Friday Night: The Performances!

The Performance

We arrived at Fullerton College around 2:00pm. The band was immediately whisked off to the practice room while I was again put in charge of eight giggling middle school girls. This isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds.

Oddly enough, I seem to be doing fine keeping the moment in order, and walked them to the other side of the college where the choir performances were being held. I surprised myself by being clear and taking charge, introducing myself to the people in charge as the chaperon, and asking for directions. With guidance and time-lines clear, the girls we assured that nothing would go wrong before the performances were over.

Actually, the choir that proceeded us wasn't that good. I think our own choir found that reassuring.

When it came their turn, they did fabulous. They did their three songs with emphasis and skill, and the clinician afterward helped them build on their strengths and bring the altos out more fully. They were "well-rehearsed," a good compliment on its own.

The one that followed us was from New Mexico, did most of their songs in Spanish, and had some courageous selections. The last involved a sequence where the girls imitated jungle noises while the boys brought out the melody, a complex suggestion of South American tribal music.

Storm goofs

I wanted to hear what the clinician had to say, but we were on our way to hear our own band perform.

And the band did well. I don't know if I have the skill to be a teacher, but this guy really did get 110% out of these kids at the last minutes. Even more surprising, the rowdiest and most disruptive boys on the bus turned out to be just as professional and well-mannered on stage as the quietest among them. I later spoke to the mother of one of the boys, who had also come along on the trip. She said that that was not unusual: he was a "goofy" kid, but deadly serious about mastering and performing the task put in front of him, if he thought it was worth his while. Good for him.

The clinician did a great job of leading the band through some exercises on how to make more sound, not louder sound, by putting more wind through their instruments. The first piece was a choral and he was delighted to be able to help them through it.

The band that followed them was from the same school as the New Mexico chorus, and were just as amazing.

I was grateful when it was time to get back on the bus and head back to the hotel. The chaperons made a pizza run, and we all shared a greasy pizza before bedtime. I found my peeps giggling madly when I went to deliver their pies, the room reeking of nail polish and girl sweat. I advised them to open up a window.

We're Proud To Be A Twelve-Step Banana Republic

Twelve Step Store

Really? Has it come to this? Commercializing other people's capacity for failure in such an obvious way?

I am reminded of a quote from Usenet: "Your rage is useless. Your rage will be packaged, branded and sold back to you as entertainment. Get used to it."

Apparently, so will your pathos.

Good Idea. Bad Idea.

America before 9/11:

We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological, cultural, and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile. Try a Big Mac. First one's free.

America after 9/11:

Please don't hurt us.

And we're off to Disneyland!

We're Going To Disneyland!

Now came the part I thought was fairly controversial: two days at Disneyland. No excuses, no particular purpose. We could have gone back to Fullerton and listened to the other bands, but that would have been an overdose of education, I suppose. Instead, we hung out in the Happiest Place on Earth.

And really, the staff are astonishingly cheerful. I guess it's a requirement to work there, but they pull it off. Most of them must love working there, in one way or another. Despite the occasional labor troubles.

Somewhere in the basement of Walt Disney Laboratories must be a copy of The Eldritch Master's Guide to Color, because Disney almost never, ever gets color wrong. I couldn't think of a clash anywhere in the place. There's something amazing about the integrative quality of color used on the buildings, costumes, fixtures, and vehicles.

At one point, while I was taking pictures of things, I noticed a guy right next to me more or less doing the same thing. He was photographing things, not people, in a methodical and deliberate way. A lot of where he aimed his camera was at the plant life, but not all. I said to him, "You must be either a graphic designer, or a gardener."

"Umm... both. How did you know?"

I waved my camera at him. "Only one of those would pay so much attention."

I didn't do many rides. It was fun just to walk around, people-watch, run into different groups of kids from our school and make sure they're all having a good time. I did ride the steamboat exhibit, the Mark Twain. The voice-over still has the "Friendly Injun" language left over from the 1960s, the romanticized frontier of Walt Disney's youth. The steam whistle will spray droplets on you if you're too close when it blows, and the steam chimneys are quite warm to the touch, but not dangerously so.

It occurs to me that in Disneyland, you are here to be entertained by machinery, anthropomorphics, and animatronics. The humans are there to commit commerce.

As I got off the boat, a passed a group of high schoolers. This weekend Disney is packed with graduating classes, along with two music competitions. A young woman said, "Oh, my god. It's a kilt! Okay, my day just got a lot better. That is awesome." I'm glad I made someone's day.

