Disney Parks after tragedy

Spotted this on one of the geek sites I visit, emphasis added by me: 

URAYASU, CHIBA— Tokyo Disney Resort® announced today that it will reopen Tokyo Disneyland Park on April 15, 2011. Both Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea® Parks have been temporarily closed from March 12 following the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Tokyo Disneyland Park will reopen while making every effort to conserve the use of electricity in its operations.  Furthermore, a portion of the ticket price will be donated toward the relief and recovery of the disaster-affected areas.

Tokyo DisneySea Park remains temporarily closed for the time being, but we are aiming toward the earliest reopening of this Park as well.

Finally, Oriental Land Co., Ltd. would like to send our heartfelt condolences to all who have been affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our apologies and gratitude to all who have been concerned by the temporary closure of the Parks. We will continue to strive toward providing an experience filled with dreams and happiness to as many guests as possible, and will make our best corporate effort to answer the needs and expectations of as many people as possible.

How very in keeping with the culture. Not that I'd expect any different. 


Apparently, something the park management (Oriental Land Company, which owns and operates Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea under license by the Walt Disney Company) has to contend with is slow turnstiles due to the Japanese concept of "shibari" or self-restraint – it is felt that to go and enjoy a day or a vacation at Tokyo Disneyland, or any activity that is frivolous in nature, is in bad taste when so many are homeless and suffering. So they have to serve two goals: Get people into the parks in order to stay solvent, and keep the promotion subdued so as not to appear crass and insensitive. 

Contrast that with Dubya saying on national television, by way of reassuring the nation that its airlines were safe days after 9/11/01, "Get down to Disney World! Take your families!" Now, the magnitude of the disaster was perhaps not equal, but the shock it caused certainly was at least equal if not greater. Megan and I had made plans to visit Disney World that October months beforehand, and it was only at the President's amusingly specific words that we decided not to cancel the trip. We experienced the American form of shibari on that trip. Everyone everywhere was wearing American flag pins, many in the "3 circles" shape representing Mickey Mouse's outline. Anytime we engaged other guests in conversation, it almost immediately included "where were you when it happened" and a strong, strong sense of gratitude for circumstances that allowed us to be at WDW at all. Cast Members seemed uniformly touched and grateful that we had "made the trip anyway" and were even more friendly and gracious than usual, even if their smiles looked just a bit forced and broken.  

Things all over the parks suddenly had new significance and poignancy. The daily flag raising and retreat ceremonies were extremely well attended: usually the flag raising is witnessed by a smattering of mostly elderly visitors, a lot of them WWII vets, I gather. Now you saw 5- and 6-year-olds hoisted up onto Dad's shoulders, actually holding still and watching. Anything that celebrated America was now more relevant and attractive than it had been in years.

George W Bush's words, spoken by his animatronic doppelganger at the Hall Of Presidents, were eerily appropriate for exactly what had just happened, enough that I wondered if the Disney people and the White House hadn't collaborated on a quick update to the robot POTUS's speech. 

The song played in the American Adventure attraction at EPCOT, "Golden Dreams," was suddenly much more affecting than it had been before, with its lyric about a Great Bird - the American Eagle, of course - "keeping dreams aloft in the rain."

The big EPCOT fireworks/lasers/multimedia show that ends each day, "IllumiNations," so named because the lagoon borders all the Nations represented in the World Showcase, has always ended with a blustery orchestral finale followed by a more reflective song played as the denouement. Post 9/11, the lyrics took on new significance and as I looked around I could tell who else was paying attention to the lyrics because our eyes were all welling up.  No doubt we were all wondering the same thing - will our American culture have to make fundamental changes now? Is our way of life going to survive knowing that the bad guys can get us at home now? Will we really just pick up and go on? 

With the stillness of the night

there comes a time to understand

to reach out and touch tomorrow 

take the future in our hand 

We can see a new horizon 

built on all that we have done 

and our dreams begin another

thousand circles 'round the sun 

We go on 

to the joy and through the tears 

We go on 

to discover new frontiers 

Moving on 

with the current of the years 

We go on 

moving forward, now as one 

Moving on 

with a spirit born to run 

Ever on 

with each rising sun 

To a new day

We go on

We go on 
We all hoped these words would continue to describe America, I'm sure.  

That Story About My Friend Dax And The Fog Machine

In an earlier post, I promised I would one day tell the story of my friend Dax and the fog machine on the closing night of Bye Bye Birdie. 

Dax was on the stage crew of that show, which broke some new ground for the Santa Clara Junior Theatre, as it was then known. Set builders Craig Hedlund (who did not approve of my crush on Julie Crader and tried several times to intimidate me into leaving her alone) and Pete Muraco built a massive structure for the “Telephone Hour” number that somewhat resembled the setup for the old Hollywood Squares TV game show. As far as I know it was the largest moveable set piece they had built up until that time. It had a number of cubbies, each representing the bedroom of one of several teenagers in the number. The choreographer had stipulated that the set piece needed to be danced around, in, and on by more than a dozen cast members, so the fellas built it out of 3/4” plywood and 2x4s. (Also, parents tend to get a little grumpy if their little Stephanie falls 12 feet off the top of a flimsy set piece and breaks her neck on opening night.)

