Orlando By Storm

It took me sixty years, but last month I finally made it to Orlando, FL, to see for myself what all the commotion is about.

Piggybacking along with Pa-pa, who went there to represent the community college where we both worked for thirty-plus years, I got to spend a four-day-long second childhood in the distinguished company of Harry Potter, Mickey Mouse, and assorted other icons of a world where the name of the game is Imagination with a capital I.

My adventures took me to Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure and three of the four Disney parks (I didn't make it to Animal Kingdom), where I spent a full ten-hour day trying to see everything and do everything I could.  I could say I was scouting things out for a future trip with the grandkids, and that might happen.  But mostly I was revelling selfishly in the near inebriation that accompanies an unbelieveable level of sensory overload amid a setting of balmy Florida weather.

Late January proved to be a perfect time to experience the Orlando theme parks.  With the exception of Magic Kingdom day, I enjoyed light crowds and a leisurely pace.  I saved a considerable amount of money (probably about $50) on Disney tickets by buying them in advance from AAA, and I maximized my time in those parks by using the free "fast pass" feature.  By staying in a Disney-property hotel, I qualified for free shuttle transportation to and from the three Disney parks.  Round-trip shuttle fare between the hotel and Universal was an additional $19 plus tip.
    
Of the four parks, my far-and-away first choice is Disney's Hollywood Studios.  This is where I most want to go again, and where I would take the kids first.  Standout attractions there include Toy Story Midway Mania (an arcade ride), Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage, and Fantasmic! (an evening multi-media extravaganza involving a water, fireworks, and laser lights show). 

For my grown-up, adventurous side there was the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith.  The Great Movie Ride satisfied my aesthetic and nostalgic cravings.  In short, there was nothing in Hollywood Studios that I didn't enjoy.  Based on this first-time visit, if I had to choose between the two, I think I would rather take the grandkids there than to the Magic Kingdom.

As someone who cut her teeth watching The Mickey Mouse Club, it seems almost sacrilegious to say this, but the Magic Kingdom disappointed me.  Parts of it seem dated, and the traffic flow doesn't work well.  Compared to Hollywood, at least on the day I was there, it seemed dirty and stinky, and I couldn't go anywhere without tripping over a stroller. 

The fact that you can get there only by ferry or monorail means that you have two lines to fight in order to gain admission to the park--one at the point of transportation and another at the turnstiles.  The day I was there, the monorail broke down as I was midway up the ramp to get on, so numerous additional ferries had to be dispatched to accommodate the crowd.  This caused a bottleneck of people arriving at the same time, and that may have contributed to the crowd flow problems even as the day wore on.

Upon entering the Kingdom, I found it ironic to see a crane working at the site of Cinderella's castle.  I noted to my Facebook friends that "maybe even dreams sometimes need reinforcement."  Looking back, I can see the crane may have been an omen.  This is not to say I didn't have a great day.  Maybe I just expected too much, but for me, the Magic Kingdom this time around seemed a little short on pixie dust.

In my book, Epcot Center ranks a close second to Hollywood Studios.  It boasts my favorite attraction of all four days, a hang-gliding simulation ride called Soarin'.  Like Hollywood, it is laid out with thought to crowd traffic, dispersal, and management.  Its Future World is a testament to the power of scientific thinking, and its World Showcase is a celebration of world cultures.

Compared to the Disney parks, Universal Studios and its companion park, Islands of Adventure, are enjoyable but not quite so tourist-friendly.  This is a more expensive admission to begin with, and its "express pass" to minimize waiting time for the various attractions will bring your investment in the day close to $200.  It will even cost you $5 for five minutes in a booth that blows hot air on you when you get soaked on the water rides.

Despite the expense, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, located in Islands of Adventure, is well worth your investment.  The Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride is five minutes of intense flying twists and turns as you follow Harry on his broomstick through a field of super animation and special effects.  Because of Harry, Universal ranks a close third in my hierarchy of park experiences.

