Marceline, Missouri, Walt Disney’s hometown, reaches an average high of 86 degrees Fahrenheit in July, thirteen degrees cooler than its gilded Floridian mimicry, Main Street USA. I imagine when paperboys shouted from the street corners in knickers and knee high socks in Missouri, the soles of their shoes did not melt into the asphalt below them. The tips of their ponytails were not drenched in the sweat soaking through the backs of their shirts. Not like ours were.
We were tough, in PhotoPass. Prided ourselves on it. Shrugged off our leaders’ warnings about having to call ambulances and schlepped our cameras to the Street. We stood outside more than almost any other role. Sweated directly in the sun until it finally dipped behind the buildings in the afternoon. I had the curvature of the western rooftops of Main Street memorized; the shadow of the dome of the Emporium’s ear room reached the middle of the street first.
Still, no one moves to Florida for the summers. We baked as we photographed family after family in front of the famous Walt Disney World castle. The sweat soaked into our eyes and their faces turned into flesh-toned orbs of various shapes, aligned perfectly through the lens. The same spiel, fifty times an hour: “Go ahead and set your bags here, stand three boxes up from me, one two three yes right there.”
Dazzled by the magic of Disney, some of our guests thought we were robots, an advanced version of the Pirates in Adventureland. After giving the same performance for eight hours, sometimes I thought they were right.
I’d lived elsewhere, once. I owned a car, shopped at the grocery store, went out to restaurants. I had photos of it, it must’ve been real. It all seemed so far away. I found the same novelty in guests’ comments about office jobs that they must’ve found in our castle.
“Squeeze together, act like you like each other.” I called out.
“We don’t” some of them would say. “Why are you here together then?” I’d reply. I’d flash a joking smile like I hadn’t heard that from a dad just three guests prior. It was always dads.
“Big smiles” I’d call, and the ‘I’ in ‘big’ stretched down the street. “One, two, three” and by the time I would’ve hit ‘four’, we were done, five fresh shots in my camera.
Reset, repeat, until my water bottle was empty and my voice gone.
****
A few groups stood out from the blur. The couple celebrating with their newly adopted children, getting their first official family photo. A kid who ran through my photo (something I barely registered anymore), only, when his mother admonished him, he came back to apologize and give me a hug. A father who kissed his toddler on the cheek in the rain, and her whole face lit up. An engagement where he got down on one knee and burned his skin on the pavement, and was left doing an awkward hop while she waited for him to remember to pop the question.
There was the woman who insisted I get security for her. “He’s threatening me,” she said, her voice all but daring him to try and encroach on the spot she’d decided was hers for the fireworks.
“No, I don’t think she’s in danger.” I told security on the phone, eager to get back to my spot before I lost it to the gathering crowds; it had the best view of the fireworks. “Please just come deal with it, I don’t know what else to tell her.”
There was the engagement where she said yes and then, as their family joined them in front of the castle, whispered “we’ll discuss this later”. Enough people say ‘no’ that the characters aren’t allowed in the photo when the question is popped. Disney doesn’t want that to go viral.
Nothing bad happens at Disney: it’s against the rules.
****
The Most Magical Place On Earth is the antithesis of death, of grief, and Disney (understandably) spends millions of dollars a year protecting that brand.
And yet, the grieving come, in search of a closure the rest of the world hasn’t given them. They carry pictures, release balloons, pour enough ashes that the park has an official policy banning human remains. We photograph them.
I met the first of them two weeks after I started. It was my first day of night training, and a signal that my grueling five AM bus ride was finally over. Maybe now I would stop falling asleep on my camera.
The mother and daughter posed around a picture of the grandmother. She’d just wanted to see the castle; she’d passed two weeks ago instead. The picture was too flat to fill the space where she should’ve been standing. Their picture turned out blurry.
Less than twenty-four hours later I was so sick I couldn’t stand; the germs of the magic kingdom had finally caught up with me. During my fellow trainee’s turns on the photo register, I pushed past a worn velvet curtain to kneel over the backstage toilet. During my turn, I smiled politely and told my guests to have a magical day.
More came after. There was a grieving mother, holding a green balloon instead of her son’s hand. A family with a child’s portrait. The portrait smiled more politely than the kid ever would have.
A woman cried with Phineas and Ferb, and the first emotions of the day hit me, making it past the heat of the sun. (The sun’s rays stabbed like knives this close to noon. Later, in a move of desperation, I would pour sunscreen onto my hair, my scalp desperate for respite). When I scanned her MagicBand for photos, she slipped me a card.
I read it, alone in the trailer behind Main Street that night, where the carpet is dirty, the parking lot hot, and the buildings are painted a sickly green meant to all but disappear. Her son had died last year, it said. This was their first trip to his happy place without him. I cried for her.
Main Street, at night, might be the most beautiful place in the world. It softens, as the sun sets. The lights twinkle and eventually the guests trickle out, just us and a few of them. They’re people again. We’re people again. We come off the tripods, shake off our animatronic skin. We put it back on the next morning.
A woman, not too much older than me, too young, in my eyes, to be married, came to see Mickey and Minnie. Her husband had proposed to her here, in front of Mickey, four years ago. Did Mickey remember? She showed them the video, crying for a reason we couldn’t quite understand but knew, in our hearts.
He’d died last week.
Her husband couldn’t comfort her anymore but his favorite mice could, they held her while she cried.
“I would never cry in front of a guest” the attendant said as the door closed behind them, as I wiped tears from my eyes. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted yet, but I knew I didn’t want to become her. We spent the entire day playing pretend, but their grief was real.
****
One day, against the accusations of morbidity from my coworkers, I sat down and calculated how many of my guests would die within the next year.
Given the number of guests I photographed, given the percent of the population that died in a year, who would never come back?
The figure turned out to be somewhere between a hundred and a thousand. Probably higher than I thought; at that time I didn’t know the world would shut down six months after I left. I knew it would be some people’s last family vacations; I didn’t know how long we were about to go without traveling.
The odds were already almost certain that I took many people’s last family photo, even without factoring in divorces and estrangements. It’s likely that I took (or would take) someone’s last photo ever.
There were stories, backstage. Told in tearful whispers. The family who came every year, until one year they were missing a child. The kids who watched their parents die in a car crash, who smiled for the first time when they saw Mickey. “When someone contacts us to let us know a family member didn’t make it home,” my trainer told us “we make sure they get their photos.”
No matter how many calculations I did, I would never know whose last photo I would take. Statistics couldn’t tell me whether it was grandmother from Miami or the young couple from Minneapolis or even the Make-a-Wish child from Texas. It could be, but it might not.
****
So I forced all their faces into focus. I looked for blinks, for smiles and bunny ears and I tried to ignore the way my shoes were melting into the street. I worked to care about the photo I’d taken seventy-four thousand times. Because this photo mattered to this family, these friends, this person. I wanted to remember that my thousandth photo of the day might be their last. Even for Make-a-Wish kids: I couldn’t stop tragedy, but I could give them this.
Maybe that’s what we’re all doing, as photographers, as writers, as painters, as storytellers. Maybe we’re just saying “I can’t take away your pain, could I ease it? Can I give you something to carry the grief?
Could this help?”
