The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (11 page)

We walked in silence. I led my parade of thirteen guests from The Land to Spaceship Earth and no one said anything to each other. We approached the entrance to the best slow-moving history lesson and I turned to Mom for her answer: who was leaving the tour, or would she be getting a second guide?

I know when most guests walk into EPCOT they just breeze right underneath Spaceship Earth and don’t spend any time actually lingering by the giant ball. For one, that area is a complete wind tunnel. There’s no use in trying to fix your hair or hold a park map if you’re passing underneath it. The area is also really open, so sometimes things echo against the metal buildings and the giant metal golf ball. It’s also in such a prime location that everyone in that general vicinity is almost completely aware of everything else happening around them. Guests are taking PhotoPass pictures, renting strollers, asking for directions.

I’ve been yelled at before in my life. Mostly by my own mom, and that usually happened in the comfort of my own home. It never happened to me in front of Spaceship Earth. It had never happened to me in front of so many people, and Cast Members, and so loudly, in Spanish.

Mom screamed at me. Her loud words echoed off the buildings and everyone, guest and Cast Member alike, stopped to see what was happening. They just assumed someone was being torn limb by limb at the entrance to the attraction sponsored by Seimens. It was also all in Spanish. Mom might have been yelling at the top of her lungs for me to take the brunt of the beating, but I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was screaming.

Cast Members from both sides of the entrance slowly shuffled out of their location to make sure nothing was going terribly wrong. They found me, a tiny little tour guide, getting destroyed by an irate guest. One boy from the camera shop held his hand up to his ear, making a phone gesture, clearly asking if he wanted me to call security. I shook my head so gently that Mom didn’t see others were trying to communicate SOS to me. I think most of the Cast Members who watched this situation unfold were doing so only for the story they could tell their roommates later. “Yo, dude, saw this crazy stuff happen at Spaceship today…”

Somewhere in between Mom coming up for breaths of air, I started to get words in edge wise. When that didn’t even work, I realized I didn’t even actually care about the situation unfurling in front of me. There was a long pause at one point where Mom reached into her purse for her phone, obviously to call her husband, who had been a brick through all of this, that I told Mom what had been brewing inside of me from the start.

“Unfortunately, due to these circumstances, I won’t be able to continue on with this tour. I hope you and your family have a magical day here at EPCOT.” And I just turned and I walked away from them.

Mom immediately shut up. I don’t think she expected me to turn on my heels and go. She stopped yelling. Returned back to English.

“Where are you going?” she yelled after me.

“The tour is over. Enjoy your day!” I waved to them as I continued to walk farther and farther away. I was walking quite fast; probably because I was worried Mom was going to sic one of the kids on me and drag me back to them.

The entire ordeal spanned two hours.

I was standing in line for Big Thunder Mountain, like I often did, when I felt at tap on my shoulder. I turned around, ready to answer a question for a nearby guest.

“Are you new?” the guest asked me.

“No,” I told her, not sure if I should be confident in my answer, or confused.

“Then you should know better than to wear your costume out in the park.” She said sternly, and pointed right at my nametag. “You could at least have the decency to remove that. Are you on your lunch break?”

“No?” I told her, now actually confused. The guest stood on the other side of the wooden partition in the line, close enough that we could talk, but not far enough away so other guests around us couldn’t hear our conversation.

“Then what are you doing?” she asked, disdain dripping out of her voice.

“Riding Thunder Mountain?” Seriously, what did it look like I was doing?

“Can I have your last name so I can report you to your manager?” she asked. The guests standing around watched us like a tennis match, their heads snapping back and forth with each comment we made to one another.

“Are you a Cast Member?” I stammered.

“Yes, and I’m not stupid enough to go into the park in full costume.”

“Are
you
new?” I asked her.

“I’ve been with the company for six months now,” she said, proudly, like she had just been told she was next in line for the VP of Magic Kingdom spot.

“Cool,” I said, deeming the conversation over, and turned to follow my guests down towards the loading area.

“You can be terminated for wearing your costume onstage!” She yelled after me, and her portion of the line moved, too, as she crept closer to me. “This is atrocious behavior.”

