Traditions and Dinner with my Roommates

On Friday I went to Traditions. This is the class that teaches you all about being an official Walt Disney World cast member. I wasn’t sure if it would be boring or not. Parts of it were – the parts that are required for anyone being an employee anywhere, the parts about safety and OSHA and harassment, but they got through those as quickly as they could, and everything that was specific to Disney was interesting – it was all about what makes Disney magic!
First off, I’m a cast member in a costume, not an employee in a uniform. You might think that this is just a silly matter of semantics, but it’s not. It’s a whole worldview. (Sorry, CUers, had to put that in…) We are treated and honored as members of the cast of a show, not lowly employees. The costumes are for beauty and the visual effect for the guests (not customers!), not for boring utilitarianism. Even my costume, which is one of the most boring ones, has some bright yellow and blue on it, and it’s bright white instead of a dull gray, which would be more practical for cleaning, but wouldn’t look as nice. And the guests really are guests, not just customers. It’s the whole thing Walt Disney started – if you focus more on making the guests happy than on making money, the money will come. The goal, oddly enough, that we were taught as the main point of Walt Disney World, is not to get as much money out of each person as possible. It is to do everything in our power to make sure that every person in the park has them most fabulous time of his or her life. Of course, there is some focus on making money – it’s a business. There are the little shops everywhere so that people will buy things, and of course they’re overpriced. But you have to make some money to make the magic possible. And a sort of summing-up of all this is where I come in.
I’m magic – every cast member is. If I watch a little girl trip and drop her ice cream cone on the ground, I can take her and her parents to the nearest ice cream place and get her a new one, for free. If a little boy loses hold of his balloon and it goes floating away up over Cinderella’s castle, I can get him a new one. Can you imagine this happening at, say, Michigan’s Adventure? As much as I love that place – if I lost my ice cream cone there, and a custodial person tried to take me to the place to get a new one for free, they’d laugh in our faces. And I learned in my more role-specific training today, that we can do it without asking anyone for anything up to $30, and even if it’s more than $30, we can call a manager and ask about it.
The four values are safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency. In that order. Although I think show and courtesy might be tied, actually. But at any rate, my personality is a big fan of the fact that efficiency is at the bottom. It’s there, and it’s important, but it’s not the most important thing.
I think that by the end of the class many people were jealous of my placement in Magic Kingdom. Because really, it’s at the heart of the magic. And I’m so glad I get to spend most of my time for the next semester in one of my favorite places in the world.
We play along. We curtsey to the little girls and call them “Your Highness.” When someone asks how Tinkerbelle flies, before the fireworks show, we say, “With pixie dust, of course!” No matter how old the person asking is. Because in Magic Kingdom, fairy tales are real. For just one day, we can make everything almost perfect. It won’t be perfect, this side of heaven. But we can give people a taste. And maybe it will whet their appetite for what things are really supposed to be like.
On Friday night my roommates and I (except Nicole, who was doing something else) went out to eat. We were going to go to a place called Sizzlers, because we could get a discount there, but we haven’t fully mastered the confusingly named roads of this area yet, and we couldn’t find it. So we went to Ponderosa instead. It was a little more money than I wanted to spend, but well worth it for the sake of bonding with my roommates. And the food was good.
We were talking about languages, and I was telling about how my dad spoke Spanish because he grew up in Venezuela. And then they wondered why, because it was pretty clear I wasn’t Hispanic. (Nicole and Dani are, and Kara’s Japanese, and Marijka’s Philipino. So now you can picture them slightly more accurately, in case you were picturing them with blond hair or something. No one has blond hair in our apartment.) So I told them that my dad’s parents were missionaries in Venezuela. A little later my family came up again and they asked what my dad did. I couldn’t remember the catechism answer (what is it again, Papa?), so I just said, “He’s the coordinator of Spanish language ministries at the Institute for Religious Research in Grand Rapids.”
“Oh,” they replied. And of course the next question was,
“Is your family very religious?”
“What do you mean by very religious?” I asked. They were stumped for a moment as to how to explain it.
“Well, do you go to church – as a family?” Kara asked.
“Yes.”
“Every Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then,” she said, as though that settled the matter. I knew it didn’t, of course, but decided not to pursue it right then. That sort of thing is better with only two or three people, not five, unless you know each other quite well. At least that’s how it seems to me. Talking about it further when four people are required to listen for the sake of politeness is too much like preaching. We hadn’t got beyond the small talk stage yet, and Christianity doesn’t make good small talk. It’s all or nothing. But that’s enough of me philosophizing, and that’s also the end of the account of Friday.