A Masshole in the Magic Kingdom
I just spent the better part of a week taking my Beautiful Irish Rose and our adoring sons to Walt Disney World. We had a great time. Really, it was hour after hour of pure fun. But by no means is a Disney trip easy. It’s not a vacation to be enjoyed; it’s to be endured.
Forget the simple logistics (unless you want to spend hours standing in line under a blistering Florida sun, an assault on the Disney theme parks requires more advanced planning than Operation Overlord) or the enormous expense. For a lifelong Bostonian the hardest part of a Disney vacation is adjusting to the overwhelming, pervasive, tangible cheeriness of the place. To set foot in a land where “The Happiest Place on Earth” is a registered trademark when you come from a place where the official state bird is the Middle Finger, can be a struggle.
Everyone you meet in Disney is preternaturally happy and friendly, which takes some getting used to for a Masshole. The general exuberance comes at you in ripples, waves, whitecaps, curls, tidal surges, tsunamis of perky enthusiasm. From the lady who greets you at the Orlando International Airport Disney Welcome Center to the guy at the “Expedition: Everest” ride who breaks your balls for wearing a Red Sox hat, every Disney employee is genuinely delighted to meet you. If a T employee jumped out of his bus at 4:15 AM at Andrew Station and said “And how IS everyone this fine morning?!” they’d never find his remains. But at Disney, you come to expect it.
And unlike us, they do their jobs well. That 4:15 AM bus was scheduled to pick us up for the airport at…4:15. It pulled into the parking lot at 4:14. Red Line trains are supposed to run every ten minutes, which happens about as often as Carl Pavano makes a start. But “Big Thunder Mountain Railroad” sends a train off every ten seconds without a hitch. And if T employees had to listen to a non-stop, continuous tape loop of “Howdy partners! You’re about to travel on the rootinest, tootinest train in the Wild, Wild West…” their union would stage a massive sick out.
Amazingly though, especially for a cynical Masshole since birth, at no point did my BS detector go off. These people truly enjoy what they do for a living. The entire culture of the place is built around the idea that everything is swell. No problem can’t be solved. It’ll all turn out OK in the end as long as you pepper everything you say with words like “magic,” “wonder,” and “enchantment.” In Boston, that attitude long ago got crushed under the wheels of reality and the lifetime experience of everyone trying to put one over on you.
Consider the Epcot theme park. Epcot is actually two parks jammed together like the top and bottom parts of a snowman. One part is called “Future World” and the other is “World Showcase.” This was perfect for me because what two things does a Masshole have a worse attitude about than "the Future" and "the Rest of the World"? Future World is a bunch of rides that are ostensibly educational. They usually start out with a dinosaur and end up with a narrator prattling on about how we’re meeting the challenges of tomorrow with progress and hope for a better world or some such crap. For instance, the “Spaceship Earth” attraction is all about communication. I think. I wasn’t really listening. But it begins with animatronic cavemen telling stories by a fire and ends with a bunch of multicultural kids using their computers to talk to each other around the globe. In other words, the Disney fantasy version the internet, as opposed to the reality of a bunch of degenerate slobs goofing off at work playing “Guess That Ass” on barstoolsports.com.
Because that’s how the future looks in the Disney mind: optimistic hopefulness for a more tomorrowish future or whatever. In Boston, the future means a 1,000 foot skyscraper in the Financial District with a bullseye on the side that says “Hit it Here, Al Qaeda!”
“World Showcase” is the Disneyfied version of the world. It consists of a dozen or so pavilions of different countries encircling a lake like drips of toothpaste around the bathroom sink. In Disney’s world view, the nations of the Earth are filled with friendly, affable people who would rather sell you overpriced merchandise with a smile than blow you to smithereens or give your daughters clitorectomies. And everyone speaks the two universal languages: English and American money. I didn’t know what my waitress’ native language is, but when I ordered two beers off her and she said “That’ll be $18.50” I understood perfectly.
But you roll with it. You realize that you’re the jerk if you bring your own ingrained lousy Boston attitude with you. But some of us can’t help it. For instance, we went to the Disney/MGM park. The most popular attraction there is “The Rock & Roller Coaster featuring Aerosmith.” At the beginning of the ride, before you get on the coaster, there’s a little preshow where on screen the band is in the recording studio and they start talking to the audience about how they’ve got to make it to the concert on time, cue the coaster. In the video, as God is my witness, Steven Tyler does the hand gesture for the “Shocker.” I was not only embarrassed that a Marshfield guy would do the Shocker at Disney (repeated a thousand times a day), I felt guilty that I was the only one in the crowd with enough warped Boston sensibility to notice he was doing it. It takes a Masshole to know one. I couldn’t hear the rest of the ride over the sound of Walt Disney banging his head on the side of his cryo-freeze canister.
That’s what happens when our world’s collide. When the Massachusetts “F- You” meets “Have a magical vacation!” something has to give. In my case, it was me. Hard as it was, I gave myself over to the unrelenting optimism. While we walked through the Animal Kingdom park, there was no shortage of Disney employees standing by eager as hell to tell us everything we could ever want to know about the tapir or the cottontail tamarin, and we happily stopped and listened. In my town, you learn early on that everyone who stops you to chat either wants to shake you down for money or turn you into a Scientologist. So you learn to give them the Heisman in order to hang onto to your money and your sanity. In Disney, you unlearn it.
But could you expect us to be any other way? This is our home and all, but it sucks. No two places could be more diametrically opposed than Boston and Disney World. Sure we’re both lead by short fat guys with big ears who talk funny and have the initials "M.M." And both places have a hideous building in the center surrounded by acres of pavement, but the similarities end there. Every day in the Magic Kingdom is designed to bring joy into your life. Every day the city of Boston conspires to extinguish every last spark of hope and optimism right out of you.
If they ever turned Boston into a theme park, the attractions would be:
- The Twilight Zone Tunnel of Terror
- Cab Drivers of the Caribbean
- Expedition: Everett
- Fenway Park’s “It’s a Small Seat”
- Whitey Bulger’s Flight
- Cartoon Network’s Publicity Stunt Spectacular
- Honey I Shrunk the Banknorth Garden Audience
- Mission: Parking Space
And our trademark slogan? Easy. “Boston World: The Surliest Place on Earth.” Have a magical frickin’ vacation.