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Body positivity has yet to reach out to those of us with pustules and pimples. Even with the number of social media accounts dedicated to high-def macro lenses filled with dermatologists squeezing and prodding the afflicted acne-sufferers for bigger, darker, grosser puss balls, the people suffering haven’t been humanized. It’s a new-age freak show with captions like “little zit, big squirt” and “removal of a twenty-five-year-old blackhead.”
While having acne hasn’t ever been told to me directly as a reason someone didn’t want to date me or be my friend, it certainly ruined my self-esteem for years. Especially when the acne was on my back and chest as a teenager and I felt like I was inherently gross. The amount I loved myself truly increased every day my skin was slightly less bumpy than the day before. Even now, when I get a rogue forehead zit, I question if I should go out for fear of being photographed and having the shallow pits of hell on the internet feast on my misfortune.
But I’m also well-adjusted enough to know that every-body gets acne, at some point, and sometimes if you are blessed with baby-ass skin in high school, you’re not immune to a battle with your skin later in life. The number of friends I envied at age fifteen for being walking magazine covers, Photoshopped by God for our eyes’ consumption, ended up prematurely wrinkled, with rosacea, excess hair, and yes, sometimes a big fat zit in their twenties and thirties. There’s no amount of water you can drink that is going to solve for your hormones changing and surging and depleting. There’s no snake oil you can sell people who know the truth.
And honestly, I wish the only bad thing about me was my bad skin. That would be a pretty solid legacy, to be honest.
Disney
Handsome, unattainable man Ryan Gosling once said, “I’m in a relationship with Disneyland.” When I first saw the GIF of this statement, I realized that I had this in common with him and we should be married forthwith. We’re not and aren’t going to be, but I, too, know the deep feeling of being enamored with the mouse.
I used to work at Disney World, which is not Disneyland. There aren’t enough numbers to count how many times people respond with “The one in Florida?” when I tell them about my employment at the parks. Disney World is the only Disney World. There are Disneyland resorts in Paris, Shanghai, and Tokyo. All of these are modeled after Walt’s original park in Anaheim, California. But that’s not what we’re discussing. We’re discussing the WORLD of Disney—and how I ended up being a Disney person.
If one were to generalize, it would be easy to say that “Disney people” are a little much. They have kids or they are kids at heart. They share endless articles from clickbait websites about fan art imagining the princesses as everything from coat hangers to types of fish. They sing “Let it Go” at karaoke. I get it. Those people sound more basic than an Ugg boot. But that’s not the kind of Disney person I am (and hopefully not the kind of Disney person handsome, unattainable Ryan Gosling is). Sometimes you become a Disney person. For some it happens the first time you go to Disney World. For some it happens working in the parks.
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At the beginning of The Lion King on VHS, there’s a commercial about two very cute little white boys who are packing to go to Disney World. The older brother (maybe seven) has already been and is feverishly telling the younger one what to expect. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I had no concept of being rich or poor back then, and obviously these kids had some serious generational wealth to have more than one Disney trip in their childhood. And you may be thinking, “Well, maybe they live in Florida and have a season pass,” which is an interesting theory, but half of the commercial is kids packing suitcases. If you lived in Florida and had the pass, would you really be concerned about getting a hotel when you could just drive there for a day trip? I’m just saying.
After the older brother detailed how big Goofy is (which is roughly “can kick Dad’s ass” big), Lanie and I decided that we were definitely asking for a trip to Disney World.
And so we did.
“Maybe,” my mom said. This was years before I realized that maybe always means “I don’t want to say ‘no,’ but absolutely not.”
In high school my mom had to go to a conference in Florida and her group stayed at a Disney resort. She didn’t get to go to the parks (tragic), but she did get the benefits of a Disney room card and she gushed about how when she called the front desk, after they solved her problems, they’d tell her, “Have a Magical Day!”
My days were painfully devoid of magic in Kentucky, but one day all of that would change, thanks in part to the only Disney princess to wield a sword, Mulan.
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My senior year of high school was a little surreal. Junior year I auditioned for our Concert Choir. The group was notably the only choir that sang. Unfortunately they had the ugliest costumes and never danced. The least dateable. And since I was fourteen and aware of the fact that I was younger than everybody and one of the only black people any of the kids at my school had ever met, I knew there was no point in trying out for Girls’ Ensemble (hot cheerleaders, but maybe they still had braces or highlights too chunky in their hair), or Show Choir (the only coed choir that featured the hottest guys from football lip-syncing with the hottest girls from cheerleading and the dance team).
I was Concert Choir attractive. I went into the audition and sang “Reflection,” a Christina Aguilera ballad from the Mulan soundtrack.
I dozed off waiting for the cordless phone to ring with good news from the music teacher telling me I’d be adding choir to my ever-growing list of extracurriculars. All of my friends made it, but I didn’t.
To this day I don’t know why I didn’t make it. I especially don’t know why because my senior year in the spring (a semester into being a member of the Concert Choir), Ms. Bart announced we’d be doing a Disney-themed concert. In addition to announcing a solo opportunity for Concert Choir, she also told us we’d be dancing.
