Broke Hoedown

I was sitting in an airport lounge yesterday afternoon when I saw the news that California’s Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry, under the state’s Constitution. I know there are still some hurdles, I know that there are plenty of groups working to stop this and that the Pope disapproves . . . I am sometimes tired and bitter and worried that there will be backlash, but all the same I choked up with tears to see the couples rejoicing, to read about a woman calling her partner of 19 years to finally propose marriage, to see my friend and musical collaborator Allison on TV talking about the California ruling with her legally-wed, Massachusetts wife.

I was in the middle of the airport, surrounded by people who couldn’t understand the depths of my joy. It felt as if a national holiday had suddenly been declared, and nobody but me knew about it. Thank goodness for the twitterverse and my crackberry . . . I could text and twitter with likeminded friends. One of my buddies had a great question for me on twitter: Will Disney do something special for the first same-sex couple to wed there? And I have to say, while I doubt Disney would go out on the political limb to do anything officially special, I’ve just gotta believe that the first time a same-sex couple is legally wed on Disney property, there’s gonna be Cast Members there who really get that this is a historic moment, and I’m sure plenty of them will go out of their way to find just a little bit of extra pixie dust. After all, same-sex couples can use the wedding facilities at Disney World (and maybe the non-US parks too?) . . . but can’t be legally wed in that state.

Twenty nine days from now (assuming same-sex marriage foes don’t find a way to stop it), same-sex marriages will begin in California. And honey, we all know that this isn’t enough time to plan a wedding! But hey, if anybody out there hears when the first same-sex couple has arranged for a Disneyland wedding, please please please drop me a note. I wish I could be there to throw rice, but at the very least I can celebrate with them in my heart.

Rumor has it that Jedi Mickey won’t appear this year at Star Wars Weekends. Darn! I gotta admit that I wasn’t really all that into meeting Jedi Mickey myself . . . but I know he’s popular, and I was banking on him to draw some of the crowds away from the lines for Stormtrooper Donald, my personal fave.

If you were really looking forward to meeting Jedi Mickey, or just want to support me in my desire to thin the Stormtrooper Donald lines a bit, here’s the address you might wanna write to:

Guest Communications
Executive Offices
PO Box 10040
Lake Buena Vista, Florida 32830-0040

wdw.guest.communications@disneyworld.com

And, of course, things could be worse. There are people in this world with genuine problems . . . the pictures from China in this morning’s paper made me weep, and I know things in Burma are even worse. So, while you’ve got that pen handy, please consider whether you might want to send a few bucks to Doctors Without Borders. For the price of a pair of embroidered Mickey ears you can do some good.

Do you think there’s any chance that Steve Martin might be waiting tables at The Wave, opening soon at the Contemporary Resort? After all, the Orlando Sentinel tells us that all their non-sparkling wines will be served from screw-top bottles.

Hat tip: WDW News.

How much do I love the internets? Were it not for them, I wouldn’t have easy access to cool projects like LibriVox, where volunteers record audio books of public domain titles. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, including plenty of Shakespeare and James Joyce. Disney fans might be interested to know that there’s also a decent amount of Lewis Carroll, including both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

I do wish there were more projects like LibriVox providing convenient, free access to public domain materials. I hope we see more of them over time.

Anybody who’s been to Epcot’s Club Cool knows what Beverly is: A strong, bitter, some would even say foul beverage by Coca-Cola, which is said to be popular in Italy to whet one’s appetite before a meal. I developed a strange fondness for Beverly on my last couple trips actually . . . a fondness which neither my child nor my BFF can fathom.

Last fall I had an inexplicable craving for the stuff (no, I am not pregnant), and went shopping in Boston’s North End, a strong Italian neighborhood with many stores specializing in groceries imported from Italy. Beverly was nowhere to be found.

I work with a woman whose family is from Italy, and who maintains close ties there. She’d never heard of Beverly, and neither had anyone she talked to. We both searched the interwebs, she in Italian and me in English, and found nothing to indicate that Beverly’s actually distributed in Italy.

