Welcome to Mickey’s Family Camp

The golf cart has been rented, the toiletries and wet towels are scattered around the bathroom of Townhouse No. 5, and the four of us are well across the frontier, deep into the shadow of the Mouse. Even if family vacation is an oxymoron, it’s too late to turn back now. Strange things are already happening: It is only the first morning of this three-day adventure at the Disney Institute, and one of our two 15-year-olds has voluntarily awakened at 6:30 on the lone Friday of her weeklong spring vacation to attend a cooking class called “Studio Bakery: Chocolate.”

Sure, chocolate is addictive. Sure, Natalie considers chocolate a reasonable alternative to breakfast staples such as cold pizza and Pop-Tarts. But we’re not talking brain receptors here to explain her willingness to get up at dawn. No, we’re talking Disney magic. It is so darn bright and sunny in Orlando, and the people who work at the Disney Institute are so darn bright and sunny themselves that no one would want to disappoint them. So Natalie heads out for an 8 o’clock class in which she will not only learn to make chocolate truffles and get to eat them, but will also be told that the cocoa bean is nature’s richest source of magnesium, an element essential in the prevention of heart disease, hypertension and diabetes.

Sugar-coated learning? Call it Dis-Ed.

A little later in the morning, sitting on the balcony of our on-campus condominium, sipping a cup of coffee and watching a pair of mallard ducks flap around in the canal, I’m starting to feel a bit guilty that my first class is a golf lesson that doesn’t begin until 11.

Oh well, I sigh, stretching for another of the banana nut muffins that have been delivered to our door. I’m on vacation.

*

For the last 50 years or so, most Americans took the word “vacation” literally. During the two or three weeks they were excused from the job, working folks packed up the family, threw bathing suits, tennis racquets and all that dysfunction into the station wagon and headed for the beach or the mountains. There they willed themselves into a state of vacatus, as we say in Latin: emptiness, at leisure. Traditionally, people tried to relax while doing next to nothing. And two or three weeks later, the family climbed back into the station wagon and drove home with sunburns and sore muscles, less rested than when they left, perhaps, but at least happy to get back into their own beds.

Then, according to Disney legend, in the mid-1980s, company CEO and chairman Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane, went to the famed Chautauqua Institution. There, by the lake of the same name in upstate New York, where Jane had spent some of her girlhood summers, Michael was inspired by the type of learning vacation that had its American heyday between the 1870s and the 1920s.

With the chairman’s epiphany, a new niche market was born.

Chautauquas were, according to a description at the time, designed to “utilize the general demand for summer rest by uniting daily study with healthful recreation.” Founded to educate Methodist Sunday school teachers, Chautauquas soon expanded to offer the general public a range of lectures, concerts, readings and entertainments, all designed to provide cultural stimulation. By the turn of the century, Chautauquas began to travel as tent shows, and eventually the movement created a national hunger for education that led to adult summer schools, university extension classes, correspondence courses and door-to-door encyclopedia sales.

Although the Chautauqua Institution lives on, traveling tent shows eventually folded under the pressure of mass market entertainment--including, ironically, movies and television of the type produced by Disney. Vacations dedicated to self-improvement gave way to those offering self-indulgence. Still, Eisner apparently sees a lucrative market here. Thus was born the Disney Institute, which, according to some estimates, cost at least $10 million to get up andrunning, employs a staff of nearly 800 and, in its first year, attracted artists such as poet Nikki Giovanni, film director Martin Scorsese and jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

Corporate penance? Yeah, maybe.

Corporate profits? You bet.

*

The Disney Institute opened last year on 90 wooded acres within the kingdom of Walt Disney World on what was once The Villas, a 20-year-old Disney vacation resort. Clustered around a central lake are 450 remodeled one- and two-bedroom townhouses, a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools and hiking trails. The campus-like grounds are within walking distance of Pleasure Island, a hectic night-life zone of restaurants and dance clubs, but remain serenely isolated from the crowded theme park circus a few miles away. The place has the look and feel of an upscale church camp. At its center is a new lakefront main street that has a movie-set, small-town look. There is a marqueed movie theater, featuring live entertainment or a Disney film nightly; an outdoor amphitheater; a restaurant called Seasons with a Floridian menu of seafood, fresh fruit and key lime pie; a well-appointed spa, gymnasium and health club; and pastel classroom buildings containing studios filled with the latest in photography, animation and kitchen equipment.

