Sing Together Now: It’s a Disney World After All

The huge hidden magnets latched onto our RV’s bumper somewhere up by Pensacola.

I’d longed to stay on the Gulf Coast, where we’d been lazing along, stopping whenever the whim hit to swim in the warm currents or sample the shrimp and crab dragged ashore in idiosyncratic little fishing ports.

But then the magnets planted beneath the asphalt of every Florida roadway started pulling us south and inland relentlessly. And the secret radio signals started getting through to my kids’ fillings, causing them to chant robotically:

“Disney. Disney. Disney.”

My wife, Pam, and I put Walt Disney World on our itinerary because it seemed essential to our summer-long exploration of what the American family is up to these days.

We had no idea, though, how hard it would be to resist the mass brainwashing that seeks to turn every American family into a Disney American family.

We are finally sucked into the conglomerate’s massive Orlando force field after midnight, and spend the next two hours on a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of U-turns through construction zones and look-alike neighborhoods. “I hate this city!” I sputter as we pay our 2,000th toll. Then, miraculously, we are there.

Having studied cults, I know the strategy: Create unbearable despair, and the subsequent release seems so sweet that a prospective acolyte will weep with gratitude and loyalty.

Even armed with that knowledge, though, I have a hard time suppressing my joy as I leave Pam waiting in the rented RV with our three sleeping kids and I step into the log cabin-style lobby of Disney’s Fort Wilderness Campground.

It is 3 in the morning, but a hearth-mounted television blazes with a Chip ‘n’ Dale cartoon. I ring a perfectly polished desk bell. Before my finger descends a second time, a blond woman with an accent purged of all regional offense appears, more cheerful and welcoming than any Angeleno has been since they trucked in all those lobotomized shills from Orange County for the 1984 Olympics.

The motif here is “wilderness”: RVs are Conestoga wagons, visitors are pioneers settlin’ in for a spell “in one of the richest, most abundant sources of pure relaxation found anywhere.”

As I grapple with this illusion (according to the Fort Wilderness Gazette, the “most commonly asked question in the wilderness” is: “Where can I rent a golf cart?”), my greeter pokes at a computer and pulls out maps and charts and fliers.

Never breaking eye contact for more than four seconds, she scribbles circles and arrows for the boat to Disney World, buses to Epcot, and our cable-ready campsite. (Did I hear right? Will Dumbo really swoop down and pick up our laundry for just $500?)

Finally, my new best friend hands me five plastic cards with magnetic swipe stripes. The cards--each emblazoned faintly with a smiling blue genie--are for transportation within the park. Pam’s and mine, she adds, also have automatic $2,500 credit limits that can be extended easily should we exceed it.

“So don’t be afraid to shop till you drop,” she says.

*

Not long after daybreak, we set off to explore our new frontier campground, with its playgrounds, tennis courts and (literally) steam-cleaned sidewalks.

We eavesdrop as self-described mouse freaks trade esoteric tips for milking the most fun from every Mickey moment. We meet families who never vacation anywhere non-Disney. We learn of couples who get married here and ride in Cinderella’s coach.

With resolve that is nothing short of heroic, I fight the mind control.

When the kids and I have lunch at the Trail’s End Buffeteria, for instance, I pointedly focus on the negative. Ignoring the bounty of fried chicken, ribs and spaghetti and the gushing courtesy of the wait staff, I note that the dessert bar does not include ice cream, which is peddled aggressively throughout the complex.

This restaurant (like the restrooms, like the laundry) pipes in a barely audible medley of Disney tunes. As we step back outside, I reach deep into my reservoir of resistance and produce a little deprogramming ditty, sung to the tune of the song being played:

A whole new world!

A world of zombie fam-i-lies

who do just what they’re told

to fit the mold

and make sure they please

Guru Walt Disney.

Emily, 10, and Robert, 7, ignore me. Ashley, who is 12, sings along for a moment, but then we’re back on our bikes pedaling along happily amid vast swarms of other smiling clans.

As we ride, it rains. But it is warm Florida rain and soon we’re all sloshing and whooping, a band of fearless marauders who strike fear into the hearts of the innocent pioneers as we shout back and forth. At midnight, we ride over to one of the campground’s two sprawling pools. Like the human drones in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine,” mothers and fathers and children are spilling out of the forest and into the well lighted commons.

Plunging into the expanse of shimmering blue, we stack ourselves two and three high and chicken-fight. We cannonball.

I catch myself thinking that this feels an awful lot like bona fide fun. In counterpoint, though, the kids keep dribbling across the sidewalk to probe well-kempt shrubs for the answer to a mystery: Those pleasantly chirping frogs--electronic or real? I’m not kidding. We can’t tell. And as I listen, the chirps are joined by a gentle voice in my head: “Does it matter, Bob? Does it really? What constitutes reality anyway, Bob?”

I wonder about that as we ride back on pathways still bustling with family members walking hand in hand.

*

By entering into an economic pact with the Master Mouse Authority, these folks have entitled themselves to privileges unheard of in the “real” world these days. And I have no doubt that many of the mothers and fathers we pass are thinking: Why must this just be a vacation illusion? Why can’t we stroll without fear of thugs, or the distraction of litter, in our real lives?