Did I mention I wore the kilt? I pointed out to my three charges, Storm, and a few other people that my job on the trip was to do three things: one, tell them what was expected of them, two, help them solve those problems they could not solve themselves, and three, show them that being an adult does not necessarily have to suck. A few of those who heard me later confided that they thought that their parents had succumbed to being adults. They weren't bad parents, they'd just given up trying to have fun. I said that it wasn't being an adult that was the problem, it was choosing to be mundane, ordinary, just get it over with. "I have no intention of 'just getting over with' my life," I told one young man.

At noon, I had to walk two girls back to the hotel; one had grabbed the wrong shirt and was quite in trouble. A six-block walk, and Anaheim has long blocks. I grabbed the sunscreen.

Did you know a Utilikilt Mocker can carry two 750ml bottles of wine in the front pockets and not show? That is awesome.

Had lunch with Stormy and her crowd. She looks tired but exhausted. We ate at "The French Market," a fairly decent place with a really good salad with blackened salmon and avocado. I was "kilt man" to many of the kids. Stormy got a lot of "Your dad is pretty cool, after all."

The coffee here is terrible. I feel so sorry for the rest of the country.

The Jungle Cruise voice-over is by Steve Martin. And the Disneyland Train is by Dick Van Dyke. That is very cool.

Tomorrow will be just like today, only moreso

The Office Of, Er, Today.

While at Disneyland, I avoided Tomorrowland for most of the day, sure I'd be disappointed. And I was. The House of Tomorrow was, well, the house of today, only with more monitors. The home office of tomorrow is made of stained cherrywood, very masculine, with a four-monitor setup (and every monitor that wasn't in a tablet or handheld was 24" or bigger) on the desk, a monitor over your head with your to-do and agenda staring you in the face, and monitors on your desk facing outward convincing anyone who looks at your desk that you love your family. The den of tomorrow has a 100" TV. The kitchen of tomorrow has 24" monitors and tablet computers running Windows 7 to help you cook. Every bedroom has a wall-embedded gigantic monitor, and a tablet for environmental control, and pitch-perfect surround sound. The patio of tomorrow has an enormous gas grill and, yes, a monitor. This one was vertical; I kept hoping Wheatly would show up. It's all fully aspirational.

"The House of Tomorrow" is really the House of Today With A Much Higher Electric Bill.

Oh, and the sound systems are all controlled by a Microsoft Zune. Bill Maher recently did a skit about Osama Bin Laden, then apologized for one slur: "Saying Osama Bin Laden was a Zune user is a line I should not have crossed, and I'm sorry." Disneyland uses Zunes.

I walked through the exhibit, amused, and when I reached the end I said aloud, "Dammit, where's my posthuman future?"

A hipsterly dressed young man next to me said, "That's what I was wondering, too." We smiled at each other and went our separate ways.

Who knew Disneyland employees could be subversive and ironic?

Neo-Soviet style art at the Innovention Building.

The "The Hospital of Tomorrow" is, like "The House of Tomorrow," hosted in the Innovention Building. And like The House, The Hospital of Tomorrow is very much like The Hospital of Today, only with slightly better scanners and, yes, more and bigger monitors.

A room had a display on "Your Future Health!" One of the looping videos showed an enthusiastic young man and a hapless but well-dressed woman in a cartoonishly decorated examination room. She was holding out her arms and he laid a yellow, foul-looking gelatinous slab across her hands. "What is that?" she asked.

"Ten pounds of fat. Well, it's fake fat, but that's the right color and," he poked at it to make it jiggle, "the right texture." He laid another slab across her arms. "And that's twenty pounds!" Again. "And that's thirty pounds!" A real slab of the stuff was available under the video screen for visitors to poke at.

The woman naturally objects. "Doctor! This is heavy! I can't carry this around all day!"

"If you're thirty pounds overweight, you already are! Every minute of every day, this is exactly what you're carrying around." He poked the plastic fat again to emphasize his point. "Imagine the strain it puts on your hips, your knees, and your ankles. Over time, that adds up and can lead to real injury!"

Star Wars has a hell of a cross-promotion going on with Disney. Throughout the Disneyland Park, I had been seeing adorable small children wearing black T-shirts with the Yoda quote, "Judge me by my size, do you?" It's very cute.

The gift shop in the Innoventions Building is the only shop in the entire park where you can buy that shirt in adult sizes. The most common size stocked is XXL.

Whoa. Poor industrial affordance at Disneyland?

Low Affordance

Astonishingly, I did spot one moment of less than excellent design: the trash cans. While, yes, everyone knows how to use a trash can, the degree of that assumption is strong in the design of the trash-can ingress.

