Burbank Show 3

Americans At Disneyland...

So the show is at the Anaheim Convention Center next to Disneyland and we are sharing hotels and amenities with Disney people. Permit me to hate on them.

I do not understand adults who go to Disneyland. I mean, sure, when my daughter was preschool, we took her several times (we got a pass with a single admit good for a year for Californians) and it was great for her. Most of the time. Not when we took her to meet Mickey Mouse. That was hellish. After an hour in line watching Mickey cartoons we were finally ushered into the room for the meet and greet. My daughter freaked out. After a week of talking about nothing else except meeting the Great One, she would not let of me, wouldn’t look at MM, and was just crying uncontrollably. We finally left and went outside and I asked her what was wrong. “Daddy,” she said while resolutely wiping away her tears, “he was so big.” I chuckled and confirmed what had happened. She thought Mickey Mouse would be a few inches tall, like on TV. When it turned out that she was meeting a five-foot-tall rat, she came unglued.

I love watching people; call it a writer-comedian thing. Watching Americans stream into one of the iconic American cultural creations, though, I had one thought: Americans need to seriously consider salad. My god, there are a lot of fatasses here. It is bad. I’m fat but compared to these people, I look like a middleweight. How bad is it? Well there is a place down the street that rents motorized scooters by the day, and they are everywhere. They all have signs saying “rent me” on the front; should just say “I’m with fatso.” One family I saw waddling towards Disneyland had a little girl with them who did the funniest, meanest thing I saw all day: she started exaggeratedly waddling behind the biggest man in the herd, in step with him, until her mother told her to stop. If I’d done that, and I wish I’d thought of it, believe me, I’d have gotten punched in the mouth.

Besides the waddlers are the stroller people. I never realized it when we were stroller people, but the fathers all have the same looks on their faces. The first day at Disneyland it is the look of patient resignation to fate that every dad has when he nears the Magic Kingdom. By day two, it has gone from patient resignation to quiet desperation. Day three transforms dada into a caged rat dying to escape. One poor bastard I saw pushing a tandem stroller with what looked like a four-year-old and a toddler was probably on day three or four and had the look in his eyes that just screamed out “kill me. Kill me now before I have to go in there again. Shoot me in the head, run me over with your car, whatever it takes, just don’t make me do another day at Disneyland with these screeching, crying, money-sucking little monsters.” No wonder the bars are full every night. Mommy and Daddy need their ‘parent juice’ and no, honey, you can’t have a sip.

But the adults in Disney cosplay mode for the park, that I don’t get. One of my wife’s Facebook friends is an adult Disney person and posted that he was taking his girlfriend to Disneyland on date and my first thought was “Why? Is she ten? Did you have to use candy to get her into the van or was a Disneyland trip enough?”

I am by no means saying that us card dorks are cool. No, my friends, we collect cards because we are not cool. Well, maybe all of the young men outside the hall vaping weed this week are cool (don’t you miss the time when public spaces just smelled like pee?). But compared to the Disney people, us card geeks are downright normal. I mean who would you trust more, a man in a baseball cap or a man wearing mouse ears?