Ema Earns Her Ears: My Secret Walt Disney World Cast Member Diary (Earning Your Ears Book 2) (11 page)

The friendly Disney lady at the counter where I turned in my paperwork asked about my flight and whether I was excited to be back here. Then she handed me an envelope full of documents and wished me a magical day. I frantically opened my envelope to find my apartment complex and number.

Chatham Square, #21204.

So it wasn’t Vista Way, like we had requested, but it was a new program, and it seemed fitting that I would get to enjoy this new journey in a new complex. I was just hoping that Amy had the same apartment number.

I waited and watched as she chatted to the cast member who had her envelope. Finally, she took it and ran over to me.

Ema: What have you got?

Amy (disappointed): Chatham.

Ema: That’s okay, because I did, too. Are we together? What’s your apartment number?

Amy: 21204.

We had taken our seats after grabbing a handful of freshly baked cookies and a bottle of water. Next to us was a girl, Katie, whom I had sat next to on the plane. She was a dancer from Sheffield. We instantly connected over our love of musicals, and she had told us she was going to be a performer, too. We had chatted quite a bit in the departure lounge at the airport. So she came to sit with us to eat cookies while we waited for the presentation to start. I asked her where she was going to be living. Chatham! She had requested to live with someone, too, but they were coming in on the London flight and hadn’t arrived yet. I told her we were also in Chatham so we could meet up before all the orientation meetings, I asked for her apartment number. 21204!

Can you believe it? Three performers under one roof. This was going to be the best summer ever.

At this moment, I heard a friendly American voice and turned around to see Mickey standing there, the man who had helped me the year before. I gave him the biggest smile and he smiled back and waved I couldn’t wait to tell him that I had gotten my dream job. But first, we had to sit through a video presentation and a mini-introduction to the program. It was the same presentation video we had watched the year before, and to be honest, I already knew what it was like to be in the program. It was a new year and things may have changed, but I was so excited to be living with Amy and Katie, and just being back here, that I couldn’t concentrate.

When the presentation was over, it was time to go find our suitcases that had been unloaded from the taxi and piled up in the corner. For those of us who weren’t living in Vista, we were told to get our luggage and board the mini bus for our designated complex. I went with Amy, Katie, Vicki (another girl who would also be living with us), and a few others living in Chatham, including Sarah Smiles. Sarah won the legacy award, the highest of the cast member awards, which means that you are truly fantasmic, and entitles you to a blue nametag so everyone knows it. The bus ride to Chatham helped me learn how this girl lives up to her name of Sarah Smiles, because she has a phobia to silence and really does smile, a lot. Whenever conversation lapsed, she would pick it up with a spiel about our favorite parks and characters, films, housing complexes, things to do outside of Disney, where the best shops are, what food we have to try, and everything else imaginable. She did get us all talking, and by the time we got off the bus we were no longer as awkward toward one another as we had been when we got on. I suppose that was the point.

Our apartment was in the back left-hand corner of the complex, with a view of Patterson Court, one of the other complexes. We opened our front door and saw a flight of stairs, an unusual layout for a Disney apartment. We dragged our mountain of luggage up the stairs, and once in the apartment proper we found other suitcases that had already been unpacked. We had roommates. But none of them were in. They must have arrived on an earlier flight, which meant they weren’t British because our plane was the first one from England to land in Orlando that day.

Amy and I found a room where both beds were free and grabbed it. My bed was pushed up next to the window. We had a shared bathroom which joined two rooms, and we walked through to find Katie and Vicki setting up camp. I knew I had to get my bed made first, because if we went out I wouldn’t want to do it when I got back, and it makes me feel more at home. I opened my suitcase and rooted around the mountain of clothes and shoes to find my bedding and covers. And that leads into another story.

