand, yelling, "I found it, I found it!" The unspoken (but unmistakable) subtext in his voice cried out, "I have just saved the entire Walt Disney organization from bankruptcy!"
"Where was it?" Carolyn asked.
The Bell Captain explained it had been sitting in the checkroom of the adjacent (and nearly-identical) Disney Beach Club. Remember, Carolyn had come to the Yacht Club, where I was staying, on the shuttle for the Beach Club. When she gave the bellhop our room number, he must have assumed she was from the Beach Club, for he had the suitcase transported over there…which is where it had been all night.
I thought for a moment that Carolyn looked delighted. "What made you think to look there?" she asked the Bell Captain.
"Oh," he said modestly, "it wasn't my idea…it was your boy friend here –!" And he motioned to me. I grinned proudly and waited for Carolyn to throw her arms around my neck, tell me how brilliant I was and thank me with an "E" ticket kiss.
Instead, she punched me in the arm, called me a nasty name and spat, "You couldn't wait until I got another outfit out of it?"