The Happiest Place On Earth

Slouched in waning anticipation, I sat enduring the first of many waits from the back seat of a rented sedan. My first trip to Disneyland was also my first to California, and as the unfamiliar Anaheim sun coerced the car’s interior climate from balmy to tropical, an uncomfortable sweat formed along my spine; born then absorbed first into my t-shirt, then into the polyester seat. I made a strong appeal for someone – anyone!- to turn on the air conditioning. “It doesn’t work. You’ll just have to roll down your window,” came the stern verdict from the front. Ah yes, much like the push-button at the crosswalk, I have long suspected the rental-car air conditioning button to be either a long and elaborate social experiment on human gullibility, or a means of pacification based on the conclusions of such an experiment that were long ago reached. As our oven inched glacially closer to some predestined parking space, we would occasionally round a corner, at which point the sunlight would refract through the partially ajar window and seer my ivory thigh. Like an ant beneath the lens of some malevolent child, I felt how cars like ours had looked from our descending airplane just hours before.

When we eventually reached our space there was a hasty exit of the vehicle, as if we were distancing ourselves from unsavory company upon sighting someone we whose respect we valued. Imbibing the panorama view before me, I suddenly became anxious. “Where’s the park?!” I asked my father in indignant alarm. Pulling a shiny map from his shorts pocket, he pointed toward the horizon. I followed his finger, squinting into the distance, and I spied it: the Matterhorn Mountain and Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, far away past a pavement moat and penitentiary fence. Just like in the commercial. My eyes alternated from the oceanic expanse of asphalt back to the map, on which the rational lines of the parking grid competed for prominence with the reverie of shapes and colors that was Disneyland. At the entrance my parents produced some paperwork to claim our prepaid family package, and after little adieu, we were admitted into that small republic of enforced happiness. “Welcome to the happiest place on earth!” gushed a young woman in a red polo. We pressed past as she repeated her mantra to the next set of incoming patrons, and the next, and the next. We had a wonderful day.

At the time I lacked the equipment to see it as I do now. I did not detect the intention that was dripping from the strategically placed gift shop gauntlet through which we were channeled at the end of each ride, or the cadence in the words of the greeter at the gate, honed by repetition. Like viewing a favorite Disney movie for the first time since childhood, there are certain things that, upon revisiting, I find I had missed entirely: a brief cultural reference; a sly innuendo. These, I find, - like much of Disneyland – went happily whistling above my sunburned head. And I am certain that my ignorance served me well enough at the time. But I am always delighted upon returning to such memories to discover those previously unrecognized obscenities. They somehow repay the time expended reminiscing, and often make the recollection itself all the more rewarding, if only because we are seeing it for the first time as it actually was. I find it best to live without illusion.

Now at this point, lest you feel tempted to regale me with your indignation at my having depicted Disneyland as anything other than a shining oasis of childhood purity distilled, I say to you this: spare me. Embrace the underbelly, or at the very least, embrace the fact that there is an underbelly. It can be a difficult shift, but it makes most things far more amusing. In the meantime, you’ll have to excuse me. It’s almost my turn for the teacup ride.