As I’m going through my suitcase, Amy is unpacking clothes and finding places for all her bits and bobs around our room. She had started to organize her make up on the dresser while I was putting sheets on my mattress and pillowcases on my pillows. All I had left to do was the duvet. This is always a challenge for any British person, but add jet lag and it can become even more confusing. I find the easiest way to put covers on my duvet is to turn the covers inside out, grab the corners of the duvet, shake the covers until they assume the right position, and then just pull the duvet up to the other two corners and do up the poppers at the bottom. My usual approach went completely tits up, as I grabbed the wrong corners and put the duvet in a landscape position on a portrait cover.

Logic told me that the easiest way to sort out the mess was to get into the cover and move the duvet around while I was inside my sheets. I did this all without thinking that Amy might find it funny at best and weird at worst. She burst into laughter. I asked what she’d done, not realizing that I was asking from within my bedsheets. “It’s you,” she said, “what are you doing inside your duvet?” At that point, I realized that what I was doing was insane, and burst into fits of laughter myself. Amy said, “ I have to take a picture.” In one of our many pre-Disney conversations, we had promised each other to take as many photos as possible to document the entire summer, as well as videos for vlogs. Amy kept her promise. From this moment on, I knew we would be the best of friends, and I can understand now how so many people thought we knew each other from home.

Katie and Vicki decided to head out to Walmart, while Amy and I made the less sensible choice of taking a bus to the Polynesian to meet my roommate from last year, Abbie, for Dole whip. As we were all getting ready to leave, we heard a male and a female voice coming up the stairs. Another of our roommates had arrived, with her dad in tow. “Hi, I’m Marley,” she said, in a friendly voice.

Marley was from Port Orange, about an hour’s drive north of Disney World. I was automatically jealous that she lived so close to the happiest place on earth. Her dad told Marley how lucky she was to be living with British girls. She said she was going to get some things with her dad that she had forgotten, and we said we were going to Polynesian and that she was welcome to join us later.

As it turned out, we didn’t go anywhere, but became distracted with unpacking all of our luggage and checking out all the cupboards in the apartment. Katie came across a bottle of milk in the fridge. We began talking about Marley, wondering what she’d be like as a roommate, and Katie kept referring to her as Molly. Confused, I said:

Ema: Who’s Molly? I thought her name was Marley.

Katie: Marley?

Ema: Yeah, like
Marley & Me
.

Katie: It says Molly on this bottle of milk in the fridge.

We all burst out laughing. I’d even saved her in my phone as Marley.

On the day after our orientation, Amy and I decided that it was finally time to go to Walmart to buy some food that we could actually assemble into a meal. We had been living off Lunchables and cookies and a lot of fizzy drinks from the vending machine.

The most logical way to prepare for your first trip to Walmart is to make structured a list of all the essentials so you don’t get home and realize you’ve missed something you desperately needed. Neither of us did this; instead, we sat with our phones on the bus to Walmart trying to think of what we needed and typing it into a message. Amy’s list started off with cookies, truly a needful thing.

At Walmart, we bypassed the food aisles and headed straight to cosmetics and crafts. It took us an hour to start putting food in our cart, because first we had to look at all the Disney clothes and pins and tacky touristy Florida gifts that Walmart sells. I bought some giant colored felt tips pens to use for writing messages to one another back at the apartment.

By this time, I was starting to get hungry, and bags and bags of amazing American treats found their way into our trolley. We did get the essentials, as well: bread, rolls, butter, smoothies, pancake mix. At the frozen aisle, we added pizzas and tater tots.

Back at the apartment, we found all the roomies chilling in front of a giant TV watching Netflix. We didn’t have a TV set last year, because everyone in the apartment had flown to Orlando and there was no room for a TV in our luggage. Having American roommates certainly did come with advantages.

As I put away my food and placed my felt tips on the table, Merrite, an extremely bubbly girl from Minnesota who could give Sarah Smiles a run for her money, said she had a good idea of something we could do with my pens. She got us all some paper and said we had to write down information about ourselves. This was a really cute idea, and obviously the questions were focused around Disney, so favorite Disney film, park, ride, princess, villain. And of course, the basics, too: the basics, name, where we were from, our role. We stuck our finished information sheets to the pin board in the communal area. It was already starting to feel like home.