Like the cooler girls in the other choirs. Us. Dancing. Imagine.
A week or so later, she held auditions for the solo in that concert. Perhaps you’ve figured out where I’m going with this and that the song she chose was “Reflection,” the Christina Aguilera ballad from the Mulan soundtrack.
The auditions were in the middle of class, with girls passing notes and lying around onstage while Ms. Bart lined up those who wanted to audition. I watched as girl after girl butchered the song. Soprano, alto, bad singer who made the cut—they all sounded as if they had never seen the movie. After about forty-five minutes of this nonsense, I decided I had nothing to lose by auditioning. I’d already experienced this exact, literal rejection. I was ready.
And I hit every note like I was Whitney goddamn Houston.
When I got done singing, the class clapped for me. I’m not joking. It was like at the end of a movie when people are celebrating because the protagonist reached their fullest potential. This was my freeze-frame fist-pump John Hughes Brat Pack moment.
Ms. Bart didn’t waste time giving me the solo. We’d have two concerts and then tour the songs at the local middle and elementary schools.
I liked this new reputation of being a good singer. I liked the poetic justice of knowing I was always good at singing that damn song and that not making it into choir junior year must have just been a fluke. But much like Mulan’s newfound confidence after chopping her hair off and being a hot boy, things wouldn’t work out exactly as I planned. The first concert went swimmingly (yay!), but the second performance was to be on a Wednesday, and I wasn’t going to be able to make it (boo!) because it landed precisely on the day my mother proposed we fly to Florida to check out Bethune-Cookman College as a potential option, bringing me the closest I’d ever been to Disney.
I don’t remember much about actually visiting Bethune-Cookman. I’m sure it’s a great school, and I have a number of the HBCU’s marching band’s showcases on my Yo
uTube workout playlist. What I do remember about the trip was flying on a plane for the first time and learning that you shouldn’t wear shorts and flip-flops on a plane, regardless of how warm it is where you’re going. I also remember spending the evening at Downtown Disney.
Downtown Disney isn’t in a park; it’s kind of like a lavish strip mall. A Ghirardelli, an Earl of Sandwich. The Florence Mall in Kentucky could never. The largest and most appreciated store of all is World of Disney. It stretches forever, and in a few years I would know that Disney is mostly gift shops anyway, so this was an authentic experience.
Mom bought a disposable camera and snapped away.
“Oh my god, they have the villains?!?!” I screeched, gesturing to the row of snow globes that featured Ursula and Scar.
“What movie is that from?” my mom asked, oblivious to the fact that I’d committed these entire films to memory and thought of them before any actual true-life circumstances when asked to recount my childhood. The first film I saw in theaters was A Goofy Movie. Snow White got stuck in our VCR (my mom still has this VCR in the garage). I remember that we ate Whopper Jr.’s from Burger King for dinner the first night we watched The Lion King. The next school year started with me in a fresh new pair of Pocahontas shoes from Payless. Walt Disney is probably rolling in his grave thinking how happy he made a little black girl at the end of the twentieth century.
Back in the store, I tried on so many hats. There’s a great picture of me with a “Rasta Mickey” hat on. It was a little racist. I know. But I was just so happy to be experiencing life among the wealthy dreamers in sunny Orlando instead of singing for an audience of my friends’ parents again that I let it slide.
The biggest city I’d ever been to was Cincinnati, so seeing something so far from my hometown really impacted me. I had my first taste, and I knew I’d be back.
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The spring of my sophomore year of college was a drag. I hated all of my friends, my roommate was getting on my last nerve, my classes were all required but in no way guiding me toward a career I wanted. I needed a vacation. Honestly, I hadn’t been on a vacation in three years, and before that it had been my whole life. I was rundown, irritable. I needed relief, but I also needed to graduate on time so I could spend more of my time doing what I wanted to do. This led me to searching for summer internships and asking anyone I could for advice.
No dice. But I started to comb my memory for any glimmers of hope offered to me by upperclassmen of years gone by. There was one guy, Jonathan, who told me at a party (where we were a bit tipsy off of really gross coconut rum) about his ex-girlfriend that he met at Disney World.
He opened his laptop and went to a folder marked “Disney” and started clicking around.
“You won’t believe how pretty she is,” he told me. I found it strange that he was being so complimentary of an ex to a near-stranger at a party.
He flipped the computer around and awaited my reaction.
“She’s a mermaid?!” I shouted, the coconut rum lowering my self-awareness.
“Well, she was during our internship.”
The photo showed a girl with a bright red wig that didn’t look real necessarily, but certainly wasn’t cheap, with a purple clamshell bra and a green sequined tail sitting on a rock formation, huge blue eyes beaming. Next to her was a dorky guy that was blushing and appeared shorter because of the length of her tail. It was Jonathan.
“So, you dated a Disney princess?” I questioned.
“Yeah, we met on our internship,” he said.
