Warning: Read at your own risk! If you ever plan to work for the Mouse and want Traditions to be a surprise, stop reading!
I awoke this morning to the rain coming down and unfortunately, since the windows here are terrible, a freezing room. After taking a razor to Ol' Stubble Mountain, I started to get ready for my Traditions class. For some strange reason, Mr. Disney himself forgot to include "basketball shorts" on the list of acceptable clothing for this mandatory evaluation, so I had to bust out the nice clothes. Ties were optional, but I figured, what better setting for my Mickey tie? (shout-out to Chris' dad for never making me return it after that one dance)
My roommate Josh and I were scheduled for the same class, so we arrived at the bus stop only to find one other person. After a small panic, many CP's came meandering up in their business casual attire, as ready as we were. After a quick bus ride, we arrived at the Disney University. In the lobby I was greeted by this happy guy:
We were split up (bye, Josh) and corralled into a room lined with giant TVs and a plethora of pictures featuring the man himself, Walt Disney. But before we entered the room, the first step towards officially being a Disney CM occurred: we were given our blue CM ID cards! These are our tickets into the park until our Main Entrance Pass is mailed to us, so everybody was super anxious and excited to receive these. I sat at an empty round table which was soon filled with new potential friends and we were again given temporary Disney-style name tag stickers. A CM came to the front of the room and began going through a very boring SafeD video (ya, you guessed it, Disney's version of safety. Almost as corny as UCF's overusage of (K)night) The video gained a moment of credibility only after this CM began to speak in a very monotonous, "I don't really want to be here" tone. Oh no. Are the next four hours going to consist of this?? Looking around the room, I could tell I wasn't the only person thinking this. Luckily for all of us, this CM was soon replaced with two "I'm so happy to be here!" CM's, which woke us up a little. After returning from a quick break, we all found a large box sitting on all of our tables. Yes, this joke was made:
We were instructed to open them together as a table and inside we found pairs of the famous Mickey ears that millions have worn proudly around the parks. There was much rejoicing (and many, many selfies).
For the next two hours we went over the basics of Disney heritage, the present-day company, and what was required of us to be a CM. I must admit, many aspects of it were very hard to pay attention to because so much of it was common sense (don't punch the Guests) but I hung in there. Finally, things got interesting.
After being tricked into thinking we were about to have to stand in front of everybody and act out a scenario, we were instead happily informed that we would be visiting the front lines of it all, Magic Kingdom. After much cheering, we were given some more cool news: we would each be wearing a secret service type earpiece so that we could hear our guide talking to us at all times. Awesome. We all boarded a bus and were soon on our way.
Most of the bus ride was nothing different than I had done before, but things began to get interesting as we drove up the side of Magic Kingdom, the sleek Space Mountain looming nostalgically on our left. Suddenly, we passed through a gate and things began to get....dirty? The perfectly up kept Disney that I have experienced many times before quickly faded into old rusty pipes, machinery that hadn't been touched in years, and small slave children being led into It's a Small World!?!?* I knew the rumors were true! Okay, so there weren't any slave children, but there was a sense of realness that I had only seen once before on the Keys to the Kingdom Tour back in high school. After unloading behind the Storybook Circus section of the park, we began our descent into the main hallway of the Utilidors (the Utilidors are the tunnels that run underneath Magic Kingdom so that CM's/vehicles/garbage can easily be transported without guests seeing).
Although I had already once been in the Utilidors, it was still an awesome journey. We first passed the Mouseketeria (you can figure that one out on your own) and then finally made it into a main section directly underneath Cinderella's castle. As we were waiting against the wall, who else did we see but Cinderella herself, about twenty feet above us on another level. Although she wasn't in full costume, her hair and makeup obviously resembled the famous character. She heard us talking about her and looked down at us. Now, I have heard many mixed things about the princesses backstage, most of them bad, so I was expecting her to show us her fangs and snarl. Instead, she looked right into my eyes and gave me a huge smile. Pretty cool.
After a couple more minutes of navigating the tunnels, we went up a flight of stairs and stood at a pair of huge double doors. I had seen these doors many times before and instantly recognized them as the doors that act as the end of one of the side streets of Main Street USA. Many visits before, I had sat on the other sides of these doors, trying to sneak a quick peek in whenever a CM would go through them, and now I was on the other side of them. Pretty cool.
We went through the doors and were instantly immersed in the music, lights, and smells of Main Street. Our group was pretty large, so we quickly attracted attention. Two high school kids sat at the nearby table, the exact table I had frequented in the past, and one instantly began filming us with his camera as soon as we came out. We felt like celebrities as the camera and many Guests watched us walk by, leaving behind the backstage reality and entering the fantasy that is Magic Kingdom. Pretty cool.
I don't want to bore you with too many details but we basically walked around the park so that we could get a close up view of how the CM's work using the four Disney Keys (SafeD, Courtesy, Show, and Efficiency). One highlight of the trip was walking by the castle as the nightly stage show was going on, which featured many constantly smiling CM's doing an outstanding job as usual. Soon after, as we were leaving through the Utilidors, we went by these same exact CM's as they were leaving, many with their overdone facial makeup still on, wigs in hand, their smiles left behind on stage. It was surreal.
Finally we made it back to the Disney University. After a couple more videos we were surprised with a visit from the Big Cheese himself, Mickey Mouse! He had brought another box with him and we soon found out that it contained our name tags! Finally, the moment we'd all been waiting for! One by one we went up as our names were called to receive our freshly printed token of legitimacy. Every person received a round of applause and cheering.
Thank you to everyone who has followed my experience so far! Sorry about the long posts this week, they will most likely get shorter as I get into the routine.
See ya,
P.W.
*This is a joke. Don't kick me out, Disney. I love you.
