One recent evening at a Walt Disney World resort called Caribbean Beach, the tikki bar was entirely empty. The only customer turned out to be an off-duty bartender. Like all other Disney World employees, bartenders here are officially called “cast members.” This particular cast member talked shop and flirted a little too loudly. He and his attractive on-duty colleague discussed how to locate the surveillance cameras (they’re hidden in the bookshelf speakers) and how to give away unauthorized freebies (zip the keycard and void the transaction).
It’s peak season at Disney World–that’s the one in Florida, not California–and 51,000 Disney employees are celebrating the centenary of Walt Disney’s birth. It’s not clear how many tourists are celebrating with them at Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and the handful of other Disney theme parks here in Orlando. Judging from the short lines and vacant seats at Space Mountain, attendance is down. Way down.
Many guests have the misimpression that Disney World itself is 100 years old. It isn’t. A cast member in a blue jumper tells me that Walt Disney himself personally cut the ribbons here in 1952. But I instinctually distrust everything at Disney World, especially the histories.
It’s true that security is a little tighter since September. Friendly security guards rifle through backpacks, purses, and fanny packs at the entrances to every park. But one senses there are too many Disney targets in too many Disney places, tucked into too many acres of Florida swampland, to attract a serious terrorist plot. Cinderella’s castle, which is essentially a 600-foot façade on a cramped one-room gift shop, somehow doesn’t seem like much of a prize in the global war on terrorism.
On the other hand, Disney’s two new cruise ships are sitting ducks. At nearby Port Canaveral, security is waterproof and vacancies are rare. Since launching their luxury Carribean cruise business in 1999, Disney Cruise Lines has been a resounding success. Scores of sun-starved Midwesterners like me buy all-inclusive packages that admit us to the theme parks, then we climb aboard the Disney Magic or the Disney Wonder for a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. Each time we make port, we are required to bring our keycards and photo IDs, and our bags are X-rayed. A bomb-sniffing dog wags its tail.
One port-of-call is Castaway Cay, a 1,000 acre Caribbean island which Disney purchased a few years ago. Formerly known as Gorda Cay, it was an uninhabited drug smugglers’ stopover with an airstrip and not much else. Disney dredged a deep-water harbor for their ships, which weigh anchor here twice a week. At each anchorage, about 2,500 slightly overweight professionals from Minneapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis are disgorged, steering their children to Disney’s exclusive beach, playground, and restaurant.
On the paved trail to this island paradise, Disney has also built a rustic two-room shack that serves as Castaway Cay’s official post office, a bureau operated by the Bahamas Postal Service. Here, you can buy real Bahamian stamps that feature a beautiful image of the cruise ship from which you just disembarked. The Postmistress, Miss Carmita Roker, says there are 40 permanent residents of the island. How many of these are Disney cast members? All of them, she says. “Except me. But I don’t live here.”
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