If you’re looking for a place to go that is clean, fun, and capable of draining your entire life savings in a matter of hours, I have one word for you: Disneyland.
I recently went to Disneyland with my girlfriend, Charlotte, and with another couple, Jacob and Jennifer (who are now an ex-couple, by the way).
Unfortunately, there were about 70 billion junior high school drill team girls in attendance that day, as they were having some kind of competition there at Disneyland, I would guess to determine which school had the loudest, sqealiest girls in the state, or perhaps the universe. We saw them all over the place, and I strongly suspect that they followed us around from ride to ride, getting louder and louder and squealier and squealier and irritatinger and irritatinger. For a while there, we thought that we had taken a wrong exit and had somehow driven to hell instead of Disneyland.
Anyway, aside from those girls, the most obvious feature of Disneyland was that it was very, very clean, and we soon saw why: The second someone drops a piece of litter on the ground, eight guys swoop in out of nowhere and sweep it up. We think those guys are actually highly evolved buzzards, which must be handy, because buzzards probably do not demand a very high salary.
One major thing that is currently going on at the Magic Kingdom is that they have done away with Tom Sawyer’s Island, because they are putting up some kind of Fantasia-related attraction in its place. This new thing should be finished sometime this spring, and I am sure they will celebrate its completion in the typical Disneyland fashion, which is to have a big media promotion for it and then promptly close it for renovation.
At one point in the day, for reasons that are still not clear to us, we went on It’s A Small World. It is not very impressive, as it is just a bunch of dolls screaming at you in different languages. When we got off, though, I must admit that we all had a really good feeling inside, like all the world’s problems were solvable, and children from every nation could stand together on a hill and sing “We Shall Overcome.” And then we heard those junior high school girls, which pretty much ruined things.
(We briefly considered luring the girls onto the cable cars that go over Fantasyland and then, just as we got off, cutting the cable and letting them plunge to their fiery deaths, but we knew that as soon as they hit the ground, those buzzard guys would swoop in and sweep them up, probably even before the Eyewitness News Van® could get there.)
At about 12:00, it suddenly occurred to me and Jacob that we had been there for three hours, and yet we still had money left. Seeking to alleviate this obvious oversight on our part, we decided to eat lunch. Since Jennifer was Jacob’s date, he insisted that he should pay for her food, but since she is a Modern, Independent Woman, she insisted that she should pay for her own food. They got into an argument over this, and he stormed away, nearly knocking Goofy over in his haste. Being a good friend, I hurried over to him (Jacob, that is) to comfort him and assure him that if it really meant that much to him, he could pay for MY lunch. He declined, however.
I love this column. I think it's just so dang funny. I hope you agree.
This is the only time that I mentioned Charlotte, who was my girlfriend for a few months my senior year in high school. Perhaps this shows where my priorities were: My friends got mentioned often -- Aaron was mentioned in about a dozen columns, I think -- but my girlfriend got mentioned once.
And you should have seen the whole Jacob/Jennifer debacle. I never saw such an emotional, melodramatic couple as those two. If they weren't screaming at each other, they were making out passionately. They lasted all of a month, I think, but they were as entertaining a couple as I've ever seen. (It was this same Jennifer who made out with Andrae while we were all camping, by the way, in this column. Quite a gal, that Jennifer.
