While your tea cup is spinning

This morning marks a milestone for the Main Street Gazette. With the article you are now reading, the Gazette has launched 700 hundred articles, 700 pieces of perspective, picture postcards and photo safaris, recipes, records, treasures, and music. As with all markers, I feel overwhelmed by the generosity of you, the reader, who has kept coming back day after day to see what I have to say, I am amazed at how many friends we have made, and astonished every day that I am still churning out something that is considered readable. So, once again, and from the deepest depths of my heart, Thank You!

Now, on to the topic at hand which, I think, works nicely as a landmark piece and a reminder.Many of us out there could be considered Disney geeks, nerds, or fanatics. Though we may use terms like historians, archivists, documentarians, all in association with the words amateur, we are more often an amalgamation of historians and geeks. No matter the designation, we all share a common passion for what is Disney, what could make it better, what secrets its past holds, and an understanding that not everyone sees things through the same glasses we use. But there are times when the labels and the serious documentation of Disney, specifically Walt Disney World, fall away and we become something else.

We take a spin on a tea cup, float down a lazy river, muster up our best pirate “ARRGHHHH!,” or jump aboard a Time Rover to save a dinosaur from extinction. In those moments, everything melts away and we are left as a mass of emotions in human form. Excited, terrified, giddy, bold, brave, nervous, the particular emotion depends on the person or attraction, but it happens nonetheless. It may not happen for every attraction, every time, but when we least expect it, even the heartiest of veterans find the glee and fright of childhood creeping into their hearts and expressions. These are the moments I cherish, the moments I can’t seek out and wait for, the joyful moments that I just have to let come in their own time.

As fans we may know a script inside and out, could ride-through an attraction with our eyes closed and still be able to see exactly what is going on, and notice the most minute of changes, but it is well and good that our guards occasionally slip down and we enjoy what originally enticed each and every one of us to the experiences to begin with: the emotional resonance, the storytelling, and, in short, the fun!



The above photograph was graciously borrowed from the library of Elizabeth Caran.