By CINTRA WILSON
The other day my boyfriend suggested that we go to Disneyland, since we live in L.A. and the last time I was there I wasn't as tall as the mylar dwarf who serves as dictator of admittance to most of the rides. I immediately started rummaging through old phone books for my stale drug connections, believing there was no way that my tortured adult mind could possibly withstand the onslaught of gyrating velour robot animals lip-synching sugar-drenched lyrics insidiously laced with plans for Christian world domination in five-part major harmonies, and angry Asian medical students gingerly hugging fat children with miserable families from the dark and sterilized vantage point of their full-body Duck costumes, and ubiquitous fluorescent stores filled with suckable Mouse heads and black plastic ears.
"No drugs!" my boyfriend barked, which I thought was a dangerous idea. But we went forward anyway into the city of Anaheim, with nothing for psychic prophylatics but coffee and the Ritalin the doctors had prescribed us.
Our first adventure was to enter the 3-D zillion-dollar extravaganza Captain EO, now on its very last legs and one of the most unpopular rides in the park, where you can see all 360 degrees of the late Respectable Michael Jackson. It was kind of touching and sad to sit there in the dark with the silly 3-D glasses on, watching pretty-eye-shadow-girl Michael sing freely with puppets in the days right before the plastic surgeons replaced his head with that little white triangle with the holes painted on it.
"We are gonna change the world! Hoo-hoo!" he crowed energetically, his eyes flashing swarms of laser-mites and his body doing that gangly hot-oil action it always did so well, with a tag team of leggy Solid Gold dancers behind him. There is actually one point in EO that is truly astonishing, and it comes at the very beginning. A perfect Disney 3-D rock comes at you and floats in front of your face, so close you swear you could hug it. My head exploded with liquid baby-like glee -- Wow! Look! Science! Art! Technology! They do this thing where they make this rock float in front of your head and if you touch it, it isn't there! It was wonderful and safe and benevolent, in a way that unknown things in the real world aren't.
Next page: LSD-informed architecture