I am glad for this unexpected opportunity to check out these four Orlando theme parks.  I approached each attraction with a mental yardstick that I would use to assess how the kids, particularly Sooby and Pooh, might react to it.  Some, I know they would love; others might scare them.  Overall, I think they would appreciate Orlando more and remember it better if they were, say, nine and ten rather than four and five.

I hope that, in five years or so, Pa-pa and I will be able to take them to the Disney parks.  Perhaps we can all be initiated into Animal Kingdom together.  Meanwhile, I will be content to hope for that, or, perhaps, as my good friend Jiminy says, to "wish upon a star."
  

   

Before the World Catches Up

Headnote: As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have recently taken part in a college mini-course for which the focus was using photos to inspire poetry and taking photos to illustrate existing poems.  The poem that follows was inspired by a photo I took of Pooh at the farm nearly a year and a half ago, when he was not yet three.

Before the World Catches Up

Blowing white fluff
off a dandelion stem
is one of those things
you know to do innately,
like writing with a pudgy
finger on windows
where water condenses
to make a slate
just for you.

A kid thinks nothing of
the weed-filled yard,
the smudged glass,
but only of pure
pleasures like these:
decorating a picture window
with ABC's and stickmen
and watching dandelion seeds
loft lazily up, up, upward
against a cloud-filled sky.

Footnote: This picture of Pooh has been hanging on the wall in the kids' room since I took it a year ago last September.  It is one of my all-time favorite shots of him.  But he is four now, and the gallery needs updating.  It is time for new pictures and new poems.

The Jester and the Cabbage

When the hour was dark and the moment was drear,
A huge cabbage terrorized New Windermere.
So green was its hue; so tremendous its bulk
That it went by the nickname "Cruciferous Hulk."
It stormed through the woods; it stomped through the vale;
It marched into town flanked by parsley and kale.
Could the kingdom be saved?  The folks had their doubts
'Cause it came with an army of huge brussels sprouts.
They bolted their doors, but all was in vain.
The veggies grew more when it started to rain.
Worse than Godzilla, worse than King Kong,
The cabbage would kidnap the kids--and that's wrong!
So the townspeople rallied, implored of the law
To grate it to death in a big bowl of slaw.
They had to be careful; the cabbage had spikes--
It let out the air from the tires of their bikes.
It punctured their fences and poked through their walls,
And left a big trail of green slime in their halls.
The dukes were outnumbered; the damsels, distressed;
The king tore his hair, and the queen beat her breast.
A committee convened, but to no avail--
The cabbage cried, "Tear down the town!" to the kale.
The king took some action; he didn't think twice:
He summoned the jester to ask his advice.

The jester arrived in his bells and his cap
And his big, pointed shoes that reached up to his lap,
And he said to the cabbage, "Wait! Wait 'fore you strike.
I'll show you a trick--and this trick you will like."
The cabbage was startled and stopped in mid-poke,
And asked if the jester was playing a joke.
"Well, actually, yes," said the jester with glee
As he balanced a kumquat on top of his knee.
He reached in his pocket and took out a pear
That he squeezed and then smashed right onto his own chair!
Then what happened next you just wouldn't believe--
A big orange pumpkin rolled out of his sleeve!
With a thud and a clatter it lit on the floor,
Then, gathering momentum, rolled right out the door!
Meanwhile, the jester was not nearly through
With the trick he was showing the cabbage and crew:
He had grapes on his fingers and plums on his toes,
And he balanced bananas on top of his nose.
The king couldn't help it; he let out a laugh
That soon spread to the duke and the rest of his staff.
The brussels sprouts snickered; the parsley's big frown
Wiggle-jiggled a bit and then turned upside down.
The curly-leafed kale couldn't stifle a grin
When the jester did handstands on back of a hen.
And what of the cabbage?  A gulp and a cough
And a snort and a chortle--he laughed his head off.

