In one of those efforts people make with their significant others to SHARE with the SHARING all the details of the pre-significant-other-parts of their lives, I insisted that Sandor and I go to DisneyWorld while on our holiday, so that he could see for himself what I was on about all these years.
You see, gentle readers, I unwittingly married a man who does not like rides, a crushing blow to a person who got a season's pass to Canada's Wonderland every year between the ages of 12 and 16, and who is still one of those irritating people who races from the exit of a particularly good coaster right back to the entrance again, over and over and over. Motion sickness, to a person such as myself, is for the weak, an exexplicable condition suffered only by those who somehow managed to avoid being weeded out by evolutionary progress. "What do you mean, it makes you sick? Isn't the crushing nausea totally worth the awesome rush?"
And this is the other problem. I somehow affect the vocabulary of a character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the duration of any and all amusement park visiting. "Totally wild!" I'll say, chewing on a baseball-sized wad of gum that doesn't actually exist. "That was, like, so cool." I might even use the word "radical" as an adverb, causing friends to shudder in horror as I devolve before their very eyes from a 25-year-old grad student to a hyperactive cretin who converts every sentence into a simile. "Dude."
In my desperate quest for a faster, spinnier, more upside-down, longer, with-shorter-lineups, now-suspended, now-sideways, now-backwards fix, I have been known to exhaust 11-year-old boys. "But Sarah, please..." they plead, their eyes glazing over. "We just want to sit down for a few minutes. Sitting...Sarah? Please?"
So it is to Sandor's great credit that he agreed to go to the Magic Kingdom at all with such a frenzied, frothing, fairground beast like myself, knowing full-well that I would immediately cease to be his beloved wife the second we got into the Pluto parking lot. In my efforts to SHARE with the SHARING everything about Disney that I remembered and loved as a kid, I think we were both expecting him to come home with asphalt burns all up and down his torso from being dragged around the park by his wrists, his rabid wife failing to notice that he tripped somewhere in Adventureland three hours before. But this didn't happen. Through some kind of internal development I shudder to call "the consideration of adulthood," my spaztastic excitement and desire to drag him all over the park, face-down if necessary, was dimmed by Sandor's deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare the second he caught sight of Cinderella's Castle.
Never having been brought to DisneyWorld as a child, I think, only sets up a state of extreme bewilderment in adults, no matter how well versed in irony, and Sandor was no different. We walked through the gates into the most magical place on earth, and it was as if he had been hit in the face with a giant waffle of tinkerbelly goodness, rendering him utterly stunned:
And he remained like that. The above photo was taken at 9:30am. This was taken in Tomorrowland, eight hours later:
I'm still not sure that it wasn't an act, designed specifically to keep me from marring his pretty face in my delirium, but it certainly worked. My SHARE with the SHARING changed from the aggressive and potentially dangerous "SEE? SEE? SEE?" style to one that was more subduded and suggestive, even going so far as allowing him some say in how the day progressed. And to my delight, he actually repressed his barfy tummy long enough to go on both Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain Railroad, though he drew the line at running back up the entrance ramp when I noticed that the lineup was only 15 minutes long. I started to complain, but SLAP! The Tinkerbell waffle stare again. "But...there's just so much else that I haven't seen yet...I just don't want to miss out on anything." The italics were Oscar-worthy - not too much emphasis, but just enough to seduce the listener to focus on the torment, the fear of those words at DisneyWorld. Miss out. Oh God, give the man a mouse ears, a giant turkey leg, whatever it takes just so long as he doesn't miss a thing.
The bastard. Now I'm sure it was an act.