Disney, of course, has an answer.

After checking out of Fort Wilderness (a man came by early and put our bill under the RV’s windshield), we negotiate the labyrinth of Disney roads and wind up in Celebration, the company’s new family-friendly “American Town,” not a theme park but an actual made-from-scratch “community.” As per its budding reputation, Celebration is as spick-and-span as California’s own Coto de Caza, without the raging individuality.

The street signs feature girls on bikes and boys with coonskin caps blowing in the wind. None of them is marred by graffiti. We eat a very nice meal at a cafe on Celebration’s main street-style town square; then, Pam and the girls go shopping while Robert and I amble along the 4,900-acre development’s lake in search of residents.

Soon we encounter Mark Dusch, 33, and his 3-year-old son, Amilio, who are gazing from a footbridge at a very real but appropriately docile 3-foot alligator.

Dusch will move into a new townhouse here as soon as it is finished. He is clearly excited. “This is like little towns used to be,” he says. “At the same time, it’s structured and futuristic.”

Later, down by the pool complex, we come across two families barbecuing on the perfect lawn beside a picnic shelter. Noting the meat sizzling on the grill, I ask if they’re not violating a Celebration regulation: Aren’t all burgers required to be patted into little mouse ears?

“We heard all those rumors,” Diana Bohman replies, chuckling with an insider’s confidence. “The Gestapo mouse idea.”

Bohman won the chance to buy here in a crowded lottery and recently moved into a new home in the development’s first phase. She sees herself as something of a pioneer, she says. And as far as she’s concerned, Celebration is holding up its end of the deal.

Bohman’s new friend Stuart Devlin says he and his wife, Cynthia, both from New York’s Long Island, have watched the development of Celebration from the beginning. “You think Disney, you think family and all that stuff,” he says. “This is the kind of community that people have been dreaming about.”

As I talk to the adults, two little girls try to coax Robert into a play structure, but he demurs and shoots their picture instead. Smiling, I think that these folks would make fine neighbors.

What’s interesting, though, is that many of the people I interview are echoing, and precisely, themes sounded in the videos and brochures offered at Celebration’s Preview Center.

“Celebration takes the best of what made small towns great in our past and adds a vision of the future,” one display proclaims. Celebration, we learn, is “a place to learn, to play, to meet new friends . . . a place to grow together.”

Walt Disney himself appears on one video, and his words are offered elsewhere as inspiration: “I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important than finding solutions to the problems of our communities.”

Celebration, says Disney’s Michael Eisner, “will be molded and shaped by the people who make it their home.”

But they’ll have plenty of help. The state-of-the-art school system, with educators specially trained by nearby Stetson University, will be watched over by a board of three trustees from the university, the school district and Disney.

As a boy in the video says of his new community: “They care about you more.” As Robert and I wander, I catch myself wondering if the next lottery is still open to applicants. Then I glimpse a couple so incongruous to this pastel world that I rush to them in hopes that they’ll offer an acerbic anecdote.

Until recently, the man in black--who requests anonymity--says he played drums for one of America’s most infamous gothic rock bands, a cluster of multiply-pierced mutants who spit on all that is wholesome and cause conniptions in parents worldwide.

To my horror, though, instead of dumping on Disney, this guy blasts American cities for their traffic and crime. He says he and his girlfriend, Meta Powles, would love to live in Celebration.

“We’re Disney buffs since birth,” says Powles, who is also dressed all in black and sports skull earrings.

I am stunned. But as I walk away, I come to a realization. This is going to send hackles rising at espresso bars across the Westside, but only because it’s so obviously true: If Los Angeles and its urban brethren weren’t such dangerous, dirty, visually assaultive, smog- and traffic-choked failures, the Disney mega-corporation wouldn’t be so successful at hustling this alluring alternative.

But does that mean that turning the rest of America over to Disney is the answer?

*

As Robert and I are wandering back to the RV, we see something that shades the illusion and unearths a childhood memory.

I was a 5-year-old boy in a coonskin cap making my first trip to Disneyland and quivering with the expectation of meeting Davy Crockett. With my mom’s hand in mine, we turned a corner near Cinderella’s castle, and there on the steam-cleaned sidewalk lay an obese and disheveled woman in the throes of heart attack or heatstroke. “Oh Lord! Oh Lord!” she moaned.

Today, Robert sees a tourist, in her 30s perhaps, sitting on a downtown Celebration stoop, talking to herself and sobbing while a woman I take to be her long-suffering mother watches from a short distance.

Clearly the woman is mentally ill and her facial expressions, as well as her mother’s, are a window into the Pandora’s box of pain that has been known on occasion to find a home in the human condition.

But does it have a place in Celebration? Will there be insanity here? Poor people? Homelessness? Will Celebration have a mortuary?

People here don’t seem to be losing sleep over such questions yet. And I know why.

As one aspiring resident told me earlier: “We just believe in Disney. We’ve always believed in Disney.”

* Monday: Virginia.

ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.

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