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Wild Thing
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[08/20/99]

Wild Thing
Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!
Classic fairy tales get a feminist makeover for parents who don't like their princesses tricked out, locked up or comatose. But were the old ones really that bad?
By Margot Mifflin
[08/20/99]

There goes my baby
Once, I thought my daughter would win the Nobel Prize. Now that she's started college, I just hope she keeps her phone, her power, her housing -- and remembers to wake up for class.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[08/19/99]

First crush
When you're a girl, a grown man's attention can make a woman out of you.
By Maurine Shores
[08/18/99]

Hot Flash
take my tv
The American Academy of Pediatrics says children under 2 should not watch TV. Why would any parent disagree?
By Jacques Leslie
[08/17/99]

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So if I couldn't really appreciate it, why were we there? My parents wanted to go. They were both 27 at the time -- young Angelenos; I was 3 months old. It was June 1969 and the wonderful world of Disney consisted of a single theme park -- Disneyland -- just down the road in Anaheim. It was a day trip, a quick jaunt. An easy invitation to act like a kid -- even if you weremarried and a new parent.

My mom's favorite ride was the Mad Tea Party, so that was our always our first stop. You sit in enormous teacups that whirl violently around and if you really want to make yourself sick, there's a wheel in the middle you can turn that will spin you even more. When I got a little older, my mom took me on that ride and I almost threw up. She sat across from me in the cup, laughing like crazy.

To me, Disneyland was the neighborhood theme park. Even after we moved overseas, to countries where Disney didn't own every child's imagination, I visited Disneyland every year, during our trips back to the States. This was in the '70s, when Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy were the mainstays of the park. The place was a palace of '50s nostalgia by then; Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were already historic relics. Nothing ever seemed to change or to need updating -- not the rainbow-colored construction-paper flowers of It's a Small World nor the fake hairy pirate's leg dangling over your head as you sailed through the archway in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Also The dark side of Disney Taking the kids to Disney World is an obligation I could've gladly done without.

As an adult, it's this sameness that pulls me through Disney's gates. I know which rides I want to go on and that I'll want a piece of peanut-butter-chocolate fudge. I'm still awed by the parade, teeming with characters from my childhood. But when I look around, I see the kids clamoring for the more recent characters: Mulan, Pocahontas, Tarzan. As soon as a new movie is released, its animated stars appear on Main Street, in Disney stores, on Broadway. Kids sing Disney theme songs ad nauseam and beg for the latest stuffed toy or action figure

It's this commercialized fanfare that makes parents dread the trek to Disney these days. Add in the cost of expensive daily passes and the prospect of hyper kids running amuck among the stockinged legs of big-headed make-believe characters and you've got a ripe situation for short fuses to blow. A perfect excuse to skip Disney altogether.

So don't go. Especially if you're going to blow. Last time I visited Disney World, in Florida, was in May, and I saw a terrible thing, a very un-Disney thing. It was a hot, humid day, steaming and brilliant. I was standing in line at the snack bar, deciding between the Donald Duck orange ice pop or the Mickey Mouse-eared chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream stick, when I heard a sharp voice behind me. A mother was reprimanding her young daughter for dropping a soda. Nothing spilled, since the bottle hadn't been opened yet. The child was startled, wide-eyed and silent. She bent down to pick up the soda, her mother's words still fierce. I was shocked. "That's wrong," I said rather loudly to no one in particular. "This is Disney World. You can't get mad at kids here."

Next page | The worst-behaved people at Disney theme parks are the adults