My guests realized I was having a heated conversation with someone in the line. Billy leaned into me. “Why is that crazy girl yelling at you?”

“I don’t think she’s ever seen a tour guide before,” I told him.

The Disney Narc came up behind me again. “Are you just going to pretend you’re in the right?”

“I’m also going to ride Thunder Mountain,” I told her, as we moved closer towards the awaiting train. “Is that okay with you?”

Her eyes were fiery red. She turned to one of the Thunder Mountain Cast Members and yelled, “Don’t let this girl ride!”

The Thunder Mountain Cast Member looked at me, and I looked back at him, and we both recognized each other from all the times I had ridden Thunder Mountain before, and his name was Jonathan, and I said, “Jonathan, I want to ride in the back.” And Jonathan said, “Okay.”

I climbed into the car with Billy next to me, and we both waved to the crazy Cast Member standing on the dock, who pulled out her phone and took a picture of me as I rode away into the Frontierland sunset.

There’s this mythical time in Disney lore that’s referred to as “capacity”. Guests often asked if the park was at “capacity” on a rainy spring day, and I’d laugh out loud at their notion, thinking, there are barely 30K people in the park right now. How on earth do you believe this to be capacity? I’d explain that this was not as crowded as the park could get, and they’d ask me questions like we were sitting around a campfire making nice hot s’mores. They wanted to know about this time called “capacity”. I’d tell them capacity was a time when the wait for Space Mountain would be four hours and the wait for quick-service food would be an hour an a half. I’d reference the pathway between Fantasyland and Liberty Square, and explain that sometimes the park would be so crowded that this area came to a complete standstill. I talked about it as if it were the worst battle of Magic Kingdom I had ever fought.

The family wanted to go to Magic Kingdom on Christmas Eve even though I begged and pleaded with them to change their mind. It was a family of four, Mom, Dad, two adorable kids, and the chain-smoking Jewish-grandmother Nancy. She was a sassy broad, constantly forgetting how to operate her EVC, constantly parking it in the wrong spot, getting lost, forgetting the key, asking, “Where’s the nearest place to smoke?” We wanted to take the EVC away from her, but we had gotten it for her so she would stop wandering into crowds to smoke. At least on the ECV she was a little bit easier to find.

By the time we reached the park on Christmas morning, all the EVCs were rented for the day. Dad didn’t understand how the EVCs could be gone like that, and I tried to explain that there wasn’t a secret hidden stash of the motorized scooters. I suggested we rent a wheelchair instead. Dad looked worried with this suggestion and I quickly offered, “I’m more than happy to push.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” I wanted to push the wheelchair. Just like the stroller, if I had Grandma Nancy in my clutch, there was a high possibility the family wouldn’t lose me in a crowd all day. Or maybe they would. Grandma Nancy was feisty.

I want to describe other things as being as crowded as Magic Kingdom on Christmas Eve. Like, a boy band concert. “There were so many screaming kids there, it was like Magic Kingdom on Christmas Eve!” You will never really know what it feels like to be in a closed-to-capacity space until you’ve braved Magic Kingdom on a closed-to-capacity day. The park hit capacity at 10am that morning. Do you realize how many people are in the park when that happens? It’s astounding; I don’t even want to say. If everyone in the park gave me a nickel, I could probably have bought Toontown.

Dad put the two kids in a double-stroller, and we literally used it like a cattle prod to make our way through the crowds. They didn’t want to stay all day, but we were staying to see the parade at 3pm so we at least needed to make it till then. We had lunch at a tiny table barely built for all six of us at The Plaza. After lunch the son wanted to go ride Splash Mountain.

Now, this tour was actually pretty cool. They were one of my favorite families, actually. Mom and Dad were wonderful people, and had wonderfully well-behaved children who said “please” and “thank you” and never stuck their hands into the water at Pirates of the Caribbean. I would gladly march into battle for this family, and that’s basically what I was going to do, lead them from The Plaza to Splash Mountain.

