Member-only story
A Tale of Re-entry Anxiety at The Happiest Place on Earth
Managing the urge to get super-cali-fragilistic-expiali-nauseous
Shwish-thud, shwish-thud, shwish-thud. Someone’s dropping a beat. My body joins the rhythm in my own personal parade. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m walking toward the gates of Disneyland with an enthusiastic herd of fun-seekers.
In a wave of uh-oh, I realize the sound is the pandemic chub between my thighs scuffing out a song. Upon further crowd scanning, my fellow troopers know the name of that tune as well. We’ve been eating our feelings for way over a year, lending fodder to the debate over whether it’s a small world after all.
With no trams running due to germs, the two-mile walk from the parking structure puts our collective girth on notice that a change is upon us — not just to our waistlines.
Initially, winning a place in the online queue for tickets gave me back a hard-fought crumb of my sanity. As the pace of the pilgrimage revved it became obvious I wanted, I needed, an entire mouse-shaped cake.
I was breathing the rare air of a Disneyland ticket holder at a time of reopening ourselves to a new way of life.
There’s no road map for this stuff. So, sensing the call of The Greater Good, I assumed the role of test subject — an improvised “how are we…
