The Little Mermaids
It was fun, in the beginning. Sadie saw a casting call for Disney World auditions, and she got all worked up about it. “They give you money to move to Orlando,” she said, her hands animating the air to underline her enthusiasm. “We could get an apartment together and be Disney princesses and it’d be the fucking best thing ever!” She had applied to fourteen colleges but hadn’t received any acceptances yet, I guess she was getting desperate. Still, it wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard. Even just auditioning sounded fun, like trying out for one of those reality tv shows where you sing or dance or do stupid games in a big apartment.
Except after we went to the audition and did the dance numbers and the pantomime where we pretended to fold laundry or wash dishes, I was called back but Sadie wasn’t. She said it didn’t matter, she just shrugged and said I should go for it. At the callback, they had us try on the hair and make up of different characters, and I could see how the casting director’s eyes lit up when I came out made up like Ariel. Even I was feeling it, the frenzy and excitement of dressing up, all the wigs and trying to act with my eyes as wide as possible, smiling so hard my cheeks ached.
The offer to play Ariel rolled in the next day, and I accepted. When I told Sadie, she called me a bitch and unfriended me on Facebook. I still can’t believe she did that. I mean, I had already thought about what it would feel like if she got accepted and I didn’t, had mentally rehearsed a scene in my head where I would hug her and say I was proud of her and that she should totally go for it, and that she better get me discounted tickets or free merch or something. But I guess Sadie hadn’t rehearsed it in her head, and then it seemed inevitable that because I was prepared for failure and she wasn’t, she had failed.
Disney had a pretty good message board system for the newbies making their way to Orlando, and I found an apartment with Robin, another girl who worked as Ariel and had already been there for 6 months. It was just like what Sadie had said. I spent a couple of evenings trying to see what Sadie was up to on Facebook and chatting with our mutual friends, trying to find out if she got accepted to college anywhere. No one knew, which meant that she didn’t. After a week I sent her a Facebook friend request, but she didn’t accept it.
For the first five days, the training focused on learning how to do the fur characters, even with a couple of days in the park in a fur costume, before learning to be a ‘face character’ like Ariel, which was a million times better because you didn’t have to wear a gigantic fake fur head, but just a wig and makeup.
One of the most important Disney rules: never, ever break character. Ever. No matter what is happening.
Robin and I often had different shifts, so the apartment, which wasn’t even that small, felt huge when I was there alone. But on nights when we were both off, we’d go drink with some of the other cast members. Someone was always hosting a small gathering at their apartment and we would turn up with a bottle or two of something as a contribution. Most of the conversations were really about work, but the stuff we couldn’t say while on shift. People would take turns telling loud, laughing stories about the things we found most terrifying or ridiculous: the tunnels and shops under Disney World where all the storage rooms were, even the pharmacy and health center for when the fur characters inevitably got kicked in the groin by some stupid kid, usually egged on by their parents hissing things like “go on, kick him! He can’t feel it in the costume! Kick him again!” as though they were working out some deep hostility towards Mickey that they had only recently uncovered; the fake Disney jail, which was a creepy storage room that held nothing but pristine furry heads ready for the taking if one got damaged. Some of the princesses complained about the dads, especially the girls playing Pocahontas. I guess it’s the skimpy costume, but so many of the dads would whisper creepy things like, “I’m dying to put my hand under your skirt. Is it okay if I touch you? What about just a hug? Can we meet after you’re done your shift?” “I love Indian chicks. Native American, my bad. Whatever you are, it’s totally my thing. Where are you going to be next?” And the daily dad-pervert joke, “I’d like to poke your hot ass!” That was one of the benefits of being Ariel—any time I was wearing the mermaid fishtail and seashell bra, I was in the grotto for shows or photos with the kids, and the adults kept their distance. Other times I would be doing the princess meet-and-greets in the Ariel princess dress, living out the Disney-spun happily ever after where Ariel keeps her legs and gets to marry Prince Eric and now just swans about in a seafoam-coloured dress and talks to kids at princess breakfasts and meet-and-greets.