Business was slow the first year. Disney does not release attendance figures, but institute officials say that without Disney money, and Eisner’s personal interest, this costly experiment might have been scrapped. The first course offerings were certainly not cribbed from turn-of-the-century Chautauqua curriculum--there were no lectures on John Donne’s metaphysics, for example, or panel discussions on the Peloponnesian War. Still, Disney execs just might have overestimated the American baby boomer’s appetite for culture and meliorism. Gone, for example, are original courses that required guests to write the scripts for “As the Disney World Turns”--an in-house soap-opera broadcast--and potentially revealing exercises such as “Reclaiming Family Stories” and “Journal Writing.”

What happened, says Dianna Morgan, a Disney Institute senior vice president, was that the first campers to show up at the institute after the February 1996 opening were “the ones we call Disneyphiles, the people who visit the theme parks several times a year and enjoy anything Disney might do.” They did not want more mental stimulation; they wanted more Mickey Mouse. Thus, while those first guests embraced “As Walt Would Tell It,” a two-hour review of the Disney founder’s narrative style, they were scared off by ego-bending, touchy-feely offerings such as “Midlife and Beyond.”

Since those early days, Disney has boosted traffic by inviting day visitors to join those in residence, and finding a home here for the Disney University, which puts on management seminars for business groups of as many as 75. At the same time, Morgan says, the institute has also tweaked its advertising pitch and zeroed in on its market--”a little older, with older children, slightly higher income than the typical guest.” Alas, that market is asking for intellectual challenge. “We’re going to borrow from Chautauqua and Aspen [Institute],” Morgan says, “and add more things that involve family interactions, panel discussions, Socratic dialogues, some of these things that were part of the original vision.”

Socratic dialogues?

Advertising in magazines such as The New Yorker and National Geographic Traveler, and through targeted cable television stations, the institute uses the tag line, “You won’t believe what you can do.” For the $1,645 my family and I are paying for two full days of classes and three nights of lodging, sans meals, I want to emerge from the institute assured that they didn’t “do” me. Forget dialoguing like an ancient Greek. I just don’t want to come out talking like Goofy.

For those who hear in the name Disney Institute a faint echo of sanitarium, medical research or center for the study of cartoon animal behavior, the first signage that arrivals see upon check-in is not entirely reassuring. This way, points one arrow, to the Front Desk. And this way, indicates another arrow, to Programming.

Programming?

Well, I have to admit that for us a little programming might be in order. As a family we are a fresh creation, recombinant following divorce, blended but far from homogenized. By Disney’s measure, we are the perfect demographic for what company publicist Dan Higgins calls “soft adventure travel.” “You want to invest in yourself, do something meaningful, not just lie on the beach,” he says. “You do things separately during the day, then come together in the evening.”

Ofelia, the mom, is a businesswoman whose sense of adventure is tempered by practicality and an appreciation for out-of-the-ordinary pleasures. Yes, she has enrolled in gardening, cooking and photography classes, but only after first confirming her 3 p.m. appointment at the spa for a Purifying Seaweed Body Masque.

Natalie is Ofelia’s daughter, a lithe dancer and 10th-grader who, on the drive up from Miami, popped into the car’s tape deck a recording by Adam Sandler, which contains nothing but the lowest form of sophomoric, bathroom humor. I would have cut it off immediately had I not been laughing too hard to locate the eject button. Along with chocolate, Natalie has chosen classes in rock climbing, television production and “Create an Animated Character.”

My son, Joey, also 15, is a freshman theater major in a performing arts high school who has brought along a copy of William S. Burroughs’ novel “Junky.” If subjected to a car search upon entering the grounds, I imagine, this book will be confiscated and Joey will launch into a dramatic protest. He has signed up for classes in animation, Spanish cooking, television production and rock climbing.

As a journalist, I am, of course, an open-minded skeptic, hoping for happy synergy but secretly fearing that the family dynamic will erupt in disaster. In agreeing to go on this vacation, Disney veterans Natalie and Joey have each expressed a cool curiosity about what they will encounter. But they are also teenagers, capable of disdain and negativity, susceptible to brooding. I imagine that if their first class in this vacation school does not go well, they could drop out, choose to watch television, turn sullen.

The experimental, risky nature of this venture looms large as I run down my own class schedule: candid portrait photography, “Romantic Dinners,” and, with Ofelia, “Dance! Dance! Dance!” But first golf.

