Tomorrowland Never Dies

Our correspondent, accustomed to black tie affairs and fancy hors d’oeuvres, feels oddly at home at a Disneyland party.

By Shinan Govani

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ILLUSTRATION: MIA MARIE OVERGAARD

As a large female mouse rocked it to the Black Eyed Peas, smiling her sadistic smile, I made my way to a nearby queue. Minnie was trying hard, but Nemo was the cause celeb for this Disney-set shindig. Having been accused of attending the opening of an envelope, I had come here, at least, to attend the opening of a door for the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

“Disneyland has more submarines than the Canadian military,” cracked a friend as we waited to board the latest, greatest attraction in Anaheim, California.

With Cinderella’s castle looming large behind us and a steady hum of screams in the distance, a man wearing earth tones punched the digits of his Nokia, giving off the vibe of someone who had an important meeting to get to – or perhaps a papal election – just as soon as he’d finished with this faux-aquatic appointment. A few places ahead, another rider gave off a sunnier feel, explaining that he was one of Disneyland’s official photographers and that he used to be in “hard news” but that now “who needs all that serious stuff?”

Were truer words ever spoken in the wonderful world of Walt – that candified idyll that came into being some 50 years ago, one that writer Neal Gabler in his biography, Walt Disney, deftly characterized as “a universe of nostalgia rendered material, scaled to the proportions of childhood”?

But being at a Disneyland fete wasn’t all that different from my normal routine. By some measures, the whole world is an amusement park, and so many of the grown-up bashes I go to have become Disneyfied. Such is the world where infotainment rules, adults dress and act like kids and the infantilization of culture runs through everything like a monorail.

Even the publicists and velvet rope minders at these adult parties are not unlike the ride operators at Disney. The salient difference is that instead of chirping, “Have a fun-a-licious day!” (as was lobbed at me earlier), they intone, “Are you on the guest list?”

Once finally sardined in, I had more opportunity to contemplate these similarities, though my first thought turned to Brooke Shields. Specifically, how did the model mother – one of the many child-accessorized celebs, like Geena Davis and Courtney Cox-Arquette, out for the new ride – get on this ship without hitting her head?

Nothing, apparently, gets between Brooke Shields and her Nemo.

Through the magic of magnetic coils, the power of electric engines and the thrill of computer hijinks, we chugged along. What followed was some underwater anime – like a movie come to life, as seen through our carved-out windows, and, in tweendom vernacular, “supercool.”

It was make-believe of the highest order — just like the hoity-toity soirees I’ve spent years attending. Really, each party is a production, all the guests are role-playing and everything subsists on a choreography of little white lies and practised social mores.

Like the party I hit in Cannes where a certain production company had thought to pimp out a villa with a big trampoline, a giant slide and an honest-to-goodness game in a wading pool called Fishing for Bimbos. Because entertaining sometimes requires stunts, and adults are often just kids with bigger shoe sizes.

Take also the opening I recently went to in Toronto for the new Michael Lee-Chin wing at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was in praise of architecture as visually hyperbolic as anything you’d find in Tomorrowland. And all those people in fancy tuxes and frocks? They arrived with the same shade of awe and exaltation reserved for families about to mount their first coaster.

There is one thing, however, that did distinguish the submarine launch from some of life’s more haute affairs. At these posh events, hors d’oeuvres have been shrinking faster and faster. But here, instead of small bits of crostini with even smaller slices of melon on top, we had a spread that included big mother bowls of pasta, gargantuan helpings of gyros and even boatloads of fish.

This last item on the buffet was particularly troubling, considering we were here, after all, to celebrate a rather renowned member of the sea-world community.

“What kind of fish is this?” I asked one of the servers, pointing to a dish.

Hesitating a tad, he told me it was Dory, better known as Nemo’s dad’s best friend, famously voiced by Ellen DeGeneres.

It seems that in Disneyland, as in life, even the most feted celebrity is just another fish in the sea. 

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl.

sgovani@enroutemag.net

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