In Which Cinderannie Meets a Photographer and Visits Cinderella

Tuesdays look to be turning into quite exciting days. You see, Tiff usually has Tuesdays off. And Kari always does, because she has a class from 2-6. Dori’s days switch around. But anyway, after Kari and I’s grand morning at Epcot, we thought we might like to do that on most Tuesday mornings before her class – go to a park right when it opens and enjoy the non-crowdedness. The trouble was my days off had always been Wednesday-Thursday. But this week and next week it’s switched to Tuesday-Wednesday, so maybe I’m having very good fortune.
But besides the mornings, we have discovered something very exciting for the evenings. Let me back up a bit, to a week ago yesterday.

It had been a very rainy day, and Liberty Tree was so “dead” (our term meaning barely any guests were there) that the manager let me go home early. When I arrived home, I found Tiff, Kari, and Dori all in our room, getting dressed up. They explained that they were getting all “gussied up” (as Tiff described it) to go to Downtown Disney, just for fun. It sounded great to me, so I took a quick shower and then let Kari pick out my clothes and do my makeup. She has a knack for it and it turned out very nice, especially how she did my hair. When we were all ready we headed out. The sky seemed to be still threatening rain, so Tiff and Kari both brought an umbrella.
When we reached Downtown, we first stopped by Ghirardelli Chocolate. This is always the first stop we make at DD, because they give you a free sample of chocolate. You can’t beat that – and it’s excellent chocolate, too. Then we went to World of Disney. Kari had the idea of us going to wherever they do the Bibbidy Bobbidy Boutique photos and seeing if they would take our pictures. I was uncertain at first if we would be allowed but agreed to ask and find out. The lady working near BBB said that the place was at the Photo center at guest relations, and she didn’t know if they were still open, but we could check it out if we wanted to. So we trekked over.
When we went inside the guest relations building, there were no guests. The two photopass photographers (a man and a woman) were standing around looking bored. I walked up and asked whether we were allowed to get our pictures taken in their little studio thing even though we hadn’t been to BBB, and the man (he had bright blue eyes and spiky hair) said “I don’t know, you can see we’re just swamped with guests today…” We all laughed and he beckoned us around to set our things down on benches in the corner. Then we all came into the studio.
“So, what do you want? Group? Individual?” We decided to do group pictures first and maybe some individuals later. And that was the beginning of over an hour of ridiculousness and fun, of poses both traditional and crazy. At one point Tiff said to the photographer,
“Is it just me, or are you having as much fun as we are?”
“You don’t understand!” he replied. “It’s been like this” – he gestured to the empty room – “ALL DAY!”
So we got lots of fun pictures, and then at the end he said that we should come back again sometime and do it again, coming at about that same time when no one was there, especially on rainy days, and that he worked Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. And we ended up going again the next Tuesday and getting pictures again, and this time at the end he said if we ever wanted to just hang out at the parks and have him take pictures of us, we should let him know. We couldn’t believe he was serious! So maybe sometime we’ll get to do that.

In other exciting news…
A little while ago, I was standing at the podium, chatting with the other seaters because there was no one to seat, and William (my trainer, if you recall) said something out of the blue that my brain at first didn’t process. It somehow connected to whatever we had been saying, though I don’t remember how.
“Yeah, you’re going to be cross-training at Cinderella’s.”

I didn’t say anything at first. My brain didn’t grasp the significance of what he had just said. Then it clicked. Me. Cross-training. As in training so I could work there. At Cinderella’s Royal Table. The restaurant in the castle. Then I started grinning and couldn’t stop. The rest of the day I kept repeating in a sing-song what I had heard a little boy saying at lunch one day –
“I’m going to Cinde-rel­-la! I’m going to Cinde-rel-a!”