If I had been designing the trash can, I would have molded the lids just a little bit, with a large descending plane sloping inward, and small, maybe two-inch ascending plane on the bottom to meet the descender. This would have helped communicate "push here," while reassuring the user that his hands were unlikely to slip and touch the interior of the receptacle. Not that Disney has much trouble with littering, but it would have been one more touch of perfection.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides

We received special dispensation to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides, which was showing in the Disney AMC theater just outside the park. I ended up chaperoning 11 kids to go see it.

It's a serviceable film. It's not great. Johnny Depp is a professional, but he hates doing anything twice. His disappointment at doing a fourth film is never obvious, but still you can tell his soul isn't into being Jack Sparrow one. more. time.

Things go boom under Jerry Bruckheimer's consummate expertise, the costumes are gorgeous, the settings amazing, but there are so many plot holes. It's a stupid pot. When Barbarossa reaches the vessel of Ponce De Leon, where are the English? How does Jack escape from the English the next morning? None of this is explained. The two mermaids we see are very pretty, in a youthful and Caucasian way.

This is a movie you have to see only if you had to see the third one. And not even then. It's super pretty, as only multi-hundred-million dollar budgets can provide. But that's about it.

Saturday at Disneyland: The Award Ceremony

Lovely nook in New Orleans district.

After the movie, I tried to herd the students back, but all of the girls (including Stormy) broke avay and ran back to Disneyland proper to redeem their FastPasses to Space Mountain. The boys stayed. I reminded had only 40 minutes to get food before the music festival awards were to be delivered.

Boys, I discovered, do not listen. But they can be led.

We made it back to the park and I let them loose, and then it was finally my turn to go eat. I ate at a little sandwich shop with decent roast beef, with an actually spicy horseradish aoili and pickled radish.

I got to the rally point after dark, and the kids were waving around these shining, LED-powered light sabers that blinked and flashed. There's a lot of blinking and flashing at Disneyland. The blue LEDs hit me right in that wavelength that attacks my colorblindedness, giving me a splitting headache every time someone waved one in my face. Stormy said to me, "Yeah, I wanted one. But they'd give you headaches and Omaha's seziures, and that wouldn't be cool." She's learning compassion, and that's a good thing.

I was attacked by a gaggle that numbered eight, including Stormy, E. and H. "You're so cool. We love your kilt. Will you chaperone us after the ceremony?" How could I say no?

We marched to the ceremony, which was held past the "ElecTRONica" exhibit. Give it up guys, you're not recouping the love from that film. We waiting in line outside the Hyperion Theater, and then were allowed in.

What a production! A talented foursome of entertainers sang and danced a syrupy love song to talent and music and whatnot, joined by Micky and Minnie eventually, and then a comedian dressed as Alladin's Genie rose and cracked some pretty contemporary jokes. He asked if anyone knew anyone who had disappeared in the Rapture, and said he no longer gave a wish to be a famous singer after he gave one to Ke$ha. "She looks like she'd be sticky if you touched her, huh?" He was talented and believable, but no Robin Williams.

This was an "Everyone Gets an Award" ceremony, but with the restriction being how big an award it was. We actually won a silver for Chorus and second place for the Band, so rah-rah us. Actually, that's not bad considering how outclassed we were: Redwood Middle brought six bands, four voice, and three dance groups to the competition. They're a magnet school for fine arts in a wealthy district, and have the entire district for a talent pool. We had no chance. Given that our music director works by himself, second place is respectable. It was noisy, and some of the girls from the other schools had sirens for voices.

Afterward, I ended up with nine kids: four boys and five girls. We went back to Disneyland and did The Mad Tea Party, twice, where I was both times dragooned into supplying the muscle to spin the teacup we occupied. The first time it was in E. & H., the second time with Storm & L. I think I hurt my left wrist. We did the Snow White cars, and the Carousel, and then we got home.

It was 12:30am when I collapsed into bed.

Sunday: Morning In America!

Oh, Vader, to have sunk so low.

Morning. Gummy eyes opened onto a day. On my way to the Marriot next door, I was warned by another chaperone, "The line at the Starbucks is long." I asked if she meant at the Hilton. "Yeah, there." I went to the Marriot, where there was no line at all. Instead, I made small talk with the Windpower Convention going on there, apparently a very big deal.

