by Aidan Wayne
This was it. She was going to be Rapunzel.
She met her character escort outside of Costuming, and he introduced himself as Alex, and not only her character escort of the day, but her evaluator as well.
“I’ve been working as an escort for thirteen years,” he said as they walked through the Magic Kingdom tunnels to the indoor Guest meet-and-greet area where Rapunzel was currently “permanently” stationed. “And I’ve worked with nearly every face and fur character Disney’s got, so I know what’s what. I’ll be checking out your energy, your Guest interaction, and your overall acting skills. Try not to worry about me, though. The more relaxed you are, the better you’ll do.”
“Right.”
Alex laughed. “I know that doesn’t help at all. Everyone’s nervous on the first day. For the first week. Sometimes longer. But you’ll do fine.”
“Thanks. I hope so.”
“So how are you liking the college program so far?”
Ashlee appreciated the change in subject, because her stomach was doing flip-flops. She ended up chattering almost nonstop about her experiences, what she was hoping for, and how her biggest goal was to be a dancer at Disney, on top of working as a face character.
“Are you going to be auditioning in November?” Alex asked.
“Yeah, me and my friend Maya are both auditioning. And Maya’s also going to be auditioning as a stilt-walker too.”
“She can stilt walk?”
“Oh yeah. She’s really good. I haven’t seen her in person or anything, but she’s got videos on YouTube. And she had her stilts specially shipped to her so she can practice for the audition.”
Alex nodded. “I see.” They stopped in front of a staircase. “Here we are. Are you ready?”
Ashlee swallowed. It was just like a dance recital. She knew all the moves. Now all that was left was to perform them. “I’m ready.”
They walked up the stairs and through a doorway, and Rapunzel stepped onstage.
Chapter Seven
DANA SEETHED all through getting ready to go to work. Going back into her bedroom to get her bag just made her madder, because there was Ashlee’s stupid purple bedspread, and the wall of photos and posters she’d put up on her side of the room, and that fucking television, and Dana had a rage-filled thought about throwing the damned thing off the balcony before she rolled her eyes at herself. It was one thing to hate her roommate. It was quite another to engage in active property damage. That would get her terminated from the program for sure.
Besides, there was no way Dana was going to do anything that made her the bad guy in this situation.
She grabbed her bag and stuffed her lunch into it, then pulled on her black shoes and started the walk over to the buses. It was a gloomy, overcast day, and the sky looked like it was about to start pouring any second. Which had been happening a lot. Probably she should invest in an umbrella.
As it was, she got into her bus to Hollywood Studios and hoped it wouldn’t start raining until after she got to her location.
Well, that was one nice thing about the day; she was stationed at Tower of Terror, so she’d be able to see Isabella and the guys, at least in passing. If they were lucky, their breaks would line up too. She really needed to rant about the latest Ashlee argument.
It started to rain just as she got to the Tower, and she bolted inside before she got soaked, hurrying to clock in and get her assignment. Photo greeter. That was nice. Another good thing so far.
She didn’t mind working the shop area of Rockin’ Roller Coaster or Tower of Terror, and actually liked stocking because it was easy work that kept her moving and she liked to organize things. But working as a photo greeter was a lot of fun. She wasn’t exactly a people person, but as a greeter you got to interact with Guests as they got off the ride and went to see what their pictures looked like. She got to see people being excited, being scared, got to see hilarious faces in the photos, and sometimes people even did poses in their pictures. Her favorite so far had been a group of girls who had all brought books on the ride with them and had their noses in them for the picture.
As she stood there waiting for the next group to get off the ride, the side entrance to the Tower, a cast member entrance, slowly opened up. She glanced over to see who might be coming out—a coworker, maybe a manager—and blinked in surprise to see two men and two women emerge, all dressed up in vintage-looking outfits. One woman had a shimmering, knee-length purple dress and a giant feather boa. Another looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion book about the roaring twenties, and she was arm-in-arm with a man who looked like an old-timey movie director, complete with a pipe and slouchy hat. The last man was carrying a trunk and wearing a suit that was probably in fashion about sixty years ago.
The door closed behind them just as the next set of excited Guests came down the echoey halls. A few ignored the newcomers completely, but most stopped to look at them.
“Goodness, but it is pouring outside,” the purple woman said. She sounded like a character from a dramatic film. “This is the hotel de echante, isn’t it?”
“No, sweetheart,” the movie director said, voice slick and nasal. “It hasn’t been called that since we died here.”
Some of the Guests gasped, a couple laughed, and most pulled out their phones to take pictures. The costumed characters posed and hammed it up for the camera, and then the Guests went on their way, out to the photo booths of the Tower and then toward the gift shop and the exit.
The man carrying the trunk grinned at Dana, and then the group spread out across the Tower chamber before freezing like statues. The woman in purple ended up just a few feet away from Dana, standing so still Dana only just could tell she was breathing.
Dana stared at her. The woman glanced at her and winked, then froze again as the telltale pounding feet and the sound of giggles and excited chatter heralded the next round of oncoming Guests.
