Married in EPCOT

In the old-timey days when phones didn’t leave the house, Lena and I took our first trip to EPCOT together. I did a video about that trip and our time at the Monsanto exhibit before I realized A) how horrible I am on video, and B) how much more I enjoy making written newsletters than video ones. I might someday return to it and give you the much funnier written version, but for now I’ll focus on a different moment of that trip.

The invention of the online-telephone call.

We were walking out of Future World, now broken into three pieces known as World Celebration, Discovery, and Nature, and subsequently passing into World Showcase, now known as World Showcase. (Maybe it was just a better name?) For the uninitiated, this simply means we were moving around to the back portion of the park where all the countries are.

A man with a clipboard approached us. This happened to us a lot, and I later found out it was because I liked to wear Disney shirts at Disney, and the clipboard people just figured I liked the parks enough to put up with them. 

He wanted to know if we’d be willing to listen to a five-minute pitch and then call a friend on the phone in exchange for one hundred Disney Dollars. Now this was the early nineties, so $100 was a much bigger incentive then than it is now. Everyone on the property accepted Disney Dollars one-to-one, so that was no problem either. It was simply $100 in food or merch that wouldn’t be coming out of our actual pockets.

In point-of-fact, one Disney Dollar actually cost one US dollar. The imitation cash was intended to be a souvenir people would buy and take home, so Disney would keep your actual dollar in exchange for their fake one. Anything you did not actually spend at the parks was extra cash in Disney’s pocket. Despite the colorful bills decorated with Disney animated characters, the program never really took off the ground.

The two of us followed clipboard-guy into a very fancy tent alongside the path with about a half-dozen other people. Whatever this was going to be was about to cost these people $800 total, so it must be pretty awesome. I don’t recall all that much about the pitch, but I admit I wasn’t paying attention. Clipboard-guy only said I had to be there while he talked. No one ever mentioned listening. 

At five minutes I cut clipboard-guy off and reminded him of our agreement outside. Everyone chuckled, he skipped to the end, and we were done with that part. 

Next, we wrote our names down on clipboard-guy’s clipboard and answered a few questions before making our phone call to display the grand new technology of online telephoning. (Still years away at this point.) Yes, we’re married, yes, we have a phone, yes, we know someone we could call to test the quality of your amazing new online telephone, blah, blah, blah.

I handed the clipboard to Lena, and assistant clipboard-lady jumped forward out of the shadows. “She doesn’t have to fill anything out. That’s just a record of who gets the Disney Dollars. It’s only one entry per family. You did say you were married, right?”

Without missing a beat, simultaneously and unrehearsed, Lena and I both looked up at her and said, “It’s fine. We’re not married to each other.”

“Oh.” Clipboard lady said. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”

Some immediate and salacious assumptions were made as to the nature of our vacation together by the tittering folks in the tent, but clipboard-lady was having none of it. “May I see your IDs?”

Now, when we married, I tried to get Lena to keep her own last name. I did not care for the people-as-property-driven origins of wives taking their man’s family name. But Lena was having none of it, and she insisted on the switch. Later, however, I took my grandfather’s last name because of some insane shenanigans which only just occurred to me would make a great story too. Regardless, we had different last names on our driver’s licenses, and we walked away with $200 worth of Disney Dollars in our pockets. 

We ate very well that trip.

“I’m so sorry,” clipboard-lady said as we left, a nervous smile on her face. “I didn’t mean to, you know.”

I grinned back at her. “That’s okay. Our spouses are at Universal Studios.”

Oh, and apparently the quality of the speaker in the phone you’re using is far more important to the overall quality of your call than the strength of the connection. No one there could tell the difference between a normal call and the fancy new online one, but clipboard-guy did get us to admit it was no worse, so I guess that was worth his $800.