*

“Negative thinking is 100% effective,” one of the two teaching pros tells me and about 10 classmates as we gather on the practice tees to loosen up the swing. He has mind-read my cynicism, I think at first, then realize he’s talking about golf. We get some tips on the grip, the back-swing, a little more golfing Zen (“Begin with the end in mind”), and then are freed to whack range balls into the broiling postmeridian day.

Next to me on the practice tee is a fair-skinned man whose face is turning as red as his crimson shirt as he whales away with a five-iron. Hotel general manager Andrew Turnbull is with a group of tourism professionals from New Brunswick, Canada, and he is looking for help with his handicap as well as ideas to put into play at home. He and his colleagues are evidence that when Disney does, the rest of the world ducks in for a look. After two days at the institute, Turnbull says, he appreciates the way Disney has struck the balance between education and fun. “Not being lectured to, no competition, no grades,” he says. “And I’m also coming away with the feeling that I am learning something.”

What Turnbull and I learn in our two-hour lesson is that we can drive a ball as far with a relaxed, one-handed swing as with a two-fisted power grip that could choke the life out of Dumbo. “In all the years I’ve been playing, I’ve never heard as good an explanation of how to overcome the tendency to overpower the ball as with this one-handed pendulum approach,” says Turnbull. He can’t wait until the snows melt back home.

After golf I have a few hours to kill until I’m to cook a romantic dinner under the direction of a couple of guys named Mark and Reid. I head over to the spa, where cheery Disney-shirted staffers invite me to look around. I check out the indoor exercise pool, cruise through a room packed with video-game treadmills and Cybex weight-training machines, fire up a few jumpers in the deserted full-court gymnasium and then, although barely sweating, sign up for an “After Sports Massage.” (Spa offerings are all a la carte, and massages run about $70.)

Issued a robe and shown around the locker room, I wait for my masseuse. Victoria, a pleasant but powerful-looking woman, appears and asks, “Have you ever had a treatment before?”

A treatment?

No, I confess, I’ve really never had a massage unless you count the research I did 20 years ago for a feature story on lap-dancing bars in Akron.

It soon becomes apparent, as Victoria lays me on a bubbling mud pack of blue-green seaweed--imported from France, she says--that she could snap my neck at any minute. But this is Disney, after all, and these staffers are reputed to undergo more training and background checks than an Iranian palace guard.

So I just relax, close my eyes, forget about all those topped and sliced range balls and let Victoria’s fingers work their own brand of Disney magic up and down my spine. Meanwhile, I imagine the kids cutting classes to zip around in the golf cart, checking out the video arcade and the Downtown Disney Marketplace--an adjacent shopping area offering everything from gourmet delicatessen foods to the usual Disney kitsch. I picture Ofelia sampling Chianti and Pinot Grigio in a course called “Wine, Wonders & Song,” which leaves participants with a practiced swirl-and-sniff technique, take-home maps of both Italy and the human tongue and a slight midday buzz. With New Age wood flute music seeping from the walls, I begin to contemplate the future of American vacations. I see myself and the family pioneering Eisner’s vision of the participatory, active holiday that refreshes the soul and stimulates the mind. Relaxing even more, I try to think of what these imagineering corporateers will come up with next for middle-aged campers such as us.

I am drawing a blank. This trailblazing is tough, I think.

I could go to sleep right here, face down on this massage table, breathing the mentholated air of the Dizzzzzzz. . . .

“Mike!”

“Mike!”

Oh, mercy, it’s Victoria. She is standing over me with a glass of water in her hand, an enough-already! expression on her face and pointing to my shower shoes on the floor.

“Time to go,” she says, and right then I learn an indelible real-world lesson: Getting up is clearly the worst part of any massage.

I hang around in the commodious locker room for a while, ducking into the steam room, the sauna, the whirlpool, using as many towels as possible, reading some newspapers, brushing my teeth and shaving with the complimentary toiletries, even having some fruit. Everything in the locker room is restful green and white, very antiseptic and clean-looking, and sunlight is pouring in through a high window. But as I gaze around at the other men coming and going, I see that they appear to be the same denizens of every locker room I’ve ever been in--overweight guys who look like they should be chewing on a fat cigar as they sit around in open bathrobes talking business and golf games.

Real or animatronic? I couldn’t tell.

*

It’s time for me to cook a romantic dinner across campus. Somewhere I had picked up the notion that after preparing this romantic dinner, Ofelia would join me to eat it. But no. Couples take the class together and together cook the dinner. So in a class of 15 people, I am the only one without a partner, which is too bad for Kerrie and Gary Swart of Milwaukee because they have to take me in like a starving orphan.

