An Actor's Life for Me, Part 11

Posted by Trevor on August 18, 2009

Tags: Disneyland, Gideon, Pinocchio

Sometimes unpleasant things happen, even in the most magical of kingdoms. Toward the end of the Pinocchio unit's Village Haus set, when we were all doing our walk-over to get back to the Egg House Break Area for lunch, we ran into a little situation.

Photo-hijacking hell. The whole group of characters were corralled into a corner where we were doing a walk-and-wave through a crowd of guests in the castle courtyard. Suddenly, before I knew what was happening, we were all being posed and art directed by a highly caffeinated Alpha Mom. She managed to shove all of the other lesser mothers and their petty preschoolers out of the way and arranged us into her idea of an uber photo tableau around her very own precious little kinder tot.

The problem wasn't that we were already late for our break while she micro-managed us into position for that unattainable perfect picture. It wasn't that all the other children were being kept at a distance by this whirling blur of activity. It wasn't even that we were all melting in the sweltering midday sun. I'd been in these situations before and knew that the best way to extricate one's self politely was to just take the picture quickly and then make a break for the nearest exit. No, the problem was that this mother was a bit of a "Momster" and judging by his demeanor, her offspring was probably not much better in the empathy department. He was a big beefy child of an indeterminate age, the kind that looks older than they are, on account of their fatty diet and the fact that they also eat other kid's lunches. The way he skillfully shoved the other poor photo-hopefuls out of the way indicated his own nascent bully status. Considering the feelings of others probably didn't rate very high on the things this pint-sized Mussolini cared about.

Actually, the real problem was that this kid looked green. Really green. Not just like olive green but actually pea green. As rotten as he undoubtedly was, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. As I dutifully stood balanced in the awkward pose I had been pressed into, I realized that this little green boy was about to lose his lunch. He dropped the vanilla Mouse-eared ice cream cone that he'd been halfheartedly lapping at. It hit the immaculate asphalt with a sickening splat. As Mickey's brains oozed onto the ground, I watched the befuddled bruiser step out of the photo past the fur-filled frame like E.T. waddling out of his little stuffed-animal-filled closet. But "Momma" would have none of it. She smacked him on his backside and actually shoved him back into the shot, screaming, "Curtis, damn it. Don't move!" He bounced off Pinocchio as if he was a blowup clown doll, the kind you punched and which would just pop right back up.

I watched him through the mesh on the side of my costume's head as he waddled back into position holding his stomach with one hand and clutching at my gloved hand with the other. I looked back up through my costume's eye holes at the woman who had created this postcard moment and saw that she was smiling from ear to ear. Not because she was happy, far from it, she was ready to strangle the child, but because she had actually assembled the whole group of Pinocchio characters for this picture, which was quite an accomplishment, even without the big bug. Mommy Dearest was gesturing with her free hand that the enormous fake grin she was exposing was the proper expression to make when posing for such an important Polaroid. She clutched the camera in her other fake-nailed, claw-like hand and squinted through the viewfinder. That's when I noticed that the boy was holding onto my hand really tightly. Too tightly.

"Now get rid of that gum!" she screeched. I thought, "Who chews gum and eats ice cream at the same time?" It's not as if it were bubblegum ice cream. I glanced down at the cone on the ground and saw that the melting mouse head had begun to puddle by my paws. As he spit out the piece of gum he had been noisily masticating, I heard him make a quiet little retching noise. Alarm bells went off in my brain. Foul Fellow the Fox must have heard it too because he began to shuffle away from the group. Geppetto, an old hand at this, grabbed Pinocchio and had begun to pull him away. Momzilla hadn't noticed anything and was just screaming "Now smile or I swear I'm going to take you home right now." There was another noise, the kind that a cat makes when it's doing something private under the bed and doesn't want to draw too much attention to itself before it presents its owner with a little present. Then I heard the noise that costumed characters fear all this small world over.

I couldn't watch. I looked through the tinted plastic of Gideon's left eyeball and witnessed the smile on the woman's facade suddenly fade away. Her jaw dropped, as did the rest of her face, at least the parts that hadn't been surgically and chemically rendered unable to do so. But even through the Botoxed-blandness of her expression, I knew that she also knew what was coming next. That's when I heard the kid start to spew. Not just a little. A lot. He produced a steady stream of fountain-like vomit right onto the pathway in front of the Toy Shoppe. I had just enough time to sidestep the flow and gently shove the little boy's heaving frame away from me with my cane and towards the nearest planter box. I felt momentarily pleased with my own ingenuity. It was a very practical use of the prop. I don't know whether the woman was more disgusted with what her son was currently doing, or what I had managed to do, which was basically to shove him towards the bushes with a stick so that he might continue being sick. But I had learned long ago in my first summer at Great America, where there was an overabundance of nausea-inducing rollercoaster rides and readily available junk food that when it came to upchucking children and furry costumes, it was every character for himself.

The rest of my unit had scattered towards the drawbridge, and I knew that the set was now officially over. The outraged woman nearly dropped her camera, barely catching it by the strap, but the instant photo pin-wheeled towards the ground and lay there face down. She yanked the boy up from where he stood, watering the topiary. She turned her full fury on me and in an apoplectic fit yelled, "Restroom!" I just pointed with my cane in the direction of the nearest facilities. I stood there briefly, watching the anti-Madonna and Child disappearing into the crowd which, after stepping aside to let the little chunk-blower and his maddened mother through, swallowed them up again and began converging around the cause of the commotion. The smell from the sizable puddle began to waft through the warm air and up into my costume's head, causing me to almost lose my own lunch. Fortunately, I hadn't even had mine yet, although it was past time.

As the immaculately white-clad sweeper people descended upon us to deal with the "protein spill," I poked the end of my cane into the wad of freshly chewed gum that the little puke-bazooka had abandoned just prior to spraying the cobblestones. It came up neatly and I used it to spear the abandoned Polaroid which lay on the grass nearby and which, I dimly saw, was still developing. It stuck on the first try and as I pulled it up, I caught a glimpse of the boy's face, frozen in time. The flash had gone off just a brief second before he had produced a memory that, quite frankly, their family would not need a photograph to recall. I plucked the picture off the end of my cane with my white gloved paw and spun it around, doing my best Chaplin.

I headed backstage, following my unit back to the Egg House Break Area where I thumbtacked the little agony up on the corkboard. It was my first addition to the growing collection of "found items" from the park. I titled the piece with a green Sharpie, "Green boy with Technicolor yawn coming on." After stripping off my costume and making sure that none of the "kid-stuff" had gotten on me, I followed the rest of the my unit over to the Inn Between, where I noticed that the soup of the day was split pea and that for some reason, I wasn't feeling very hungry.

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