With one headless cabbage no longer a threat,
The jester replied to the veggies, "I'll bet
That you'd like to join with me and be in my act
And perform in the circus for crowds that are packed.
We'll go on the road; we'll perform in a tent;
I'll make you all stars--and I won't charge you rent." 
The brussels sprouts blinked and the parsley agreed.
Said the kale, "Ever since I was just a wee seed,
I have wanted to act, to perform in a show,
So draw up the contract; I'm ready to go."
The king and the queen and, in short, everyone
Gave a cheer just to praise what the jester had done.
He had rescued the kingdom, had kept it from harm
With a trick he had kept up the sleeve on his arm.
For he knew that no problem could ruin the day
If those with the problems would laugh them away.
So the veggies and he took the vaudeville route,
And the cabbage? Some spices and heat made him kraut.

A Much-Needed Note of Explanation:  Several weeks ago I was part of a community college lifelong learning class taught by one of my writer friends, wherein we considered how photographs might inspire poems.  The first night, she gave each of us a photo prompt and asked us to engage in a brainstorming process to generate words and phrases it might suggest, and, ultimately, to derive a poem related in some way to the picture.

As you can see below, the photo I selected (sight-unseen) was a doozy.  I could tell it was a specimen of some kind of green vegetation, but the close-up shot pretty well abstracted it beyond recognition.  I learned later that the photo depicts a hosta flower, but that knowledge came only after the above piece, a narrative kiddie poem, took shape in my head and then found its way onto paper.

I have yet to try the poem out on the kids, but I am hoping they get a kick out of the rhythm, the rhyme, and the far-out story situation. After all, Dr. Seuss made a fortune this way.  Maybe Sooby will want to illustrate it.  I hope so, and I hope you enjoy the piece as well.

  

A Super-Hero Turns Four

Dearest Little Pooh:

On this, your fourth birthday, I am playing with the present I had planned to bring you today.  It is a soft, squishy Spiderman toy that features "over 15 sounds and phrases" when you push the spider picture on his tummy.  "You're my crime-fighting buddy!" he will say one time.  "You're web-tacular!" he will say the next. 

I am not able to spend your birthday with you this year because your mama has the flu.  I think it may be the first birthday I have missed for any of you grandkids.  But don't worry.  Our celebration won't be cancelled; it will just be delayed for a little while.  Spiderman is very patient that way.

It has been my pleasure to watch you learn and grow and become your own little person this past year.  Although you share your sisters' love for story and song, it is clear to see that you would rather be on the move than sit still to draw or paint or do other crafty things. You would rather lick icing off the knife than decorate the cookie.  Clearly, you prefer action to artistry.

You loved your role as a mean, sword-bearing mouse in The Nutcracker, but didn't much like being one of only two boys in the summer dance recital.  You are much more comfortable dressed as Spiderman or Batman than in a white dress shirt with a red bow tie.    

Why tap and twirl, you must wonder, when you can run like the wind?  After all, the infamous, underwear-clad Naked Man, the super-hero you invented yourself, wouldn't be caught dead in tap shoes and dress slacks.

Mama tells me that she has bought you Spiderman presents too, and that your cake also follows through with the super-hero theme.  I imagine you are spending the day wearing your Spiderman costume, the one I bought for $1 at Wal-mart during the after-Halloween clearance sale last year.

Even though it is about four sizes too big, it made you so happy that I am pretty sure it was the best buck I ever spent.  I hope that, today of all days, you can wear whatever you want to wear, do whatever you want to do, and be whoever you want to be.  This is your day. 

Happy Birthday, sweet boy.  It has been four years since you first spun a web around our hearts and trapped them for good. You are a special blessing to our family, and in these four short years you have already contributed much toward saving this old world.

 

The Egg Trick

If you read my Nov. 9 post entitled "The Mean Cook," chances are, you already think I was a terrible mother to my daughter Cookie.  It is all about my concocting a big lie to encourage Cookie, who was about two at the time, to behave herself at a local restaurant so that Pa-pa and I could enjoy a nice meal out with our daughter neither on top of the table nor underneath it. 

You may recall that I told her a mean cooked worked there and he really did not like for kids to misbehave.  He could come flying out of that kitchen at any time, I said, brandishing kitchen cutlery that was the stuff of every child's nightmare. 

Through the years, the story of the mean cook became a staple in our diet of family stories, and now Sooby and Pooh love to hear it.  They especially love the idea that their mama could have been a rotten little kid, and the more I embellish that part, the more they love it.