I started to wonder if perhaps Club Cool’s stretching the truth a little, and googled “beverly drink club cool hoax.” Turns out that I’m not the only one wondering about this . . . the Google cached version of Beverly’s wikipedia page includes the fact that some speculate that it’s a hoax, but Wikipedia’s been purged of that reference (here’s a link to the current, hoax-allegation-free Beverly page).

So, what gives? Anybody have evidence of Beverly actually being distributed in Italy, or anywhere else outside Future World for that matter? Inquiring minds want to know.

A bunch of you were kind enough to take the Reader Survey I posted a while back. Thank you! It’s great to hear where you’re coming from, and a little bit about how Broke Hoedown is perceived by my frequent readers.

Quite frankly I’m still in shock that this blog gets as much traffic as it does . . . I honestly never figured more than a handful of people would read it. Plenty of my traffic seems to come from people looking for a single item and just passing through (the Pin-ups post from a while back is always well-visited, which I shouldn’t find surprising . . . but I am surprised at how perennial my coverage of Anime Boston 2007 has turned out to be). But there some number of you who read Broke Hoedown regularly, and I’m quite flattered and glad that you do.

One comment really struck me, so I thought I’d respond to it here.

Skip the news, it is already everywhere. More adult level discussions and commentary would be welcome. Also I suggest you take more chances by stating an an opinion and taking a stand. Just like you did with your ‘Which Fantasmic is better?’ Jentasmic column. Not just to be “controversial” but I think chooising a side leads to better discourse. Plus we all know Disneyland is better than the Magic Kingdom but WDW Resort is better than DL Resort. There I said it.

Y’know, I think you’re right . . . the news is in fact everywhere, and anybody who reads this blog regularly has just gotta be reading some of the news-oriented Disney podcasts (The Disney Blog is one of my favorites in this category). So, I’ll try to take this to heart. This might mean fewer postings, but perhaps of higher content value. At least, I hope so.

(But, well, I can’t totally agree with you on DL vs MK and WDW vs DLR. Sometimes I just wanna roll out of bed at the Best Western and be at the front gate with a 3 minute walk across the street. But then again, there’s something super-awesome about that Monorail ride across property, from Epcot to Magic Kingdom. So I dunno.)

This comment also underscores something that I was glad to see in the survey responses: Those who responded either really like, or don’t mind, the fact that I deal with grown-up topics from time to time. Which of course makes sense . . . because if they didn’t like it, they’d go somewhere else, right?

Again, many thanks to those who took the time to respond. I appreciate it!

The pending closure of DIsney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom made me nostalgic for one of my old hangouts . . . and cranky about our society’s growing investment in proprietary virtual environments.

[... ]the relationships forged and supported in such a space can be quite rich and complex. I “saw” these people every day, often working more closely with my geographically-distributed colleagues than I did with the guy on the other side of my cubicle wall. I never would have thought of these as “virtual” relationships . . . they were real, actual relationships, expressed primarily in a text-based space. We got a lot of work done, and we laughed a lot too.

Eventually, the project shifted communications strategies, and we had to leave behind the MUD where we’d all become so comfortable. But here’s the good thing: MUD software is not under the control of a single proprietor. Some of the code I’d written in our old hangout could easily be duplicated in the new place. All it took was an email to the admin to get my programmer bit set again, and a fairly simple copy/paste operation. I couldn’t bring my lightsaber, nor my Jedi credentials, so it wasn’t quite the same. But there was some degree of portability, and we got used to the new space in short order. Plus, it was easy to move us all to the new space, communicating through email lists.

Virtual Magic Kingdom users don’t have any such options, because the environment in which they’ve invested their heart, soul, and creative energies is completely under corporate control.

There’s a whole lotta people out there trying to save VMK, and I hardly know who to link to first . . . but this one’s probably a good place to start (Google will find you way more).

Found on flickr, in Georgie_grrl’s photostream. Hubba.