Disneyland or Paris--is there really a debate?

It was virtually the same price--financially, but the emotional price I would have had to pay to wallow in the depths of middle America while drowning in the consumerism would have been just too great for my fragile soul. That was the reasoning I set before my carpool buddy, Mr. Attorney, who had been chiding me, for years, for not taking The Beast to Disneyland.

“It is anti-American to deny your child at least one trip to Disneyland.” he said in his best defense attorney voice...playing it up to a jury that was not present.

“Look, I survived quite nicely sans Mickey and Donald.” I said to his flashing wire-rimmed glasses as we merged into the NYC traffic. “I don’t feel like my childhood was scarred by the absence of a Disneyland trip. What is YOUR obsession with Disneyland? Hey! Do you have Disney stock?”

*********************************************************************************

It was Fate—I am sure of it. I was SO CLOSE to pressing the “submit” button on the Disney site. Five nights in some hotel that looked like a pinball machine...pools crawling with kids....grown people dressed as Goofy...large, lumbering families who will all have diabetes in five years all wearing Mickey Mouse ears. It was SO depressing, but I was doing it for the Beast. It was a moment of true selflessness on my part.

Of course...it was JUST a moment and then the fickle finger of Fate pointed the way out. As I sat looking at the “submit” button on my computer screen, an e-mail popped up from a friend, a savior really. “Subject: Wow! Cheap Trip to Paris.”

That night during dinner I announced to The Beast. “Guess What! We are going to Paris—just like the Rugrats!”

She smiled happily and said—”Oh that’s nice, but I was sort of hoping to go to Umbria. “

“Perhaps we can do Italy next year.” I told my wonderful, beautiful, kooky Beast.

Like any true artist, The Beast LOVED Paris
From the Metro

To the Tuileries

To the Eiffel Tower

Just remember--when you are feeling peer pressure to act or do something that goes against your natural inclinations--just say no. Go to Paris instead.

Increasing Troop Presence in School

Although we live in an artsy-fartsy town, the Beast ended up going to the elementary school in the non-artsy, non-liberal part of our school district due to “zoning.” I, in turn, ended up sitting in meetings with mothers who, I swear, must have been visiting from other planets.

One of the first meetings I attended was for the Girl Scout Daisy Troop. An Ubermom (blond streaked hair coiffed, fingernails manicured, SUV in parking lot) said that the girls should wear their uniforms, not just for the Girl Scout meetings, but for the entire day—because she felt there should be more of a “troop presence” in the school.
“Like a war zone?”...I queried. “Please..this whole little girls in uniforms thang goes against my pseudo-liberal mind-set” I explained to the hostile alien beings. “and besides those little Daisy smocks that they don are not going to command any true respect anyway...if that is what you are after...”

The long suffering, human troop leader moved the conversation away from military protocol to suggestions on field trips for the kindergarten girls to go on.

The pastel attired extraterrestrials chatted about going to the bagel shop where the girls could learn about making bagels or to the local karate school to learn about self-defense or to BJs...to learn about blatant consumerism and other forms of normal human behavior on earth.

Feeling that the trip idea trend was heading towards Beckett-like absurdity I piped-up--”we are very close to NYC—perhaps we could take the little girls in one of your big SUVs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to the Natural History Museum or maybe even Carnegie Hall... “

They stared at me with their almost human, perfectly mascaraed, blank eyes for a several minutes and then turned back to one another and the Ubermom, said: “The Police Station is also interesting—they fingerprint the kids and then lock them in a cell...”

Oh the joys of public school.