Once again, a few people ignored the woman, instead looking for their pictures (and taking photos of the photos with their phones), but a lot of people stopped to stare at the woman. Three guys went over to pose with her, as the girl in their group went to take their picture.
That was when she moved.
All three guys shrieked and leaped about a foot into the air. “Jesus!” one cried, clutching at his chest.
“No, dear,” the woman said. “Just me. But thank you all the same.”
Everyone laughed, took a few more pictures, and then moved on.
Dana looked from the hallway where the Guests had gone to around the chamber where all the actors were posing, and she grinned. It was going to be a very entertaining shift.
“THANK YOU all so much for coming out to meet Rapunzel,” Alex told the crowd of people still lined up to see Ashlee. “But she has to check on her latest painting and see if the paint has dried. She’ll be back soon.”
“Bye, everyone!” Ashlee called before turning and following Alex down the castle hall away from the Guests, and then through the backstage door and down the stairs. Her face hurt from smiling so much, but she couldn’t make herself stop. It’d been such an amazing rush.
She desperately wanted to ask Alex how she’d done, but he didn’t seem inclined to talk, instead pulling out his phone. He still led her to one of the backstage staff rooms, though. Face and fur characters got thirty- to forty-five-minute breaks between sets. That’s one of the reasons there were multiple people playing the same character in one park: so Guests didn’t have to wait that long between meet-and-greets.
It was always an experience being in a character staff room, because people wandered around in bits and pieces of costumes. Most fur characters stripped completely out of costume, down to the gray “downtime” clothes Disney supplied them, but sometimes face characters did too, usually before or after a shift, wanting to stay out of costume as long as possible. It was amazing to see someone in full face-character mode… from the neck up. It was fascinating to watch Belle text on her phone and Prin
ce Charming wearing sweatpants.
For her part Ashlee stayed in her dress because she didn’t feel like struggling in and out of it. She grabbed a bottle of water and a granola bar—provided for character actors since they couldn’t carry their own water and snacks around with them—and plopped down in one of the chairs in a corner. Usually she’d be all over trying to talk to the other people in the room, but she’d just gotten done with her very first face character meet-and-greet, and she was so wound up she needed a little time to decompress. She did hike up her skirt, though, to reach the gray shorts she wore underneath and to pull her phone out of her pocket. There were very, very strict rules about cell phones; they had to be on silent or turned off completely, and having a phone beep or ring or vibrate while onstage, especially as a character, could be grounds for termination. She had hers off for good measure, and she turned it on now to check her messages and social media.
It felt like the half-hour break flew by, because then Alex came up to her again. “Ready to go back out?”
“Yeah.” She turned her phone off, stowed it, and stood up, taking a deep breath. She’d already done one set, and in her opinion, it had been an amazing mix of energy and nerves. Time to go back onstage.
This time the walk from the breakroom to the stairwell seemed much shorter and filled with slightly less crazy anticipation. Oh, it was definitely there, the butterflies back in her stomach (but she was going back out, was that a good sign? Was she still being evaluated? If Alex thought she was terrible, he wouldn’t let her meet Guests again, would he?), and her face already hurt from the smiling. At least this time she wasn’t quite as close to shaking out of her slippers.
DANA REALIZED about fifteen minutes in that the costumed characters were the Players of Hollywood, the improv actors who traveled around Hollywood Studios and encouraged Guest interaction with comedic skits. When she asked about it, she learned from Soo-jin, a coworker who’d been at the Tower for several years, that when it rained, some of the Players usually popped into various attractions that fit their aesthetic. And Tower of Terror fit the bill perfectly. If it was raining outside, it was basically a guarantee that the Tower would get a visit. Which was pretty awesome. She was already a fan of rainy days, but this certainly gave Florida’s wet weather added appeal.
When it was time for her break, she took the backstage elevator (an elevator inside a ride based on a broken, deadly elevator; there was some irony in that) up to the Tower staff room. Bolin was there, splayed out on the couch, hat resting on his stomach, and he waved tiredly to her when she came in.
“Hey.” Dana sat down across from him. “How’s it going?”
“Day’s going fine, home life isn’t,” he groaned.
“More of Brody and Mitya?” She and Bolin had sort of bonded over their roommate trouble.
“Yup.” Bolin got along well with all his roommates, but Brody and Mitya very much did not get along with each other. There wasn’t out-and-out fighting like Dana and Ashlee had, but, according to Bolin, there was a lot of snide comments and sniping back and forth. The worst part of it all was that they kept wanting Bolin and their fourth roommate, Mike, to take sides, which was a stressor for everyone involved.
“And Mike really just wants to cook and skype with his girlfriend,” Bolin said. “He’s made it perfectly clear that he’s thoroughly uninterested in anything else that goes on. He basically just lives and cooks and ignores the rest of us aside from that, as long as we get the other chores done. But that means I get to be the mediator between them.”
“That’s rough,” Dana said. “I mean, it’s great that you at least get along with them, but being in the middle sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” Bolin said, sitting up to take a swig from his water bottle before flopping back down on the couch. “Honestly I think they should just kiss each other and get it over with.”
Dana snorted out a giggle. “What? Is that new?”
