Rasher Report #3: The Happiest Places

Thanks for your patience, as I'm a day late this week! The night before a vacation is not the time to try and finish a newsletter, it turns out.

Disney Adults Forever

I am writing this on a plane to Los Angeles. Tomorrow will be my first day of a week at Disneyland with my wife. This will be our second Disney vacation in as many years: last January, we went to Disney World for our honeymoon. The idea for that trip began as a joke; we were dithering over honeymoon options, not excited about anything, when we saw a TV ad for the so-called Happiest Place on Earth. "Or we could just go to Disney World," one of us said.

It turned out to be a great choice on many levels. Part of the reason why Disney vacations are expensive is because they require little effort to plan. Both of our jobs had actually picked up during the pandemic, and neither of us wanted to put the amount of energy or thought into wedding planning that is usually expected of at least one half of the couple. After the umpteenth hassle about flowers or hotel rooms, it was a relief for at least the honeymoon to be easy. It also meant we weren't traveling internationally at a time when the pandemic made that uncertain. At the time, Disney World had strict COVID-19 regulations in place that made us feel safer traveling there than almost anywhere else. And being in the United States meant that if either of us had a work emergency, we had reliable internet and were awake during normal business hours.

Also, we are big nerds who like rides, cartoons, and aggressive theming. Ami still gets starry-eyed talking about the lunch we ate inside Cinderella's castle. I made it 3/4 of the way through Drinking Around the World at Epcot, which I consider a challenge for next time. Ami started a pin trading collection. I got to go on Pirates of the Caribbean about six times in two weeks. It was fabulous. While we were still in Florida, we pretty much made the decision to go on another Disney vacation the following year.

Does this make us Disney Adults? Maybe the vacations alone don't, but the growing amount of licensed stuff around our apartment is a warning sign for sure. Plus, we've both gotten addicted to Disney park updates YouTube. (Ask me about the drama when a fan favorite AllEars.net host quit to start her own channel, Mammoth Club, which is probably the best of the genre. Or just enjoy your rabbit hole.)

On some parts of the internet, "Disney Adult" is a reviled category. Some people cannot abide the horror of grown folks without children enjoying an amusement park on our own terms. There are tales on the internet of Disney Adults running around like they own the place and ruining it for kids, but these incidents are rare - probably much rarer than parents putting on their entitlement pants and making everyone around them miserable. When adults go to a Disney park unaccompanied by a minor, we have to be especially aware that we're entering a child-friendly and often child-oriented space. Ami and I both love seeing kids' wonder and excitement while we're at the parks.

Other haters don't bother with the concern trolling and go directly to how they really feel: Disney Adults are uncool. Sometimes, this is glazed in a patina of virtue, pointing out that Disney is a large corporation that doesn't love you back (I never expected them to) or that the parks provide a sanitized and unreal environment (have you seen reality lately?). But mostly, internet ire against Disney Adults is an insecure assertion of superiority. If you convince yourself that real adults have outgrown this kind of thing and only endure it for their kids' sake, you can take refuge in the false comfort that you're doing adulthood better than other people.

That sounds to me like a sad way to live. Whimsy and escapism are pleasurable. All hobbies are boring and dorky to people who don't share them. I get no thrill from skiing (heights give me vertigo), or gambling (I took too much math in college), or lying on a beach (I am literally allergic to the sun). But other people do, so I'm glad ski resorts, casinos, and island getaways exist. The point of vacations is to have enough fun and get enough emotional rest that you feel refreshed when you return to everyday life. Not everyone gets that feeling from riding Haunted Mansion three times on the same day, and that means more Dole Whip and character branded hoodies for me.

Junior Ice Dance Teams That Make Me Want to Move to Canada

It's a great year for Canadian ice dance. The country's two top teams, Piper Gilles & Paul Poirier and Laurence Fournier Beaudry & Nikolaj Soerensen, are enjoying the most successful year of their careers, and Gilles/Poirier are poised to finish this season with a World title. However, both of these teams are nearing the end of their careers - all of them are over the age of 30 - and the senior ranks look thin below them. Marie-Jade Lauriault & Romain Le Gac and Marjorie Lajoie & Zachary Lagha are both among my favorite teams in the world to watch, but they haven't had the breakout competitive success they probably hoped for and are running out of time to achieve it. And the middle ranks of last week's Canadian National Championships were full of teams that seem to have hit a technical and artistic wall.

If the junior-level event was any indication, though, Canada has nothing to worry about. The junior free dance was by far the most exciting event of 2023 Canadian Nationals for me, even though the winners, Nadiia Bashynska & Peter Beaumont, entered as heavy favorites after taking gold at the 2022-23 Junior Grand Prix Final. They're an impressively mature team for juniors, with a distinctive style that combines balletic poise with a sense of fun, plus terrific precision and matched movement across the ice. They were last to skate in the free dance, and their performance was like a rich dessert after a great meal - almost too much, but impossible to resist taking it all in.

The five teams behind them are still young and developing, but if even two or three of them keep moving in their current direction, Canada will have a wealth of young teams competing for their top ranks in the next few years. Each team in the top six is stylistically distinct and fun to watch, with a lot of variety in their music choices and on-ice personalities. (We do get back-to-back Pasek & Paul programs, with Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman, but I can't complain about good taste.) The best part is, Skate Canada has archived the entire event on Dailymotion, so you can go get caught up on tomorrow's stars today.

Some More of My Favorite Movies

A couple of years ago, at the height of pandemic boredom, I made a list of my 124 favorite movies and started watching them all in alphabetical order. I'm posting reviews of two movies per newsletter until I'm all caught up.

Whenever I watch Chasing Amy, I expect the gender politics to have finally gone out of date, but they haven't yet. It was ahead of its time in tackling not just biphobia and sexual essentialism but the internalized self-doubt and self-hate that hold people back from happiness. I think the viewers who have trouble with this movie are missing how critical it is of its protagonist and/or are applying their own exclusionary standards to the characters. It's a compassionate film and a funny one, and a lesson in how to make off-color language and topics serve a joke. The performances sometimes reach a bit - not least because Kevin Smith's dialogue is deceptively stylized and intricate - but Jason Lee is perfect as a guy who uses irreverent nastiness as a shield against profound insecurity. The film looks and sounds great, too, if in a very 1997 way. It's old enough to deserve to be taken seriously.

I knew The Children's Hour would hold up in terms of filmmaking and acting, but I wasn't prepared for how influential it would turn out to be in the wake of a bunch of more recent queer films. Queer politics have progressed to an enormous degree since 1961, but we keep telling this kind of story. It's heartbreaking not because you know how it's going to turn out, but because it keeps giving you moments where things might be all right. The film knowingly takes place in a world populated by women and girls and depicts the particular flavors of cruelty that women inflict on one another. James Garner knows he's playing the ingenue role and prettily makes the most of it. And Hepburn and MacLaine are absolute knockouts, not that we would expect any less.

And Another Thing

Song of the Week: "Made of Gold" by Ibeyi featuring Pa Salieu, because Afrofuturism is a music genre now, and I'm all in.

A brilliantly cursed interpretation of "Windy" by The Association. (Thanks, Elana!)

And a cat photo.

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