I loved the Ariel wig. It’s actually a really pretty shade of bright auburn, not at all the tomato soup red of the cartoon. When I put it on, after the careful Disney-trained make up that must be exactly the same every day, it was like completing a ritual. It sounds lame, but I really felt special when I put on Ariel, like it must really be what being a princess feels like.
One of the most important Disney rules: never, ever break character. Ever. No matter what is happening. Even when the grown ups who come to visit you all the time keep asking you questions about your life, they want to know about Ariel’s life, not your real life. When they ask about my parents, it’s not my real parents they want to hear about, it’s Ariel’s.
In the original Hans Christian Andersen story, the little mermaid falls in love with a prince who nearly drowns in a shipwreck. She saves him, makes sure he is safe on the beach before she swims away. But she can’t forget him, and she makes a deal with a sea witch to trade her beautiful voice for a pair of human legs that make each step feel as though she is walking on razor sharp knives. If he marries another, she will dissolve into seafoam, since mermaids have no soul. She finds a way to get into the prince’s life, but she can’t talk to him, can’t tell him how she feels, how she rescued him from the shipwreck, and so the prince she loves marries another. But her sisters try to save her—they sell their beautiful mermaid hair for a magical knife from the sea witch. If the little mermaid plunges the knife into her prince’s heart and lets the blood flow onto her legs, she will be transformed into a mermaid again. She can’t do it. The night after the wedding, grieving and heartbroken, she flings herself into the sea and is turned into a daughter of the air, a fairy of sorts, for being so selfless. If she keeps doing good deeds for another 300 years, she’ll get a soul and go to heaven.
Things that bother me about the original little mermaid story, #1: Daughters of the air? Talk about a tacked-on ending. Who introduces random new characters and concepts in the last paragraph of a story? That crap wouldn’t fly in a Disney movie. Also #2: not enough adorable talking animals.
To say that there is something intoxicating about Disney World is the understatement of the year. To work somewhere that is so specifically about place, about every little detail designed to make you think or feel a certain way. Like how it conveys a sense of safety—that’s the thing that strikes me the most. That no matter where you are in the park, you still feel safe. But it’s amazing how this place becomes an entire world almost immediately. When Robin and I were home together in the evenings, we would spend the night re-watching The Little Mermaid and acting the whole movie out, both of us knowing not only every word and gasp uttered by Ariel, but all the other characters as well. Once I got used to it, we would do our weekly Little Mermaid viewing with a bottle of Chardonnay and giggle through the big-eyed machinations, taking turns imitating not only the demure Ariel, but Ursula the sea witch, with hip-shaking swagger and buxom shoulder rolls. We would sing as loud as we could and swish about, then collapse in a heap on the carpet. Robin’s boyfriend Shane would come over and watch us, sometimes playing the Prince Eric role in our weekly movie viewing.
One of the free nights, Shane came over with his friend Ivan, who worked as one of the Mickeys. He had all the moves down and the ridiculous cooing laugh that Mickey Mouse has, a sound like a deranged dove. Ivan was from Salt Lake City, just like Shane. But unlike Shane, he had no plans for acting or Hollywood after this. Shane played a rotating series of generic Disney princes and was convinced that he was going to be the next Brad Pitt. One of Shane’s typical stories to tell after a few drinks was the legend of how Brad Pitt once wore a chicken suit to hand out flyers for a chicken joint before he got his first big acting gig. Ivan would listen intently, as though he hadn’t heard this every single time they got together, but he didn’t buy into the Disney dream at all. Sweating in a Mickey Mouse costume was not a future bon mot for party banter, he insisted that this was his last season at Disney World and then he was getting the heck out of there.
