The Fabulous Disney Babe - Feb 16, 2001

The Fabulous Disney Babe
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by Michelle Smith (archives)
February 16, 2001
Our newest columnist, The Fabulous Disney Babe, introducers herself.

Introducing ... The Fabulous Disney Babe

"There're a lot of people out there who don't know who The Fabulous Disney Babe is," Doobie told me over dinner at Storyteller's Cafe Tuesday night, while Alice played Hide the King Triton's Carousel Beanies with Rebekah.

Alice is absolutely nuts over that carousel. I hear there's one very much like it going into Tokyo DisneySea; someday we'll go ride it. I'm a Jules Verne nut; I have been since I spent my tweens with my nose pressed against the glass (?) of the Discovery Bay model at the Premiere Shop in Disneyland. Dumbo's Circus, I could take or leave, but oh Discovery Bay! I come from a long line of Disney nuts. My dad went to most of the Date Nights of the early sixties, and had many opportunities to see Walt Disney and listen to him in person, because Walt loved having an eager audience of America's Youth to listen to his grandiose schemes. Dad got to hear him talk about his plans for the World's Fair a couple of times, including the Mr. Lincoln who could actually stand and talk!

I met my ex-husband and dear friend Jim Hill at Snow White's Wishing Well; we were married at Disney's Beach Club Resort, and our daughter, Alice, was born at the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women in Orlando. It has a Cinderella's Castle and gorgeous Cinderella murals in the lobby, and the Emergency Rooms are done up with 101 Dalmatians motif. She loves bugs, roller coasters, and, more than anything else, Jessie, the Yodelin' Cowgirl from Toy Story 2.

One of my readers, who is a kind and gracious soul, whispered to me the other night that Jessie will soon have her own computer game. It's about time! (Fab puts down her Orange Dreamsicle martini and shakes an attractively manicured finger) Didn't you nice but badly mistaken this time Disney Consumer Products people learn anything from the Buzz Lightyear Debacle? You have a character as winning as Jessie, who appeals to little ones like Alice who just do NOT do the Princess thang, and you create almost no merchandise for her....and the possibilities are endless.

Alice's other loves, as I mentioned, are bugs and coasters. Her favorite is, still, Ghostrider, though she loves California Screamin' and Space Mountain at Walt Disney World. When I was her age, my Nanny took me to the Long Beach Pike and put me and my sister on the Cyclone. My sister informs me that I screamed the entire time. I wouldn't go on Space Mountain for a couple of years after it opened, but I loved those classic big white old creaky about-to-catapult-you-into-the-harbor coasters. I love the Revolution at Six Flags Magic Mountain, and also Goliath there. Montu and Rock and Roller Coaster are tied for my favorite looping coasters.

What else do you want to know? My resume? Well, my Travel/Theme Park/Disney writing career starts in Honolulu, of all places, where I was a travel agent and occasional tour guide. I took other tours, tours that I, as an agent, sold, and heard the most unbelievable stories that I, having grown up there and taking waaay too many Hawaiian History Classes and spent lots of hours crawling around deserted cemeteries for the University of Hawaii's Geneology project (Remember: it's "'Ohana", not "O'hana's") had ever heard. So, I used my office's ancient, even for those days, mimeograph machine (everything is purple!) and made a key for them to use that I called the Tour Guide Cheat Sheet. Everything from What That Old Building Really Is (a water station) to Who Posed for the Statue of King Kamehameha (a Filipino janitor).

Then I went to Walt Disney World on vacation and fell madly in love with the place. It was like Disneyland, but so much more. I vowed I'd live there someday. Within a few years, I'd visited so much and had become such an expert on the place that I was able to get work as a Walt Disney World Travel Consultant, and would come into offices for a few weeks and show the agents how to sell Walt Disney World as a specialty. In 1992, I found Window On Main Street in the card shop on Main Street, USA and gave it a read, tucking it in my bag in between. A lady on the bus asked the bus driver for directions from Fort Wilderness to the Shopping Village, and two voices piped up from the middle of the bus with two different but equally good ways of getting there. Jeff Lange noticed the book in my bag and we started chatting. He introduced me to the NFFC, and I flew out for the convention that July. That's how I met his pal Jim Hill at the Wishing Well.

I love the NFFC and encourage everyone I know who is into Disney to join. It's wonderful. I started a chapter in Orlando, Florida that is still going strong today. I just gave them a presentation about Disney's California Adventure last month and it was a wonderful homecoming. I love Orlando. When Alice was a baby and I was lucky enough to be able to stay at home with her in our little apartment adjacent to Disney property, Jim showed me how to use his Mac SE and encouraged me to start writing about what I knew: Disney and theme parks. The Orlando Insider was born, and was just a little newsletter until Leslie Doolittle of the Orlando Sentinel referenced it; then orders poured in. It was a little four-page rag with amazingly good theme park-related gossip. I broke Buzz Lightyear and the Rock and Roller Coaster news. Jim and I broke the Animal Kingdom story to the Sentinel the week Alice was born, and if you look in the Walt Disney World 25th Special Edition of The Disney Magazine, you'll find a picture of me, Jim, and baby Alice standing at the site of The Tree Of Life. We were the first family, where's our Silver Passes?!?

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