K's back at work, and now we both feel like summer camp is over and we're starting school again. She's only been back at work for one day, and we're already getting nostalgic for her vacation. We never went to Paris or anything epic like that, but we did manage to have a pretty great time. We did a lot of fun, silly stuff... like we went to Buffy's alma mater, Sunnydale High! Well, we made a pilgrimage to Torrance High School, the place where all the Sunnydale High School scenes were shot. (Apparently it was also the place where the Beverly Hills 90210 high school scenes were shot, but who gives a rat's ass about that?) When you go to some place you're really familiar with from a TV show, you get this weird feeling, because it's like you've been there a million times... but you've never really been there at all. It was a lot like going back to visit my own high school; everything was smaller than I expected and the paint was all peely and somebody had scratched TITO LOV JANEY onto the wall and there were puddles of whino piss in the corners.
Being fans of the show, we kept looking around and saying, "That staircase! That's where Angel killed Jenny Carpenter! There's the bench where Buffy & Willow used to have their little talks! Look, there's the fountain, the fountain!" It was all quite sad, but we had a blast. The place is so OBVIOUSLY Sunnydale High, anybody who'd seen the show once would totally recognize it. It's weird to think about kids going to that school, and seeing THEIR school on TV, week after week after week, full of vampires and ghouls and stuff.
Last week we also ventured down to the wilds of Anaheim to visit Disneyland. That was great, although it's kind of depressing how many of the crazy rides I grew up loving have been torn out or seriously tinkered with, while all the crap I don't care about is still completely intact. The cable-car skyride thing? Gone. So is the crazy undersea ride, where you'd ride around in this big, Jules Verne submarine & you'd see polar icecaps and mermaids and stuff like that outside the portholes. They also took The Tiki Room, this crazy thing from the mid-'60s that I always loved, and took out all the sweet corniness of it and gave it a real wiseass contemporary attitude. Ah, it is to weep. I'm NOT a fan of modern Disney movies, but I love some of the old stuff, and the park really kicks butt, it's pretty spectacular. I like all the slow, sissy rides, the big fairy tale castles and the jungle cruises and that kinda crap, while K is more into the noisy roller coasters. I HATE roller coasters, they make me really tense and sore, so I spent most of the day dragging K onto these terrible sissy rides. God, I am SUCH the girl in this relationship, it's appalling! At least there were plenty of rides we both liked, like The Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Tours. The Haunted Mansion is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It was made back in the early '60s, but it still holds up really well, it's full of amazing details you could look at for days. It's got a huge graveyard full of transparent spooks who jump around and holler, and a grand hall full of ghostly waltzing weirdies, and... Oh, it's too wonderful for words.
When it got dark they did this big huge parade to celebrate the park's 45th anniversary. They had some impressive floats, and there were all these teenagers in the parade wearing the most embarrassing costumes I have EVER seen! There were a bunch of guys wearing these grotesque pink jungle bird costumes... it wouldn't have been so bad if their faces had been covered, but they WEREN'T! And these poor guys were wearing a LOT of makeup, they all looked super-queeny. Actually, the whole damn park is pretty queeny, there's a lot of pink and petticoats and glitter everyplace you look. There was one part of the parade where all of these fairy princesses were riding by, and they were all wearing big wigs and big gowns and lots and lots of makeup, and I swear, as I was looking at one of the girls, for I second I actually thought, "Gee, she looks pretty passable..." I'm so used to seeing queens at clubs with that look, I forgot that actual GIRLS can dress up like fairy princesses, too!
In addition to the whole queeny vibe, the park also has a major death trip going on. Really, there are piles of plastic skulls in almost EVERY RIDE! Even the sappiest Disney movies are made into rides with some incredibly macabre imagery. (Come to think of it, those sappy old movies were pretty creepy, too! That part in Pinocchio where his little pal turns into a donkey STILL scares the poop out of me!) There were also lots and LOTS of toy guns for sale at the park, that was pretty weird. There's a store next to every damn attraction, and ALL of the stores have these huge displays of toy guns! Not exactly what I would've expected from the "Happiest Place on Earth"!
We've been to Disneyland a couple of times over the years, and we've noticed that something about the jungle cruise ride seems to drive the employees insane. Most of the people who work at the park seem pretty happy, or at least they put on a good show of not hating their lives - they're your basic Disney drones. But every time we've ever gone on the jungle cruise, the hosts have been these really sarcastic and hateful kids, they say stuff like, "Yeah, look at the hippo with the little ears wiggling. That's pretty funny, huh, folks? I get to see it 45 times a day, and it never gets old." They gripe about what they get paid, they gripe about the heat, they gripe about the goddam traffic on the way to the park... and they always say it in this real please-kill-me-now voice, too. I've heard that they rotate the park employees around, so nobody gets too sick of any one attraction, but the kids who work the jungle cruise always sound like it's their own private hell or something. I worked the concession stand and swept floors in a busy movie house for about a year, so I know what a bitch it can be to see other people having fun at a job you despise... but still, I like to think that even at my worst I never radiated the utter contempt for humanity that these guys do.
Oh well, even if the jungle cruise kids do manage to cast a pall over their swampy little sector of the Magic Kingdom, I guess I can't really blame them. It would be pretty irritating to do the little speech about the hippo 45 times a day while you were also trying to put up with all the heat and the screaming kids and the tourists who throw cups of Donald Duck orange juice at the back of your head.
Disneyland's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.