We survived the Magic Kingdom!
It was a near thing, too. At first I didn’t think we were even going to GET there, since this morning, Kevin and I were taking a shower together, and I dropped the soap.
This isn’t going where you think it’s going.
"We should be careful," said Kevin, as I picked it up. "We don’t want to slip on the soap!"
The soap was in my hand. Let us be clear on this. At this moment in time, I was completely in possession of the soap, a cedar-scented bar made by well-meaning hippies in Pittsboro. The soap was not at fault.
Nevertheless, the final word had not yet left Kevin’s mouth when he took a step on completely non-soaped bathtub, slipped, skidded, took the tub wall in the back of the knees, and went down full-length on his ass across the tiles. Along the way we learned two exciting facts, namely that a shower curtain is not load-bearing, and that when a large bald man goes through one at high speed, the shower curtain doesn’t rip.
Instead the plastic hooks explode.
Beige plastic shrapnel rained through the bathroom, in a truly amazing scatter pattern. Kevin screamed. I shrieked. Bits of hook pattered to the floor around us.
"Are you okay?" I asked, appalled.
He began laughing hysterically. Taking this as a sign that he was not badly injured, I pointed at him–naked, wet, and sprawled flat across an ex-shower curtain, with bits of hook stuck to him–and also began laughing hysterically.
At the time of this writing, Maintenance has still not fixed the shower curtain, but damn, it was funny.
After that, the day went fairly smoothly. The guard checking out bags asked where we were from, and upon learning that we were from North Carolina, volunteered that he had been stationed at Camp Lejeune. "Okay," I said, "I have to ask–which was scarier? There, or here?"
He thought about this for several minutes. "At Camp Lejeune," he said finally, "you always knew where the enemy was coming from."
This marked the first of several amusing conversations with Disney employees. We walked through the gates–yay! Main Street USA! Tacky and glorious and ruthlessly capitalistic, which is more or less the USA in a nutshell, I suppose–and Kevin’s mother informed us that she needed to stop by Guest Relations to cash in a fairly large sum that she’d earned on a Disney credit card thing which involved getting money at the theme park. I caught Kevin’s arm, and said "Wait up, your mother has to go stick it to the Mouse."
"Woo! Stick it to the Mouse!" cried Kevin, drunk with enthusiasm and perhaps the shower-related bump on the head, and pumped his fist in the air.
The security guard who happened to be about three feet away stopped dead and leveled a look of grave concern at our party. "Stick it…to…the Mouse?" he said.
Fortunately, I can talk very quickly when I need to.
The only other incident of note–other than a good time at Disney!–occurred when Kevin dragged me on It’s a Small World, proving either that Kevin is a rat bastard or has two small children or was really WAY more concussed than any of us realized. After waiting the queue for ten minutes and wanting to claw my eardrums out, we reached the end and I asked the young woman if she had learned to tune the song out.
"You never tune it out," she said grimly.
"…do you have nightmares about this?"
"It runs through my dreams," she growled.
Not much more you can say to that…
Tomorrow, Epcot!
