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Twenty years ago, I worked for the Mouse. It was my first Disney job, and my first full-time employment living on my own and supporting myself. There was also a strange sense of surrealism to be surrounded by this make-believe world because the Gulf War was underway at the time.
I remember standing behind the desk at Guest Services of the Caribbean Beach Resort the night of January 17, and thinking how odd it was that I was explaining to newly arrived guests their dining options and booking reservations for them, and they had no idea yet that we had begun bombing Kuwait and were at war.
In resorts, back in the day there were always little things Disney would do as perks for the guests on various holidays. These things weren't worth anything to anyone other than a Disney collector, but they could be kind of cool in their own way.
If you were a Disney resort guest on Memorial Day in 1991, you got this: a 12-inch by 12-inch square poster close-up of Mickey saluting, and surrounding the image is the third stanza to America the Beautiful on heavy stock paper.
Of all the things like this I accumulated over the years I worked there, for some reason this one stuck with me and I hung on to it – even going so far as to have it professionally framed. I uncovered it recently while cleaning up the basement. Inexplicably, I again couldn't part with it, and it still resides in the "keep" pile.
We are in the process of cleaning and purging the contents of our basement. We’ve held on to a lot of crap alongside a lot of important items from our collective and individual histories. Over the last few days and nights, I’ve been working my way through boxes of exclusively my stuff. Folders, photo albums, cartons of action figures and toys, baseball and football cards, cards from my wife, letters from friends… the same sorts of things you probably have in your basement.
I had a particular photo album that had all my organized sports team photos and all my class photos from grade school, along with all my choir and school programs, and miscellaneous items (like an autographed picture of Lindsay Wagner and a clipped story from the newspaper about Michael Jackson’s record setting eight Grammy awards win). But in the front of that album, on the very first page, was this…
I wish I could remember what year I made this. I am sure it was a school assignment – a “Make Your Own Crest” type of project. And I can still remember the reasons behind each and every item:
- Purple and orange because they were my favorite colors (purple still is one of my favorites).
- The basketball because, despite my size, I always loved to play it (just like my kiddo who faces the same size challenges).
- My name in calligraphy because I was into art and my mom signed me up for a calligraphy class at the local art shop.
- The tent because my family camped while growing up, and it was a huge part of my childhood (although we camped in a hardtop camper, not a tent, I took some artistic license here).
- The Walkman, baby. Music has always been important to me.
- Pitfall! I loved my Atari 2600, and I loved Pitfall.
- A comic book. Note: Even as a kid I was apparently sensitive to copyright infringement issues and, instead of rendering my favorite Marvel comic cover, I opted to go generic. Or, at least, that’s the story we’ll go with to cover the fact that I probably spent my entire artistic bankroll interpreting the Pitfall screen capture.
So, yeah. It was crazy to stumble on this and realize just how accurate a representation of the kid version of me it is (clearly, I took this assignment seriously and put a lot of thought into it), and although I don’t go camping and I don’t play a lot of video games anymore, I do still enjoy shooting hoops with the kiddo, appreciate art, love music, and continue to read comics. I guess four out of six ain’t bad.
Of all the things like this I accumulated over the years I worked there, for some reason this one stuck with me and I hung on to it – even going so far as to have it professionally framed. I uncovered it recently while cleaning up the basement. Inexplicably, I again couldn't part with it, and it still resides in the "keep" pile.
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