I previously thought that Cookie was taking it all in stride.  Not true.  Instead, she has been calculating.  Now I know that she has just been biding her time, waiting for the opportunity to tell the kids a story that makes me look like a candidate for investigation by the Department of Child Welfare.

I first became aware of this the other day when I innocently pushed the "play" button on our phone's answering machine.  Sooby's little voice rang through the kitchen loud and clear:  "Googie?" she said.  "How do people lay eggs?"  When I heard this, I knew I was busted.  I knew that Cookie had squealed without giving me the chance to lawyer up.

The incriminating story involves me, two-year-old Cookie, her crib and a hard-boiled egg.  To this day I don't know why I did it, but I told her that if she tried real hard, she could lay an egg in her crib. 

So she would squat down, grunt like the dickens, and--Voila!--I would appear to reach underneath her and extract an honest-to-goodness egg.  So deft was I with the illusion that even David Copperfield would have been impressed.

Of course, problems surfaced when Cookie tried to lay an egg without me there.  She got so frustrated that I had to confess it had all been a trick and do what no self-respecting magician ever does--reveal the mechanics of the deception.  From her reaction, you would have thought I had told her there was no Santa.

A couple days ago I listened carefully as Sooby's phone message continued.  "My mom told me that I could lay an egg," she said.  "I sat down and closed my eyes and thought about laying eggs--but it didn't work."  By the time I heard this, I was standing at the phone with a rather sheepish grin, trying to figure out what to tell her. 

Turns out, Cookie had put her up to the whole thing.  After the babysitter had pretended to pull something magically out of Sooby's ear, Cookie told her the egg story, and Sooby wanted to hear all about it from me.  So I had to admit to my granddaughter that, yes, I seem to have had a mean streak and played a dirty, rotten trick on a kid the age of her little sister.

Come Easter, when plastic eggs are the plaything of the season, I expect to experience further repercussions from my short-lived, ill-fated stint as a magician.  But I take great comfort in the fact that the ball is now in my court--so, Cookie, you listen up.

I told the kids about the mean cook and you countered with the egg.  I have my next move planned, so prepare yourself.  There is a story about a frog that I think the kids would really love to hear.


 

  

Beenie's Word of the Day

When Beenie's mama came in to drop him off one day last week, she looked uncharacteristically worried.  "I'm not sure," she began falteringly, "but I think he has been saying 'ass.'"

I hit my temple with the heel of my hand a couple times, blinked hard, and grabbed a tissue to clean the wax out of my ears.  "What was that again?" I asked, refusing to believe what I had heard. 

I was pretty sure she couldn't be right about this.  How could this be?   Why would this purely angelic nine-month-old boy say such a thing--more than once, no less?  Nope.  It just wasn't computing.

I hoisted Beenie over to ride on my hip and together, we saw his mama out the front door and off to teach the wonderful nuances of the English language to her freshmen.  "Huh.  What do you think about that?" I said to Beenie, whereupon he flashed me that lady-killer smile and promptly responded, "Ass." 

As it turned out, this was only the beginning of what can only be called an "ass"-filled morning.  The various scenarios that played out were indeed rich--uh--fodder for the baby book.

For instance, we are playing with our crate of baby toys, many of which, understandably, are shaped like animals.  "Here's your horsie," I say, handing him a stuffed equine with a teething ring sewn to its legs.

"Ass," Beenie says, correcting me.  I look again and decide he might be right.  Its legs are pretty short, after all, and its color has deteriorated to a rather dull shade of gray.

Next, we are rocking and singing that perennial children's favorite, "Old MacDonald."  "And on his farm," I croon, "he had a--"

"Ass," Beenie says.  Well, okay. I guess that will work.  After all, Pa-pa runs a donkey with his cows to protect the calves from coyotes.  So I add a few "hee-haws" to that verse and go on, trying not to give this phenomenon a whole lot of positive attention.  After all, Beenie's parents may want to someday take him out in public and they will want his vocabulary to be a bit broader and more refined.