Our goal is a meal that begins with a salad of cheese and salmon terrine, features an entree of chicken roulade and homemade ravioli, and ends with a chocolate s’mores souffle. With two wines, of course.

The kitchen classrooms, like all of the facilities at the institute, are first-rate. The Swarts and I share a workstation outfitted with dual stove-top burners, an oven, a sink, a refrigerator and just the right tools for dicing, mixing and spreading. When we cannot easily see the hands of the instructors as they work at a similar counter top in front of the room, we merely raise our glance to wall-mounted television monitors that relay the action via overhead “culinary cam.”

For the Swarts, this dinner is pretty basic stuff. Gary, 33, is an emergency room physician, and Kerrie, 29, is an elementary school teacher, and their passion is cooking. “We make pasta like this at home all the time,” Gary confides as I push a roller over the edges of a ravioli mold for the first time in my life.

In fact, the Swarts are day visitors to the institute, having paid $79 per person to fit three cooking classes into the second Friday of their nine-day Disney World vacation. “We like Disney. I have been coming here every year with my family since I was about 3 years old,” Kerrie tells me over our candlelight dinner on the Studio C terrace. “I appreciate the way Disney organizes and manages things, figuring out problems before they happen.”

But Disney’s reputation for planning and control cuts both ways. By the time we start forking holes in our perfectly puffy souffle, I realize that this meal has turned out so well largely because most of the preparation was done for us. Many of the spices and other ingredients were pre-measured and already cut; we merely blended them together. Chef Mark Dowling had the souffle base ready, and sommelier Reid Rapport is bustling around doing most of the clean-up.

Of course, in three hours a sandwich-making guy like me is not going to be able to crank out a romantic dinner that includes homemade pasta and a souffle. Since there is no time for failure, there is very little risk.

So what did I learn? Preparation is everything. A meal of appetizer, salad, pasta, chicken and dessert is very filling. I would never make a meal like this by myself.

Back at Townhouse No. 5, the family reconvenes, and I scan the kids’ faces for signs of incipient rebellion or destabilizing angst. I find only hunger. I am so full I can hardly move, but I walk to the Disney Marketplace across the canal with the others, and while they eat, I moderate a review of the first day. In her photography class, Ofelia, worried that she has little eye for composition, missed that there was no critique of her work, as the film was not developed on the spot. The instructor did offer, however, to critique the photos if they were mailed to him later. “Wine, Wonders & Song” was more satisfying. Ofelia knows her way around the kitchen. But just making something new, a simple flat bread, she says, gave her what she calls an “I can do this feeling.”

Joey brings in a three-star review of his “Home Videos the Disney Way” class, in which he told a short story of a woman surreptitiously passing her hotel room key to a man at a restaurant. Impressed with the techniques he picked up in one afternoon, he muses aloud about redirecting his career dreams from the stage to behind the camera.

In her “create an animated-character class,” Natalie reports that she was schooled on using basic drawing techniques to first create familiar Disney regulars and then invited to work up a sketch of her own. She came up with a tuxedoed penguin. In recalling the classroom atmosphere and the instructor’s style, Natalie describes a certain planned playfulness--the teacher invited students to wad up their drawings and toss them at her--that struck this antennaed teen as both staged and corny.

*

The next morning after breakfast, the kids head off for rock climbing, Ofelia and I to “Dance! Dance! Dance!” which is billed as a two-hour festival of fun with instruction in anything from line and square dance to folk and ballroom. We love to dance and have taken lessons in salsa and merengue. So I figure whatever the drill, we are willing. But there is no crowd, only Francoise and Ron, a couple with the Canadian contingent, us and Wendy, the instructor. “Country line dancing or modern?” she asks. We go modern, and after a few warm-up exercises and a couple of informational ballet positions, we are earnestly choreographing a pas de quatre that owes more to St. Vitus than Isadora Duncan. We all prove to be uninhibited enough to risk foolishness and energetic enough to get an aerobic workout. As for artistry? Alvin Ailey, relax.

For our final afternoon session, we again go our separate ways: Natalie to video production, Joey to an animation class, Ofelia to an English-looking cottage for “The Container Gardener” and I to “Candid Portrait Photography.”

My instructor turns out to be an amiable, knowledgeable man named Robbie who quickly gets my attention when he reveals that he began his 14-year career with Disney as a guide in the Magic Kingdom, where he conducted tourists on more than 13,000 trips on the Jungle Cruise! And he still made perfect sense as he briefed us on the Nikon cameras we would be using and dispensed tips on composition, lighting and depth of field.