Friday, June 14. It’s time for my first department training class. Up until now, I’ve learned the exact same things they taught me last year, but this class was brand new. Welcome to Entertainment! It was a whirlwind of a class. I thought, living with three other girls who were also in Entertainment, that I’d be in the class with at least one of them. No such luck.

I already had the job, but Disney could take it away from me if I didn’t pass my training. This class wasn’t a do-or-die, but I still felt nervous and had those familiar butterflies in my stomach that everyone gets in advance of an audition. Proper training hadn’t even begun, and already I was a wreck.

I took the bus from Chatham and bumped into a few girls from England who were going to be attendants. I knew they must have been in the same class as me, since they were wearing their professional attire with their nametags on. We all piled on the bus with the massive group of college programmers dressed in a variety of crazy costumes.

At Disney, we don’t have the sort of uniforms you would wear to work anywhere else; here, everyone calls them “costumes”, and work is a “show” with your workplace “onstage”. Much of the terminology you would hear in the theater is used at Disney theme parks. Some of the costumes are theatrical indeed, such as the old-fashioned dresses worn by the “fairy godmothers” at Bibbiti Bobbidi Boutique. We were all jealous of those.

My Entertainment training was being held at a place called DAK WARDROBE/DISNEY UNI. We clocked in for the first time, at 8am, after meeting wonderful, energetic people who had no business being so wonderful and energetic that early in the morning. We had two trainers, both of them male. One of them, Rafael, had just been nominated for the legacy award (that blue nametag I told you about earlier). He had worked as a PhotoPass photographer for most of this time with the company, but had recently transferred here.

The instructors know the safety stuff is necessary but boring, and so they try to get it out of the way first so we can finish with the fun stuff. Only Disney can make learning about safety not entirely dull, even when the lesson is how to pick up a heavy item.

The class began with a few basic rules. Number one, no matter what your role, and this does extend outside the Entertainment department, character integrity is essential to the magic. Unfortunately, there are people who like to spoil the magic for others in order to gain a sense of “I know more than everyone else”, which I find pathetic. Everyone who comes to work for Disney understands and accepts the rules, and if you chose to break them and spoil experiences for other cast members who still hold onto the magic they knew as children, you shouldn’t work for Disney.

We spent quite awhile going over the importance of this rule, and the only reason it takes so long is because if it isn’t emphasized enough, some people don’t seem to get it.

Next, we went to hear all about the green, yellow, and red zones of lifting. The instructors thought it an important lesson, but I never once used these techniques during the entire course of my program. But at least I had the skills to safely execute a good lift if I was required, because:

SAFE D BEGINS WITH ME!

We talked a lot about how the Entertainment department is completely different from every other department on Disney property, because people are always looking for ways to “break” it. For examples, some guests think it’s cool to ask Pluto whether he has air vents or fans inside his costume. Pluto doesn’t speak, and so he signs back confusion. He’s a dog, not a human, and so he’s supposed to be confused. He’d probably like to say that even dogs are smart enough to know that they don’t have fans inside their heads. That’s why attendants are always close by to help the non-speaking characters like Pluto. A good attendant will know what a character would be expected to say, but can’t.

At this point, we received our role-based training schedule. Rafael said that some of the schedule needed explaining, so he brought us up to the front in small groups to do so, with the groups then split based on roles. We were told that at some point during training we would have a “realization moment” when we would truly understand the amazing impact of what we do, and that we have to power to make a guest’s day very special.

From Disney University we boarded the West Clock bus, which is the bus that all cast members use to travel back and forth to Disney University, Magic Kingdom Costuming, the Magic Kingdom cast parking lot, and Cast Connections. Most everyone who works at the Magic Kingdom uses this bus to get to work. We all piled on.