“Hardly anyone ever makes it, and it’s not my passion. I’m just earning a bit of money, saving up for college, that’s all,” Ivan shrugged. When I asked him how long he had been working here, he said it had been 3 years. Either Ivan was lousy at saving money, or he didn’t really know what he wanted to do after this. It was clear that Ivan was brought along to potentially pair off with me, and they kept looking over at us and Robin would giggle, a pale glass of chardonnay sloshing in her hand. Ivan kept drinking beer and talking about books he read, how George Orwell’s 1984 was his favourite, how “dystopian literature really prepares you for the dark side of the Magic Kingdom, you know?” He looked straight into my eyes like I was really getting it, and I nodded vigorously, like I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he ran out of steam on the apocalypse, he fell silent, and looked over at the television that still had The Little Mermaid on repeat.
“So… Mickey Mouse. The big star of it all. That’s a lot of pressure,” I offered weakly.
“You’re telling me. People are so fucked up about Mickey. About all the characters. It’s bizarre, the obsession. And you know the people who make the weird Disney porn are no doubt coming here all the time, getting their jollies from this somehow.”
Robin and Shane groaned from the couch. “It’s true, all the Disney porn is so gross,” Robin agreed. I was having trouble keeping up, the glass of wine in my hand seemed to keep refilling, and I felt like an idiot for not even knowing there was Disney porn. I must have had a blank look on my face, because then Shane and Ivan were laughing about how I probably hadn’t even seen any of it. Robin opened her laptop and did an image search, and the screen lit up with tiled cartoon images of Mickey Mouse with a grotesque penis, performing various acts. There were other characters involved, too—Chip and Dale, Pluto, and of course Minnie Mouse. Shane scrolled down, while Ivan complained about how it was hard enough to get laid without people associating him with Mickey.
“If there is this much Mickey porn, that means there’s loads for all the Disney princesses,” I took a big gulp of my wine, tried to look aloof.
“Absolutely. You should see the Ariel porn, it’s so weird. Guaranteed at least eighty percent of the dads you see have already googled it, or are googling it all night after seeing a show,” said Robin, as she typed it into the search engine.
“They might even be looking at it right there on their phones, in the grotto,” Shane agreed.
The screen flooded with thumbnails of the classic cartoon Ariel, looking constantly surprised while various characters from the movie groped or entered her. Her tail was always drawn below the knees, or she was depicted with her human legs. Some of the thumbnails showed women dressed up as Ariel, live action versions where they wore the wig and looked a lot like how Robin and I looked when we were in costume. I continued to scroll while Robin and Shane giggled, and Ivan, suddenly more interested since moving from Mickey to Ariel, leaned in beside me.
I ran to the washroom and tried to throw up as quietly as I could, which is to say not that quietly at all.
There was an image of Ariel the Little Mermaid, but the tail was lower, beginning at her knees, and she was bent over while Prince Eric stood behind her, his erection in his hand, and with a look that was supposed to be lascivious but it was darker than that. The look that the animators give the bad guys in movies when they are about to do something awful.
Then I don’t know who saw it first, me or Ivan. A photograph, not a cartoon.
“What the fuck is that,” I gasped.
Robin and Shane leaned in, and Ivan leaned back. “Okay, this is going off now,” Robin said as she reached over and shut the browser tab, and then slammed the laptop shut. No one was laughing anymore. The thumbnail was small, but it showed what looked like a little girl in a little mermaid swimsuit, lying on her back, and an adult erect cock pressed up against the front of her. Not a drawing, a photograph. The swimsuit was familiar, it was sold in almost all the shops around Disney World and was only available in child sizes. Robin got up and put the laptop away, then began cleaning up the glasses, then busying herself in the kitchen with the dishes.
“Maybe it was a really small 18-year-old,” Shane offered. Ivan shot him a dark look.
“We should call the police or something, shouldn’t we?” Ivan said. “We just google the same thing again and send a link to the image results? The same way we saw it?”
Shane shook his head. “Those change all the time, it might not even be there anymore. Do you really want to click on that, go looking for whatever that was?”