For an exercise, I am partnered with Marilyn Toback, 55, who codes medical records in Deer Park, N.Y., and Tom Smoot, a lawyer from Fort Myers, Fla. Told to take pictures of each other in various campus settings, we each shoot off a roll of film and strike some self-conscious, contemplative poses, but I don’t think any one of us looks or feels like a model.

Smoot, 62, knows the Chautauqua Institution, that venerable mecca of high culture with 125 years of tradition, a spectacular natural setting, a distinguished summer concert and lecture series, and a distinct intellectual rigor. He’s been to Chautauqua, and the Disney Institute, he says, is no Chautauqua.

“But it is fun,” adds Smoot. “I haven’t been to a Disney park for 20 years, since my kids were young, and I have pleasant memories of that. Clean fun, no worries about crime or unruly behavior. This is much the same. Disney presents education in an entertaining way.”

Early on the last morning of our visit, Joey matches Natalie’s teenage iconoclasm by getting up for an 8 a.m. facial--his last chance to experience the luxury of the spa. He comes back two hours later with clean pores, little appreciation for the appeal of a sauna and every intention of going back to bed.

But no. It is checkout time.

As part of our package, we have bought tickets to any one of Disney’s theme parks, so on a simmering Sunday we depart the institute’s cloistered grounds for the short drive to the Magic Kingdom. For hours we join tens of thousands of other vacationers in long lines to experience brief thrills on Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain and Alien Encounter. After that the only ride left is the 230 miles back to Miami.

On the way home I search for lessons learned, fun remembered, morals drawn. The kids want to sleep. But Ofelia indulges me, saying that she loved the gardening class and came away inspired to transform the backyard into a jungly orchid grotto. The seaweed massage was pure heaven, she says, “but I think I most enjoyed the dance class, where I felt I stepped outside myself and wasn’t afraid to look silly. It was liberating.”

I, too, enjoyed the dancing, the romantic dinner with Gary and Kerrie, and the photography class, where I was reminded of several basic tenets of composition I too often ignore. (“Don’t cut your subjects off at the knees.”) And I’ve decided to wait until I’m a little more mature before taking up golf as an obsession.

In the back seat, the kids are sprawled out like accidental contortionists, leggy adolescents barely recognizable to us as the children they once were. Although Joey and Natalie have known each other all their lives, they have never been close. They go to different schools and are members of distinct subsets in the tribe of youth; their tastes in friends, clothing and music are worlds apart. Nonetheless, they have been tossed into the same small world by a parent’s partnership.

On unstructured family vacations, there is ample opportunity for skirmish and dissension over what to do next. One person’s sunny beach looks like Hades to someone else. At the institute, we had no such problems, since everyone picked his or her own schedule. And although there was little time for daytime leisure--no one in our family read a book or went swimming, for example--the evenings were wide open. One night after dinner we went to a go-cart track. The next night we were all so tired we just went to bed.

In its promotional literature, the Disney Institute invites visitors to “embark on a journey of discovery and exploration, where outstanding programs and activities will open your eyes, your ears and your heart.” But discovery and exploration require some degree of spontaneity. In her Disney News Network video production class, Natalie says the class was briefly offered a chance to write its own stand-ups, then was quickly steered into choosing from one of the three ready-made scripts. Later, while editing, she and the others in the class sat by while the instructor actually did the editing.

“He wanted to have a completed videotape that looked good,” Natalie says. “I kept thinking, ‘When are we going to have a chance to do it?’ But we just watched. It was boring.”

My cooking class was also tightly scripted. That souffle was not going to fall. Still, in just two days we were exposed to new experiences and came away with at least some fresh ambitions. Worth the time? Sure. Worth the money. Hmmm.

But was it fun?

Again I pester the kids, trying to drag some opinion from them. Natalie had easily scaled the toughest face of the four-sided cement-rock mountain, seemed pleased with her chocolate creations and drew a pretty good penguin in animation class. She also had a massage.

Joey got a feel for establishing shots in the video class and, always unsettled by heights, expressed pride in climbing the wall. He also invented a cartoon character named Gomer in animation class. As for the Spanish cooking class--well, he never has liked paella.

So, I persist, what was the best part of the whole weekend? The rock climbing, the video stuff, the restaurant food, the Magic Kingdom roller coasters?

The kids think for a moment. They look at each other. They agree.

The golf cart.