Dad asked me if it was a good idea to go to Splash Mountain, and I laughed: “Not really,” I told him. “But it’ll be fun!”

It was not fun. Walking from The Plaza to Splash Mountain should take about ten minutes. It took us close to forty-five. We tried to walk through Adventureland, but that was the worst idea I had ever had, because Adventureland is cramped and crowded no matter what time of the year it is. We cut into Liberty Square, which had a little bit more room to breathe, but not by much. Guests were already lining the way to watch the parade. The viewing area was already five or six guests deep.

I led them onto the river walk, since that seemed to be the easiest place to maneuver. We passed the smoking location.

“Leave me here! Leave me here!” Grandma Nancy cried. I look to Dad for confirmation.

“We’ll probably be an hour.”

“Leave me here, I’ll be fine.” Grandma Nancy already had her long cigarette out. She was smoking the same thing Audrey Hepburn did in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.

“She’ll make friends. Maybe one of them will push her away.” Dad said to me as we moved away from Grandma Nancy. We had willingly left a comrade behind.

We fought our way past strollers and international tour groups to get to Splash Mountain. I took the family’s bags as they jumped into their log and rode away. I darted out the maintenance door for Splash, and collapsed onto the ground. There wasn’t a wheelchair in sight, but I was going to sit no matter what.

Thirteen minutes of quiet passed, and then I had to go retrieve the family. They were a little bit wet, but they were happy and the kids asked to ride again and before I could shut that down, Dad suggested that maybe we head off to our parade viewing and get a snack along the way. Deal.

The family stopped to look at their ride photo before we turned into the merchandise shop at the exit of Splash. We had to rope around a few poles, and a candy display, and we had just about made it out of the tiny little store when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see a disgruntled guest standing there. I knew she was disgruntled because she was a middle-aged woman wearing a tiara and had a pink fannypack around her waist and was clutching the arm of a small child.

“Are you in charge?” she asked.

“Of what?” I asked.

“I need to talk to someone in charge,” the woman said. She smacked her lips.

“Regarding what? Was it something about Splash Mountain? Did you lose a hat on the attraction?”

“I need to talk to someone about this crowd. This is horrible. No one told me it was going to be this crowded today. Where can I go for a refund?” This was one of those guests who believed that it was
my
fault I hadn’t personally called her the day before and warned her about traveling to Magic Kingdom on the third busiest day of the year.

Thinking back on situations like this, I wish I had replied to guests with exactly what they wanted to hear. I should have said, “Yes, I am in charge of this today. Who would you like me to ask to leave?”

“Unfortunately, we don’t do ticket refunds,” I told her instead. If I could keep this guest from storming down to City Hall to argue with Cast Members there, I was going to try. “It’s a vacation time so a lot of guests are experiencing the park right now…”

“I don’t need to hear that.” She snapped at me. “I need to know what you’re going to do to fix this.”

I realized I didn’t see my family in sight. They must have kept walking even when I stopped to talk to this charming woman. “I can’t do anything to fix this, it’s a crowded day.” I told the woman, moving a step away from her. What did she want me to do anyway? I didn’t have the time to go around to each and every single guest and ask him or her to politely vacate the park.

“Don’t walk away from me!” the woman barked. “Are you not going to do anything about this? Get me your manager.”

“Ma’am, you can’t yell at me here. I don’t work in Splashdown Gifts. Excuse me.” I smiled and turned away from her.

“I’m going to tell all my friends about this piss-poor customer service!” She yelled after me, but I had already gotten far enough through the crowd to lose her.

My family was waiting for me outside by the bathroom. They had taken the opportunity to use them, and I was thankful they hadn’t wandered away on me. “Everything aright?” Dad asked.

“Sorry about that, guys. I’m clearly in charge of park attendance today, so someone stopped to argue with me about that.” Mom threw her arm around my shoulder and told me I was doing a great job. She was a cool mom, I really liked her. The family bought me groceries at the conclusion of the tour. We put our battle armor back on and fought our way back to chain-smoking Grandma Nancy.

You’re probably wondering how many famous people I met while at Disney. I hate to disappoint you, but I didn’t meet that many.