I was wandering through Disney-MGM Hollywood Studios yesterday when I saw him again for the first time in years. I almost didn’t recognize him.  Then I knelt down and gave him a great big hug and told him it was all okay…

The Hollywood Studios park entrance way is playfully similar to the Main Street U.S.A. walkway everyone must pass though on entrance to the Magic Kingdom…only this is Main Street Hollywood, circa 1930s and it is as if you’d traveled back in time to when everything was art deco.  For someone like me who adores the art deco style, in part I am sure because in my early childhood there were still a lot of buildings standing that were like that, it was like a kind of paradise.  For like, the upteenth time here in Disney World, I could only just wander around with my jaw hanging open.

There’s a plaque in central park that explains what they were trying to accomplish with Hollywood Studios, but by the time I had walked up to it, I already knew…

This is similar in kind to the poster for Tomorrowland which reads: The Future That Never Was Has Finally Arrived.

I entered a replica of Gorman’s Chinese Theater and took a ride through the movies.  You get on in a old sound stage set and a cast member dressed up as a 1940s stereotypical Hollywood talent scout hops on and informs you that you’ll not only be taking a tour through the great Hollywood films, but actually go inside them.  And then you’re off…first through a Busby Berkeley dance film and then into Hollywood gangster land where the talent scout is chased off the ride by a gangster who informs you that he’s taking over the ride and oh by the way, please had over all your valuables.  It goes on like that for a while and I won’t give it all away…there were the usual Disney animatronics, but of a better quality then the older Magic Kingdom rides…there was a trip through the Alien movie and for a moment you’re completely socked in a fog bank waiting for the beast to jump out at you.  Eventually you end up back at the soundstage where a voice yells "Cut…that’s a wrap…" and you get off the ride and go back out into Disney Hollywood…which is not all that different from Disney Tomorrowland.  It isn’t real.  And yet, for the moment anyway…it is.

I am not one to be easily amused, and yet the whole time I am thoroughly enjoying myself…and I find my whole attitude is different here.  I’m smiling at people.  I’m patient with idiots.  Small screaming children don’t irritate me.  Morons who block the road as if they own it don’t bother me (When did America get so goddamned fat?) I just walk around them and the happy little smile never leaves my face.  I’m living in a world that never was, that’s finally here. I can be a happy little nerdy kid here and It’s Okay.  In fact, it’s Expected of you.  All those relentlessly cheerful Disney cast members who are nowhere and everywhere with their perpetual smiles and earnest desire to make sure you "have a magical day" aren’t annoying me nearly as much as I was afraid they would.  In fact they are a blessing.  They’re my barrier between me and the world not two feet from the gates here, that voted last November to cut my ring finger off.  They’re here to keep it off me for a little while.  I wish I could give them all a great big hug.

And now the kid I used to be long ago, the one who smiled at everyone, the one with the big imagination, who wore his heart on his sleeve never thinking that people would take that as an invitation to cut it to ribbons, who trusted the world and in the goodness of people, has come back out of me.  At least for a while.  I thought he’d been beaten out of me in junior high school.