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” Ivan said as he stood up, hands on his hips and looking like someone should do something but that it definitely wouldn’t be him. “I think Lincoln said that...someone revolutionary said it.”
“Real fucking helpful, Ivan,” Robin muttered, walking back into the living room and grabbing the empty wine bottle.
It felt like the wine hit me all at once, then I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything for dinner, just some handfuls of popcorn and a Dole whip at the end of my shift hours ago. I ran to the washroom and tried to throw up as quietly as I could, which is to say not that quietly at all.
Things that bother me about the original little mermaid story, #3: Why don’t mermaids have a soul? Why would they need to do 300 years of anything in order to earn one? How did she fall in love to begin with, if she didn’t have a soul?
The next day, I just went to work like I normally would, but everything looked a little off. You spend so much time at Disney when you work there, and you aren’t allowed to discuss your job or what character you play outside of Disney, that soon all your friends are coworkers and staff, and you spend so much time at the park and in character that taking off the wig and cleaning the make up and false eyelashes with baby wipes feels foreign, exotic, and a little strange. Even wearing black pants can feel strange. My wardrobe slowly turned from mostly black and grey to a rainbow of sherbet colours, which I felt would be Disney-approved. Shane called this going native. It happens to everyone who works here. Every time he wasn’t in costume he wore a brightly coloured polo shirt.
But that day, the yellow day lilies blooming in the planters seemed plastic, and the ornate lampposts looked like set props, the pastel benches looked like viewing platforms to ogle the endless performance, and everything the sunlight touched looked like it was designed to fool us. I kept trying not to think about the picture, but it was impossible—all I could do was see it in my mind but then add a border around it, and try imagining the little girl holding a kitten, or a kitten in a basket of flowers, images that reminded me of when I was little and my grandmother gave me kitten calendars every year. All soft-focus photographs, which made the kittens seem even fluffier and the flowers even more beautiful. I wondered if the little girl in the photograph had a calendar like that pinned to her wall, if she had a grandmother.
It’s a short career, this Disney thing. No one really works here after the age of 26, and most people want to go on to “real” acting anyway. That Michelle Pfeiffer once worked at Disneyland playing Alice from Alice in Wonderland is part of the legend that keeps Shane believing that this is just a rest stop on his way to Hollywood, a part of his future biography or story he will tell in a GQ feature.
Things that bother me about the original little mermaid story, #4: She gets turned into a daughter of the air, some sprite-like thing, for her good deeds. But as far as I can tell, the only good deed she did was not murder the prince when she had opportunity, motive and the means. If not murdering people is a good deed, then the bar is pretty low. At any given moment, there is always someone with an opportunity. Anything can be a weapon.
At the princess breakfasts, even the boys are usually pretty thrilled to be talking to Ariel. Their eyes go all big and wide naturally, like they are beholding something wonderful. That the wonderful thing they are beholding is me is heady stuff, I love the feeling. That level of excitement, it’s hard to hang onto as an adult. I see the dads taking pictures and videos. Sometimes I can’t quite tell if they are just playing along for the sake of the kids, or if they genuinely believe that Ariel is real, that me in my auburn wig and seafoam dress could really be her. The mothers rarely have this problem. They know instantly that I’m what they paid all this money for, the spellbound child rapt with fascination as I chat with them about eating their fruit at breakfast or what they are going to do that day. Some of the mothers, I can feel their eyes dissecting my appearance, jubilant in identifying the fake eyelashes, the lipstick, the thick layer of foundation that turns the freckles across my nose completely invisible.
She looked at me, but it wasn’t with the gasp of delight that most of the little girls do when I first go over to talk to them. She looked at me like one of the moms, dissembling my appearance, not buying into the fairy tale ruse.