The result of the brick-outhouse-like construction was that the first time the thing was rolled out for rehearsals, once everyone got aboard and performed the number, the plastic, rubber-clad casters were mooshed flat under the combined weight of its own bulk and that of 14 or 16 teenagers. The plywood bases to which the casters were attached gently folded and collapsed. In the middle of the first run-through, the pianist halted abruptly and Craig told us all to quickly and very carefully get off of the sagging behemoth, which he later named Kurt. I never knew the set piece’s namesake but I gathered he was a large and lumbering individual that Craig didn’t like. 

I don’t recall exactly what happened next but it seems it would have been hard to continue rehearsals with the large, unsteady Kurt sitting onstage. I guess Craig and Pete and several other guys figured out how to lay it down and move it out of the way. Kurt returned a few days later with shiny new steel casters mounted to thick aluminum bases, which were bolted to the bottom. 

But that has nothing to do with Dax, or a fog machine, does it? 

The fog machine was used in a number called “100 Ways Ballet.” Led by the line, “I could just kill him!!” the number is Rosie’s mad daydream about not quite 100 ways to kill Albert, after she’s fed up with the latest fiasco related to Conrad Bieber . . . er, Birdie. 

Fog, in low-budget theatre, is a quick, cheap way to signal to the audience that the context has changed; it’s also used for pure spooky or ethereal effect of course, but here it was the stage equivalent of harp glissandi and fuzzy focus, signaling the beginning of a fantasy sequence. This wasn’t the kind of fog or haze seen at rock and pop concerts filling the air; this was the floor-hugging variety generated by dry ice and blowing the resulting CO2 “steam” out of a dryer hose. 

Readying the fog machine was a multi-person operation, and Dax was one of those people. The machine itself was made from a 55-gallon drum; it was filled with water and a heating element was immersed in the tank. The water rook a couple hours to come up to heat before use, so the process started long before showtime. A few moments before the fog was needed, two crew members made ready to dump a Styrofoam cooler full of dry ice chunks into the water; another crew member was to open the lid and then slam it shut as soon as the last chunk of ice cleared the cooler. A third crew member held the dryer hose, capping it with one hand and preparing to reach for the fan switch. It was slightly tricky and the crew enjoyed seeing how quickly, quietly, and neatly they could do the ice-dump operation without letting any of the fog escape. I’ve forgotten what Dax’s specific role was. 

On the show’s closing night, whoever was in charge of buying the dry ice bought double the usual amount – 40 pounds instead of the usual 20. They were going to go out with a foggy bang. The heater was also turned up to full, so that just before showtime the water was already uncomfortably hot to touch; the water would heat even further between the overture and “100 Ways.”  

The “ready fog” cue came. A few moments before Kristy Hughes as Rosie delivered her line, “I could just kill him!” the fog team executed their finely-tuned maneuver. As soon as the big load of ice hit the hotter-than-usual water, an explosion of sorts deluged one of the crew in borderline-scalding water. He bailed and ran, parboiled and cussing, for the door that led to the loading dock, whipping off his poached shirt as he went. The rest of them had been sprayed in the face with very hot water, and now they struggled to get the rest of the ice into the drum while containing the enormous cloud of fog that was erupting from the still-open lid. More cussing, and now nervous laughter. Cast members and other crew members rushed over with towels, props, whatever they could grab from the shop racks, desperately trying to fan the fog away from the stage, lest it start creeping out before the number began. The drenched crewman, now shirtless and literally steaming, came back in through the stage door and, sussing out the scope of the disaster he had just escaped, propped the door open to give the fog an alternate exit. Everyone begin fanning it in that direction.

Finally, the stage went dark, the curtain closed, and the stage manager called for "100 Ways." The fan on the fog machine was switched on and an alarming volume of fog fire-hosed from the end of the tube; before the curtain had a chance to open, the fog had filled the stage from corner to corner, stacking up to a height of 6 feet or so off the deck. Since it was CO2, I wondered how long before we all stared passing out. When the curtain did open, the ballet’s first several bars went by before the audience ever saw a single performer. Eventually, the dancers began to emerge as the fog started to equalize itself, but as they moved through it they stirred it up, causing great drifts that rose and fell mesmerizingly. The moment the curtain had opened, the fog began pouring over the edge of the stage and was now partially obscuring the orchestra and gliding out under the audience’s chairs. Still it poured out of the machine, showing no sign of tapering off. 

The number finished. The end of the dryer hose still looked more like a fire hose, with great gouts of fog still spilling forth. Dax and the other crew members had no choice but to hastily wheel the still-spewing thing out the stage door and onto the loading dock. As the curtain closed, cast and crew resumed the frantic fanning to clear the stage as the conductor thought on her feet, cueing the orchestra to “take it from Bar 49 again” to buy time for the fog to be cleared. By now the audience was chuckling good-naturedly at the obvious mishap. 

Because so many of us rolled from one show into the next, director Mackie McClelland often gave notes on closing night. There were always lessons to learn. After a pause in her comments, she looked at the stage manager. There was stifled laughter from the cast and crew. Staring over the top of her glasses, lips twitching, she deadpanned, “There was apparently some doubt or confusion, but I think now it's clear why there’s a specific setting marked on the fog machine and how we arrived at 20 pounds as the prescribed amount of dry ice.”