Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports.
I’ve been there. A thousand years ago, my wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, and I traveled 3,000 miles with our daughter Jessie, then a three-year-old, to Disneyland to see “Mickey.”
We were less than 20 feet inside the Disney property when three characters, one dressed like Pluto, along with one dyspeptic-looking and another dopey-looking dwarf, rushed up and hugged my daughter. She started to hysterically scream, thinking she was being attacked by a nine-foot-tall dog and two four-foot dwarfs with giant heads. She didn’t stop crying for hours. The only character who calmed her down was an attractive young blond woman in a pink dress who was billed as Cinderella. It was quite a sight – there was Cinderella kneeling down so that she was eye level with about eight little kids who were gazing at her in awe.
There were the children’s mothers, misty-eyed at their kids’ sense of innocence and wonder. There were the kids’ fathers, standing on their toes to better look down the front of Cinderella’s dress. Forget men are from Mars, women are from Venus; this, I thought, is the difference between men and women. I remember feeling like a low-life standing there, with the other fathers, on our toes trying to get a look at Cinderella’s cleavage. I don’t know about the other men, but I hated myself. For crying out loud, I was lusting after Cinderella! What was next for me, Snow White?
Of course my daughter was too young to go on any ride except something called the “Pink Teacup.” I had to ride with her over and over, spinning around until I almost threw up the corn dogs, frozen bananas and icky green drink that I had eaten because it was the stuff that passed as food in Disney World in those days.
Did I learn my lesson that trip? Of course not – a few years later, I carried my sleeping four-year-old son on my back for hours at Epcot Center in Florida. After a while, he felt like he weighed 200 pounds. This may give me a heart attack, I thought to myself. Then I started wondering if the EMS guys, who were going to have to paddle my heart back into rhythm, would arrive with paddles that had Disney characters painted on them.