The princess breakfast winds down, and the last of the families are trying to get out the door. Several are still lingering, soaking up the last of the ambience—the stained-glass windows and crests, the soaring ceiling and chandeliers. I’m not crazy about this space, the dining room seems to genuinely be part of an old castle, not the pastel and colourful versions that are outside everywhere. Several parents seem to be in negotiations with small children on the brink of what will no doubt be the first of many meltdowns that day. There are some tables with just grown ups, and when I see the floor manager looking around I quickly smooth the skirt of my seafoam satin dress and glide over to a table with a couple and a girl about 6 or 7 years old, wearing an Ariel t-shirt with satin ruffles at the sleeves and hem the same colour as my dress, sullenly poking at an ice cube in her orange juice with a fork. The couple look to be in their early 40s, the woman wearing a sparkly Minnie Mouse ears headband, and the man smiling a little too hard as he tries to get the little girl to perk up and points at me, trying to draw her attention.
“Hello there! What are you doing with that dinglehopper?” I trill, smiling and giving a small curtsy.
“It’s a fork. And I’m trying to get the ice cube out of my juice,” the little girl said. She looked at me, but it wasn’t with the gasp of delight that most of the little girls do when I first go over to talk to them. She looked at me like one of the moms, dissembling my appearance, not buying into the fairy tale ruse.
“Oh, of course! I still get a little mixed up, learning the right words for things in my collection! Do you like to collect things?”
This is one of my standard conversational gambits as Ariel. Talking about how Ariel liked to collect human things that fell into the sea and making up names and uses for them. Then trying to get the guests to talk about what they like to collect. I was trained on this, the recommended subjects for conversation. It helps to get people feel like they are really connecting with the character and, as the shift manager said at the beginning of every shift, it’s important they have a positive experience.
The girl shook her head. She had successfully dislodged the ice cube from the glass of orange juice, and flicked it onto a side plate. The mother smiled at me, wincing a bit. “I’m sorry, we didn’t sleep very well last night, you know how it can affect kids,” she said, adjusting her Minnie Mouse headband. “But we have a sunny day ahead of us, and it’s going to be terrific!”
I admire it when parents do their own character acting, playing the role of the enthusiastic parent, so happy to be there. The ones with the most obviously miserable kids tend to be the ones pretending to be happy most aggressively, determined to lead their body where the mood will hopefully go. Enthusiasm is contagious, it’s true, but I think it has to be real. You can almost smell the anxiety that underlines this sort of act. Kids know it all too well.
A waiter in a gold vest cleared the table next to us, but the dad was oblivious to the clear end of the meal and asked for a coffee. The waiter nodded and quickly went off to get it, while the mother whispered urgent things to the little girl, who sat there sadly, the polyester satin peplum of her Ariel t-shirt wilting already. Taking the skirt of my dress in both hands, I flicked my wrists so that it billowed out in soft ripples as I crouched down beside the little girl’s chair.
“And what fun things are you planning on doing today?” I asked, trying to get on the little girl’s eye level. She looked at me warily and shrugged. Her dad, stirring cream into his fresh coffee, sighed. “Ava, the beautiful princess is trying to talk to you. Why do you think we spent all this money coming here? For you to sit and sulk? Your attitude needs to change, right now. Or we aren’t going to go back to Typhoon Lagoon tomorrow.” He leaned back in his chair, sipped his coffee. He and Ava seemed to be locked in a staring contest, and the dad was winning. Once he mentioned the waterpark, her mouth fell open and I could see her thinking through her options of standing her ground and being unhappy or trying to perk up for the sake of going to the waterpark tomorrow.
“Oh, I love Typhoon Lagoon!” I trilled, grabbing on to the conversational thread. “Of course, I love being in the water, don’t you Ava?” I batted my eyelashes at her, full of wonder and excitement, hoping she would latch on to that. It worked. Ava smiled at me, nodded, and even when she looked down at her hands in her lap again, she was still smiling.
“I love the water too,” Ava said, barely above a whisper. “Swimming is my favourite thing.”
