New Year's Eve at Disneyland: The Lights! The Trauma!

 Five years ago tonight, John and I had one of approximately three out-of-the-house, actually-doing-something New Year's Eve celebrations in our entire 27-year relationship.  It was about to be the fake Millennium as the year ticked over from 1999 to 2000.  Some people were buying generators and duct tape, in case of terrrorists and Y2K glitches.  (Yes, even before 9/11 there were terrorism concerns, particularly for that night in major party centers.)  As for us, we went to Disneyland.

John brought our then-new Mavica along.  He took lots of pictures from the Rocket Rods tower and inside it's a small world holiday.  He took pictures of Christmas decorations in Toontown and on Main Street USA.  Unfortunately, John doesn't know where any of those pictures are now, what file names to search for in hundreds of CDs of material. So all the pictures in this entry are "borrowed" without permission from John Frost's article of January 2000 on LaughingPlace.com.  If John (Blocher) comes up with our pictures later, I'll post those instead.

Generally speaking, we had a grand time that night until about 10:30 PM.  Cast members were handing out "wishing wands" and hats.  The park's PA played a CD of stars singing Disney songs.  (Is that alliterative enough for you?) The one that really amazed me was Tim Curry riffing on The Ballad of Davy Crockett. This became a little less special, though, as they played the same CD over and over.  Numbers and colors and shapes were projected onto the Matterhorn and the castle.


It was all very pretty, but something less wonderful was happening, too, at least from our point of view.  The park was filling up with people.  Thousands of people sat on the ground in front of the castle--in the park under the trees, and in the street and on the sidewalk. I had staked out a spot on the side of the castle near the Matterhorn, where it was sort of possible to sit down and not be on the ground. John was getting antsy.  He HATES crowds and lines and waiting. So you can imagine my surprise when he decided to wade into the crowd to try for a straight-on picture of the castle.

I think he was gone for about half an hour.  Twenty minutes of that, he was absolutely trapped in the tightly-crammed humanity.  It would have been traumatic for almost anyone, but it was especially bad for John.  I couldn't see him at all, of course, and after a while I got worried.  I didn't go after him, though.  It wouldn't have helped.

He finally made it across the street, made his way back away from the heaviest concentration of people, and circled around to rejoin me near the Matterhorn.  From there we watched the midnight light show and fireworks.  It wasn't a perfect view, but it was better than being in the worst of the crowd again.

Then we went back to it's a small world holiday for a relatively peaceful, quiet boat ride past Mary Blair's animatronic dolls, tricked out for holiday fun. The Sherman Brothers' famous song was interwoven with Christmas songs, so well that I bought a CD of it. People like to complain that hearing It's a Small World After All over and over can drive a person crazy, but after the New Year's Eve crowd, it seemed downright peaceful and reassuring.

19 minutes and counting here.  Happy New Year, everyone!

  

You can see why John wanted a picture!

But this is what he had to deal with:



At midnight, the castle looked like this:



Pictures and video (follow the links to get to the video) by John Frost, James Hensley and Dave Mastanich.