Point #5: Permanent Vacation

1986: Mom told me about a 4-day medical conference at the Hyatt in Orlando that she had to attend. She said we would visit Disney World while we were down there. Since this would be the first time for my family, I ran up and down the beige carpeted stairs in our Levittown-style house and squealed delightfully.

1996: My mom, my friends and I went for a ride with Andy in the rental SUV. We left the Disney-owned time-share we were staying at and barreled down I-64 towards Kissimmee. Anticipating a visit to Old Town, I was agog over the chance to see the vintage cars and hear the rare oldies once again. Andy said Old Town is too seedy - we were going to Celebration.






Celebration? Established in 1994, Celebration was a town owned by The Walt Disney Company (in January of 2004, Lexin bought downtown Celebration) with its own hospital, university (Stetson) and movie theater. Pastel townhouse apartments line antiseptic Market Street.
As my friends cowered in fear, Andy suggested that my mom and I might move down there with him.

My mom shot him a disapproving look, as if he cussed in front of a child without spelling out the words instead.

We didn't move to Celebration. But the fact that I spent more than a nanosecond in a town owned by a multimedia conglomerate frightened me. Having visited Celebration a year after Disney bought ABC, I began to suspect - for the first time ever - that my whole life may be on the ABC network and everyone was trying to hide it from me.
Not that anything is strange about a corporation owning a municipality, but a company that's known for making magic should never be trusted with running a town. Life in that town would be a dream - it wouldn't be real. All the friends you lose move on to invisible Hollywood careers with movies you never know exist because you are still in the dream.

If a movie studio like Disney can have its own town, why not its own county? Or its own state? Or its own world,..., perhaps all that babble about Disney World being a "simulation"was meant to distract me - it really owned the "globe." It's a small world after all.

Why were all of my family's vacations in the Magic Kingdom? Like The Tanners from "Full House" and the Winslows from "Family Matters," my family vacations were perfect opportunities for product placement. Before ABC and Disney tied the knot in'95, they flirted with each other. Explains why we would go to Disney in '86: the tenth anniversary of my show, which began in 1976. The bicentennial. The year I was f-u-c-k-i-n-g born.


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