It finally appeared on my schedule for this week, and I trained there on Sunday and Monday. There was one bad thing about this. Because Cinderella’s is open for breakfast, and because when you train you have to learn everything, I had to be there for learning how to open at 6:00am on Sunday. The day of losing an hour because of daylight savings time. After having to close at Liberty Tree and getting out at 10:25pm. Needless to say, I was expecting to feel very sleepy. However, I actually had a surprising amount of energy and only had about a half-hour where I felt sleepy, right before lunch. Speaking of lunch… they fed us breakfast and lunch! And it was so delicious! I want to learn to make scrambled eggs that good. And cheesy breakfast potatoes and a deep-fried cheese danish with blueberry over the top, and for lunch a whole bunch of different things like fancy porkchops and couscous and `jasmine rice and a sort of mushroom sauce and other things I’m not sure how to describe. And for dessert a “chocolate cheesecake buckle” which is shaped like a giant muffin and tastes like a very moist very rich cupcake. And know what? I saw Cinderella in the break room and she said "Good morning" to me! I found this very exciting. And I am hoping that at some point I may actually see her enough - she 's generally busy with guests - to convey at least one of the messages my little sister has requested me to give to her.
I like Cinderella’s. The atmosphere is very different from Liberty Tree. I like both, and both are very suited to how they are meant to be. Liberty Tree is very relaxed and we tend to “wing it” a bit. It feels like a home meal, the dining room is mostly wood, all cozy little rooms and it tends to be loud and the characters are always being silly. Cinderella’s is, of course, much more royal. The dining room is full of the cool brightness of indirect sunlight, since one whole wall is all windows. It is open and airy, and gives the feeling of being in the clouds. Everything is run more precisely. If Liberty corresponds to the element of earth, Cinderella’s corresponds to the element of air. At Liberty one would half-expect to find a roaring fire in the fireplace and some dwarves or hobbits or ordinary workingmen cheerily having a beer and a pipe in some corner. At Cinderella’s one would expect the breeze to bring swirls of cloud in the window or to be able to reach out and touch a star. There are no chipmunks dashing about and saying that the other one smells, no Goofy sliding across the dining room with one foot up on a chair. The Princesses hold court, moving gracefully and graciously from one table to another, talking softly and sweetly. We address the families and “my lord” and “my lady” (the parents or brothers) or “your highness” and “princess” (the daughters). I had to catch myself so as to not be too casual in my address as I seated. We present each child with a wishing star – I am hoping to have one of my own at some point – and tell them that their royal attendant will be with them shortly. There is more room for role play, because there is a greater focus on fairytales. Liberty feels a bit more like an ordinary restaurant – if a restaurant with Minnie and Goofy, and all of the girls wearing bonnets, can be called ordinary – and we aren’t really taught to play up the colonial aspect much in the way we address the guests. Mostly it’s just ordinary restaurant talk with extra Disney friendliness. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I dearly love role play, and getting to be at Cinderella’s where the fairytale story is at the heart of the experience, where we are encouraged to be as in-character as possible, is a delight.
Another wonderfully fun thing about Cinderella’s is the possibility for making very delightful magic. You see, the restaurant is booked up three or four months in advance. However, throughout those three or four months – even up to the day of – people are cancelling. Now, these cancellations are filled within a few hours – or even minutes – of opening up. It’s all on the computer, and people at the dining hotline and all the resorts and parks have access to it, and most likely at any given moment someone is trying to find a guest a space at the restaurant during their vacation. All this to say, it is a delightful thing to be at the podium. Because families are always coming up to the podium hoping for cancellations. And at first, my trainer would always say that she had checked the next two weeks and there were no openings – which she had, only a few hours before. But she (being a full-time trainer who bounces between Tony’s and Cinderella’s) has not fully grasped the magic of randomly appearing cancellations. And I am generally in a state of over-active pixie dust and am always wanting to make extra magic, besides which I have this tendency to never give up on something. (This tendency occasionally results in me driving across town in a rush so as to be able to attend two different events on the same day/night because I didn’t want to give up on either of them. Remember the night of the St. Cecilia concert and the barn dance, family? It’s not exactly practical but I do enjoy them.) At any rate, when no one was coming to the podium to check in, I began searching through the reservations for the next few days, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I discovered that availability kept periodically appearing, at random times and for random party sizes. And it would be gone again shortly after. I treasured this discovery like a secret wish-granting knowledge in my heart, and waited. And when a woman came, saying that her family would be there for the next three days and was there any chance of finding a cancellation, I told her that we had been booked but I would look and see. (Incidentally, breakfast and lunch are in even higher demand than dinner, because there are no princesses at dinner, just the fairy godmother and the mice.)
“How many in your party?”
“Six.” Ooh, not too much chance of a walk-in, then. (Walk-in = someone cancels at the last minute / we manage to squeeze a party in because someone ate their meal quickly or whatever.) That’s more likely for a party of two or four. I might be her only chance. This was Monday night. I searched through Tuesday. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Nothing. Wednesday. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Nothing. Thursday. Breakfast, lunch – a table for six! At noon! Awesome! I double clicked it and clicked “accept” as quickly as I could. No one had better take this out from under me. Grinning, I told the woman that I had found her a table, at 12:00pm on Thursday. Needless to say, she was very happy. I took down her information and gave her her reservation card and was glowing for the rest of the night.
Oh dear, I’m on the fourth page already. But I must tell one last thing. The night was drawing to a close, and we were all in that passageway under the castle at the podium. It is so nice to just stand there, under the castle. Then the fireworks music began.
“Oh, I’m going to go see Tinkerbell!” cried another girl who was working there.
“Oh I want to come too!” I said. My trainer made no objection, so the two of us dashed off through the castle.
From standing right directly in front of the castle – where guests are not allowed to stand – you can’t see any of the big fireworks. But you can see Tinkerbell fly almost right over your head, and see the way they light up the castle right in front of you. A little bit after Tinkerbelle flew we went back into the passageway so that from the other side we would be able to see the fireworks.
“You’ll have to plug your ears for the finale,” the girl told me. “It’s loud.” That’s because the passageway through the castle has lovely, echoey, amplifying acoustics. So I did plug my ears. Oh and we had a very appreciative fireworks crowd, and it was fun to hear them ooh and ahh when we were out in front of the castle.

Well, it’s almost twelve-thirty at night, so I suppose I had better get some sleep…