Happiest place on earth

We went to Disneyland this weekend. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's not punk rock, it's for tourists, and it's corporate sponsorship gone amok, but I grew up in OC and have fun there. Like my brother said, it's like enjoying Christmas even though you know Santa is fake.


The big deal was the Nightmare Before Christmas makeover of the Haunted Mansion, which was pretty cool. There's a Tim Burton/Danny Elfman type score, and Jack Skelton and friends are all over the place.


Here's the hallway after the stretching room and before the doom buggies. You can tell they changed the changing paintings on the right. Pretty impressive. You can't tell in this photo, but all they did to the busts whose eyes follow was add some spiderwebs saying "ho ho ho" and "noel," as if written by Charlotte herself.


This mural is where you load the doom buggies.


There were just a few 3-D additions. I think there were two or three of these dudes.


Wait, rewind to the first pic. The Haunted Mansion wasn't the only thing different; it turns out that we chose to visit on Gay Day!


Honestly, every day can be Gay Day in L.A. but on Saturday there was a larger-than-usual concentration at the Happiest Place on Earth, mostly wearing red.


The gathering was totally unofficial, but people had rainbow-colored mouse pins, T-shirts, etc. I hear the latter were 20 bucks at the hotel. I had some red stripes on my shoes, which I figure showed that I'm on board with rainbow pride. It was nice to see the dads, frat dudes, and jocks show their support by wearing things like red D-backs jerseys and red No Fear t-shirts--even if they didn't mean to!


There were some other Halloween-themed things, but the Haunted Mansion was really the biggest deal.


The daytime parade was pretty lame, but look at this Gepetto/Master of Puppets float! Those are human dancers in costume. Creepy! (BTW, the parade was not gay just for the special day; the dancers have traditionally supported the non-breeding lifestyle.)


I was a jungle cruise guy during the summer of '87-'88. Since then, the park has given guns to apes, added piranhas, and allowed women to pretend to drive the boats. "Witty and experienced"? Hm, I dunno...