By this point I realized that my roommate wanted to leave, so I called her over to look at the picture before we peaced out.
“I’ve never seen The Little Mermaid.” She shrugged, and we gathered our things and went back to the dorms.
Years later, as I was hoping for any sweet relief from small-town campus life, this memory struck me, and I started googling Disney internships. I found the Disney College Program—a six-month internship at either Disneyland or Disney World that offered housing, full-time employment, and communications and leadership courses for college credit.
My eighteen-year-old fingers had never filled out an application so fast. And within a few weeks I opened the golden ticket in the form of a big purple folder at the C-PO (college post office) that sealed my fate: I was going to Disney World—for six months starting in June!
“YES! I’M GETTING THE HELL OUT OF HERE I’M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!” I screamed. No one yelled anything back. The lady at the café upstairs kept dropping fries and chicken tenders, the janitor swept the floor near the elevator. All at once everything was the same, but entirely different.
Once summer hit I joined the Facebook group for all of us lucky students around the world who had gotten their folders. We all posed for selfies with our folders and posted them in the group. Soon I was going to be down at Disney, away from my Podunk college town, and maybe dating a prince of my own.
I was the second roommate to arrive at our apartment in Vista Way. The college program had three apartment complexes, and Vista Way was the cheapest by several hundred dollars a week. In no position to waste money on having slightly fewer roommates, I moved in with five other girls. Four were American and one was the sweetest French girl who spoke hardly any English and would often clean up after everybody. We didn’t deserve her.
Vista Way had a real reputation for being the party complex. People even say Vista Way in a sort of salacious tone, emphasizing the “way” part of the name. Two pools, each with its own hot tub, made this the place no one wanted to live, but everyone wanted to hang.
Sleep did not find me the night before training, but I quickly wished it had. Before they let you tour the park and ride some rides, you have to sit through the longest training sessions of all time with about forty other people who also just want to ride Space Mountain. By hour ten I had all but sworn allegiance to the mouse who was now my food, shelter, and family.
The best part of Traditions (the official name for the training) was learning all of the official slang and lingo of the park. Employees were cast members. Any time you were visible in spaces with guests, you were onstage, and any time you were in a storage closet or in the tunnels (utilidor) under the Magic Kingdom you were backstage. Pointing is rude unless you use both your middle and pointer fingers. We don’t have good days, we have magical days. Rides are attractions. And we don’t call a celebrity by their name unless we see it on their credit card at the end of their transaction. No cell phones. Ever.
Traditions was like being jumped into a gang, if that gang was populated by all the kids from high school forensics and glee club. I was told about how to wear my uniform (costume) and exactly how to get on the premises from the bus since there are no cars in the Magic Kingdom proper, only in the employee parking lot.
When I finally got to the morning of training where we got to go to the park, I had nearly forgotten that I was going to eventually be working at Walt Disney World Resort. I’d all but resigned myself to living out the rest of my days in that poorly lit conference room with the sexual harassment HR video.
My group of about ten students got to the Magic Kingdom gates an hour before the park opened. Only the front gate cast members would be allowed to use this entrance; the rest of us would take the tunnel to our respective lands. There were seven lands that we’d have to discover on our own time. We wandered down Main Street, U.S.A., and our trainer killed the magic of about nine hundred things at once. Pointing out what spaces were for storage, and why the castle looks so big when approaching it versus when you’re leaving the park. I apparently didn’t articulate that it was my first time at Disney very well in my interview, because this was brutal. It’s like if you found roommates on Craigslist and you went to the apartment and it looked great, but then they told you the shower water was never warm, the outlets don’t work, and that there’s exactly o
ne rat living there, but the rat is allotted two five-minute smoke breaks a day.
After a soul-crushing, brass-tacks morning, we were sent to our respective lands for additional training sessions, and we finally got to ride an attraction. Though I worked in Tomorrowland, the line at Space Mountain was already too long, so we’d be riding Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin: a truly delightful ride/game that made me want to go home and watch Toy Story all over again.
After working in uneventful “merchantainment” for a few months, Disney announced that they were doing auditions for entertainment positions. Entertainment cast members at Disney are the peak of the hierarchy. They’re the selected “pretty” few. If they wanted to cut you in line in the mouseketeeria, they totally could. They got to ride go-carts to their respective lands while I was stuck hoofing it in what was essentially a glorified dumpster under the Magic Kingdom.
This was exciting for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that Disney was just beginning to get more diverse. They were releasing a Tinkerbell movie that starred a black fairy! And an Asian fairy! And a coded-Latina fairy! When I’d started working at WDW, The Princess and the Frog hadn’t even come out yet. There were no opportunities for me to be a “face character.” And suddenly I had the opportunity to audition.
The auditions at Disney are always the same. You go into a wooden room save for floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A dance studio, basically. You’re given a number, and when they call your group of twenty-five people, you line up in a couple of rows and smile. Then, a person with a demeanor similar to that of Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada walks up to you and stares at your face. This may cause you to laugh or, in my case, wink? I wanted it bad, what can I say?