Later, it becomes apparent that it is time to change the diaper. (I should have seen this one coming.)  "Now," I say to Beenie," let's check that bottom of yours."

"Ass."  Well, what do you say to that?  By now, I am having a lot of trouble trying to keep the laughs in check.  With a fresh diaper in place, we meet Pa-pa coming in the front door with a handful of mail.

"Ass," Beenie says to Pa-pa, who has not had anyone call him that to his face--at least, not since he retired from his job as the director of a secondary vocational school.  "Oh," I say, no longer able to confine the laughs, "he's not really such a bad guy."

I have no doubt that Beenie's often repeated "word of the day" consisted only of randomly combined phonemes that just happened to create a hilarious effect in a variety of viable contexts he couldn't possibly understand.  He probably picked up on the reactions of the adults around him.  He is at the age where he likes our attention, and that day, I think it is safe to say he captured quite a bit of it.

I debated whether or not to blog about this experience.  After all, I would never want to offend any reader or have "Googie's Attic" lose its "G" rating.  But I figure if the word in question can appear numerous times in the King James Version of the Bible, it can't be that bad to use it a few times here.

Keep it up, Beenie Boy.  You have our undivided attention.  If your future language experiments are anywhere near as good as this one, we are all going to have a great time watching you learn to talk. 











 

The Family Choir

The random mind of a Googie--or at least this Googie--is a thing that makes people scratch their heads. 

Who knows why I decided this would be a fun thing to do on Christmas Day?  At any rate, as I was packing the box to go to son Teebo's with a spiral-sliced ham, a potato casserole, and a couple of jars of home-canned green beans, I threw in the sheet music to "Silent Night."

My idea was that after lunch, we would gather around the piano, I would play, and the voices of our family would blend into a one-of-a kind rendition of this beloved old Christmas hymn.  Once shared, it would become a Christmas-Day blessing, captured on my iPhone by a production crew consisting of my mom and son Teebo--to my Facebook friends and their families.

To my credit, it was not that far-fetched an idea.  Daughter Cookie and her husband are professional music educators.  My brother and his wife have been the bass and alto voices in a gospel quartet.  My sister-in-law is indebted to her mom, who joins us for Christmas dinner, for the alto genes.  My own daughter-in law, Beenie's mom, is a former high-school show-choir standout and church musician.

The beautiful, blended vocals did not disappoint; they were what I expected.  But what I--and everyone else--did not expect was the contribution of three-year-old Pooh to the family choir.  Not knowing the words to the hymn, Pooh was content to "la-la-la" his way through the song.  Indeed,  his little "la-la-las" can be heard during pauses and even over the rest of the choir at selected spots throughout the song.  Because of this, our family choir debut is, on one hand, inspirational, and on the other hand, hilarious.

We did not intend to rehearse the performance, but when my mom had a little trouble operating the iPhone video feature, it became apparent that a "Take 2" would be necessary with son Teebo joining the camera crew.  Although Pooh remained quiet the first time through, that was not the case in the version you see on the video.  By then he had figured out what was gong on, and was more than primed to embellish our performance in a way that only he could have done.

I am not posting the video here on the blog because I have not yet figured out how to get it onto here from my phone in a way that works.  But if you are or wish to become my Facebook friend, you can see it posted on my timeline for Christmas Day 2012.  If you are like me, you will not be able to watch it with a straight face, especially toward the end where Pooh's "la-la-las" become especially resonant and the rest of us can barely keep from cracking up.

His pitch is perfect.  He can carry a tune.  His timing--well--that is what makes our family Christmas choir debut genuinely unique.  That, and his enthusiasm (read volume). 

Certainly, none of us expected our family choir debut to be upstaged by a three-year-old.  But perhaps we should have.  After all, this is the child who, only last year, was a mean mouse who tried to kill the Nutcracker when, by mistake, he ventured out onto the stage a little prematurely. 

Pooh's unanticipated antics notwithstanding, I find our family rendition of "Silent Night" charming.  I hope you do as well.  And if you are a talent scout and want to sign Pooh up for stage or screen, just send me a Facebook message and I'll hook you up.