“Mine too!” I gasped, as if we were kindred spirits and the only two people in the entire world who loved swimming.
The Dad picked up his phone and began scrolling through it. “We went yesterday, and Ava loved it so much, we said we’d go again before the week was up. Here’s some photos of her, you can see what she looks like when she’s actually happy.” He turned the screen towards me.
The mom agreed, said how she loved those pictures, weren’t they so great and Ava was smiling so hard that it was clear she was happy that day. But my stomach felt like the bottom dropped out, and everything went cold. In the picture Ava wore the same swimsuit that the little girl in the photo from the internet was wearing. I tried to smile.
“Wow, you have an Ariel swimsuit too!” I said to Ava.
“Oh, so many of the little girls at the park had the same swimsuit, it was hard to keep track of her. That’s what we get for buying everything in the gift shops,” her mom said.
“We’ve bought too many things at the gift shops,” muttered the dad, scrolling through the photos, showing me one of Ava floating in an inner tube. I nodded and smiled.
“Well, I’m sure it was a magical day, and it’s a magical week,” I nodded, starting to back away. The rest of the guests seemed to have cleared out, only the serving staff remained, and the sound of clinking glasses and silverware as everything was gathered up. The family took their cue and stood up, the mother mentioning to Ava that they should try to go to washroom before they left.
“Would you like a hug, Ava?” I offered. She nodded, and as I opened my arms she fell into them, and clutched at me. I could feel that she had gathered some of the dress fabric on my back into her hands, she was holding on so tightly. “Oh, what a wonderful hug!” I chirped. “You must be the best hugger in the world!” Her mom pried her off of me, and they waved as they went towards the women’s washroom. The dad sat down again at the table nearest the door and he began rearranging the water glasses and napkins, even though it has just been reset by one of the serving staff, and now would have to reset again.
“So what’s it like working here?” he asked me.
“Working here? Oh, I don’t work here, I live here! In the castle, with Prince Eric!” I smiled. “I should be getting back to the castle soon, to see him!”
“Ah, right, I get it. You guys are good, I’m impressed.” He turned a butter knife over in his hands. I was getting nervous. He seemed to fidget with everything, like he wasn’t comfortable. He kept glancing over to the washroom door.
“You’re very pretty, like all the girls here,” he continued. “It’s nice to be here. So many fresh flowers, and everything is beautiful. Walt Disney would be proud, I bet.”
I smiled but it felt fake, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that being alone in the room with him was a terrible idea, so I took a step back. “I should get going. It’s been lovely to meet you and your family, have a wonderful day!”
“Hey, wait a second, can you help me with this map? We are supposed to be heading to…wait a minute, my wife wrote it down somewhere…” He started pulling a map and a note pad out of a day pack that he lifted onto the table. Out came some granola bars, a couple of spare t-shirts, some striped socks, and a small lilac coloured pair of little girl’s underwear. He didn’t even seem to think it as weird, muttering about looking for a pen and asking if I could stay for just another couple of minutes. Seeing the underwear on the table, I don’t know what happened. It unhooked a small latch inside of me like one on a cage door, and something small and frantic rushed out, that sort of panic. I grabbed a fork off the table and drove it straight into his forearm. He recoiled instantly, the shock on his face so immediate as he pulled the fork out of his forearm. The blood came out quickly, drops of it fell onto the skirt of my dress.
I heard a scream. The mother and Ava had returned from the washroom, and the mother was hysterical at what she saw—her husband bleeding, Ariel standing at the table panting, blood on her dress. Suddenly there were servers everywhere, running into the dining room. Two of them pulling me back and two attending to the man, one calling security. The mother was shrieking at me and the servers, but I couldn’t make out the words, I was breathing so hard. The sound was the same as when you have your head under water, all amplified and distorted.
Ava didn’t say anything. She looked at her dad and looked at me, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget her expression. She didn’t look surprised at all. She looked like she had been expecting this all along.