When I got back with my "Triple venti latte 2% no-foam leave-room with one shot of simple" (come on, I've had six hours of sleep three days in a row, yesterday walked the length and breadth of Disneyland five or six times, and walked the length of the entire park facility twice, while herding a constantly changing gaggle of giggling girls!), it was time. There was an hour of rapid packing, making sure the girls were in motion, making sure the one girl from another group who asked me to carry her phone charger got it back, collecting room keys, accepting a big hug from Storm, and then checking out. We assembled in a meeting hall downstairs, where we would leave our luggage for the day while we went to the California Adventure park.

We walked down to the park, and let them loose inside. I walked around to the ElecTRONica exhibit to look at in the daylight. The graphic design of Tron is really hard to convey to the real world; the stylings look tacky in daylight. I met two other girls who begged me to ride on the Tower of Terror with them. It's a Twilight Zone themed vertical drop, with multimedia effects and blackness to enhance the experience of being in a creepy elevator in a creepy hotel. Sadly, the voice actor doing Rod Serling wasn't that great, and the splice job between his voice and Rod's was obvious.

From Steampunk Hero to Sad Little Fish

The visuals were amazing, though. It is very effective as a ride. There were photos you could buy at the end, but I was nearing my budget limit and didn't. It showed the two girls screaming in surprise or fear, and me with this great, maniacal grin.

Finally got a breakfast croissant, which was the first meh meal I've had in the park. Oh, and a, um, "latte." It's like the scene in Frasier where Niles ends up in a lower class of bar from what he's used to. "What kind of wine do you have? Oh. I'll have the, um, 'red.'" If I asked for a "triple venti latte 2% no-foam leave room with one shot of simple," they'd look at me like I was speaking gibberish.

I mentioned this at the all-hands chaperone meet-up at noon, and one young lady said, "That made my head explode." Guess she's not a coffee drinker.

I also got a call from a parent in Seattle, of one of my charges. After she had had conversation with her daughter the night before, she was very concerned about her daughter's diet. "She forgets to eat on trips like this. Could you sit her down at lunch and make sure she eats something?" So we did. The kid actually seemed grateful, and she and her two peers accompanied me to a lovely bakery and restaurant where I had the salad shrimp louie, and she dutifully ate all her clam chowder. "I like to eat," she insisted. "I just forget!"

Fortified, we went to the "Wild Grizzly Rapids Ride." Round eight-person rafts on a roller coaster-cum-water slide thing, with lots of opportunities to get wet. We got wet.

My last duty was to find a gift for Kouryou-chan. I found some socks she'd love, and a deck of playing cards with Star Wars / Disney character mash-ups, which Omaha will decry as blasphemy, but Kouryou-chan, who is learning to play cribbage, will probably like.

After that, we rallied at the rally point, and it was time to head home.

Finally home...

We walked through the park to the tram, and took the tram to the parking lot. The buses weren't there. We waited, in the broiling hot sun, without shade, for 35 minutes. Storm sat in my lap, and then her friend sat in her lap, until I was crushed. I heard various variations of "You're Dad's pretty cool, for a guy who wears a kilt. No, because he wears a kilt."

Eventually, the bus showed up. We arrived at the hotel with eight minutes to spare, and we made it. Well-cued to the crisis, the kids did their best, grabbed their luggage, and loaded back up in record time.

The 40-minute ride to the airport gave me time to write the previous two posts. The legendary LA traffic flowed at speed, without interruption. We arrived with two hours to spare.

Which was fortunate. The check-in of band instruments was a complete clusterfrack, and one girl pushed the "YES" button to the "Are you checking in a weapon?" question, so there was a kerfluffle about getting her cleared.

Mam, the TSA at LAX is competent and comprehensive. The guy who did the ID check for me was El-Al cool about it, asking questions to put me off guard. It was quick and effective, and I had no problems, but still. And another TSA agent asked to see my bag after I boarded the plane. Geez.

The last crisis arose at the gate. One of my girls lost her boarding pass. I spotted it on the ground, on the other side of the belt where the carry-on comes out of the X-ray machine. I flagged a TSA agent and said, "She dropped her pass. Could you see if that pass is hers?" I told him the name that should be on the pass, and he handed it to her. We were closing in on boarding time. Crisis averted, I handed the young lady off to her mother with the tale, and then it was done. I was allowed to get onto the plane.

The flight was uneventful. It was even an undramatic ending. We landed, went to baggage claim, and broke up and went our own ways. I was able to find two of my chaperon group, and thanked them for being great and making my job easy. They looked exhausted. I bet I do too.

Lisakit came and gave Stormy and me a lift home. We were home almost at 11pm. I went straight to bed.