“Dana, the sexual tension is so palpable I’m about to knock their heads together.” He sighed. “And in the meantime, they bicker like going without it for a day means the world will end.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“Uh-oh. More Ashlee trouble?”
Dana started to unpack her lunch. “We got into another fight. I think at this point our main method of communication is screaming at each other.”
“Want to talk about it?” Bolin asked, sitting up again.
Dana rolled her eyes. “It’s just the same old song and dance. We’re sick of each other, and we’re sick of the same things about each other.”
“What started it this time?”
“I asked her to shut off her stupid TV.”
Bolin raised an eyebrow. “Asked, or told?”
“What, you’re going to start on me too now?”
“Sorry.” Bolin held up his hands. “Remember, I’ve spent the last week being a go-between. I’m on constant devil’s-advocate mode.”
“Fair.”
“So? Did you ask, like, politely, or did you get fed up and just tell her to shut off her stupid TV?”
“I may have told her to shut off the stupid TV,” Dana admitted.
“Is there any way you guys could compromise at all? Even a little bit?”
“I doubt it. She’s not about to get less… Ashlee.”
“Okay, but she’s got to have some redeeming qualities. Right?”
Dana shrugged. “If she does, I haven’t seen any of them.” Bolin raised an eyebrow. She sighed. “I don’t know, I mean, I guess she has a work ethic. I don’t know anyone else who wakes up at six every morning for dance practice. Even if she’s loud and drives me nuts.”
“Look, it’s barely been a month, and you two hate each other. And you’re both being too stubborn to request a roommate change, so you’re going to live together for the next five months even if you do hate each other. It might not be the worst idea to be the bigger person and try to extend an olive branch.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Bolin laughed. “If you could see your facial expression right now.”
Dana rolled her eyes again. “Shut up.”
He glanced at the clock and stood. “Well, my break’s over. You still meeting us for breakfast at Pop Century tomorrow?” A lot of the DCP-ers went to the various Disney resort hotels for meals if they didn’t feel like making something themselves. Because there were always buses running to all of them, it was way easier than trying to navigate meetups outside of Disney property, especially since most of them didn’t have access to cars.
“Yeah. At least I know I’ll definitely be up. You won’t have to worry about me running late.”
“Sounds good,” Bolin said before leaving the staff room.
Dana read on her phone while she ate her lunch, resolutely ignoring the staff TV that was playing Disney cartoons. She’d had enough of that already.
Trying to make peace with Ashlee…. It was a nice idea in theory. She was having a good time working at Disney and getting to explore the parks, but her home life was horrible. They’d probably both be a lot less miserable if they managed to at least get back on cordial speaking terms.
She’d think about it.
Chapter Eight
WHEN HER final set was over and Ashlee was headed back to Costuming with Alex, she took a breath and said, “Am I allowed to ask how I did?” After every set, he’d led her back to the break room and then gone off to do his own thing. She was literally about to die from nerves wondering whether or not she’d be able to stay a face character.
Alex smiled at her. “You’re allowed to ask. I think you did fairly well. Your improv could use some work, and I’d suggest spending some more time as a Guest watching the meet-and-greets to see how the younger face characters interact with Guests. There’s a certain energy needed, as opposed to the slightly older princess characters, who can be a bit more reserved.”
“Okay. Of course. I can do that.”
“And I would
n’t stick with just Anna and Rapunzel. You’ve got a face and complexion that might be suited to Ariel too.”
“Really?”
“That would be TJ’s decision, and it depends on how you do with your current characters, of course.”
“Right. Right, okay.”
“But overall, not bad for your first run. You might also want to play some character-building games with yourself. What’s Rapunzel’s favorite food? What are Anna’s favorite winter activities? How would Rapunzel react to a tablet? How could Anna relate to a sick child?”
Ashlee nodded seriously, trying to commit those questions to memory. Maybe Maya or some of her face-character friends could help her think of more. “Got it.”
They stopped outside of Costuming, and Alex held out a hand. “It was good working with you today.”
“You too!”
“Oh, and I almost forgot to ask. You said your friend Maya had videos of her stilt-walking on YouTube, right?”
“Yeah. Um, why?”
“Disney is looking for stilt-walkers right now. The notice is going out this week, but I know a couple people. If you give me her information, I can see about getting her in touch with them.”
Ashlee gasped. “Of course. Of course, here—” She hiked up her skirt to pull out her phone and turn it on. “Let me just—I don’t have her number memorized or anything.” Alex waited patiently while her phone turned on and she searched for Maya’s number. She rattled it off to Alex once she’d found it and also gave him the name to the YouTube account where Maya posted all her performance stuff. Ashlee had one too: a channel specifically reserved for dance reels she’d done.
“Thanks,” Alex said, stowing his phone in his pocket again. “You might want to let her know someone will be in touch with her soon.”
Oh she definitely would. Maya was going to freak.
IT WAS still raining when Dana clocked out at eight that night. She was glad she didn’t have the full closing shift of waiting for the last Guests to leave and actually shutting down the Tower’s shop, because while it had been a fun day, it’d been a pretty long one too, especially considering how it had started.