The End of the Parade.

July 2008

Twenty-six years ago I was twenty-one years old and worked as Donald Duck at Walt Disney World. Two weeks ago I got an e-mail stating that a friend who worked with me in the Character Department died.

There’s at least fifty of us former-Disney Characters who still keep in touch via e-mail, MySpace, and Facebook. That includes a small contingent of locals who get together on a regular basis for beer, buffalo wings, or weekend camping trips. We all hung up our costumes a long time ago and many of us have moved to different parts of the country. Collectively we’ve experienced a myriad of life’s challenges and landed in as many different careers as Mickey Mouse did in his films. One former-Goofy became an emergency room trauma surgeon in San Antonio. Go figure.

Reading the news about Roy’s passing brought thoughts of my own mortality into sharp focus more so than friends my age getting married or having kids old enough to start college, and even my thinning and slightly graying hair. (Vanity will not allow me to admit to having wrinkles.) Roy couldn’t have been much older than me. He couldn’t have been.

In the hours after reading the Roy e-mail, memories of my early years in the Magic Kingdom Character Department — more affectionately known as “The Zoo” — flooded my mind. I involuntarily twitched at the thought of how I felt I didn’t fit in at all.

Roy wasn’t in the department when I performed my first meet and greet as Donald Duck on December 25, 1981, in front of Town Square’s City Hall, only a few feet from the hundreds of tourists streaming through the Magic Kingdom main entrance. My job was to take pictures with and give autographs to anyone who wanted one. I was a literally a sitting duck for anyone who came within 50 yards of me.

After I finished my first meet and greet, in an area unseen by tourists’ eyes, I popped that eternally smiling duck head off and gasped for air. According to one of my soon-to-be friends who was getting zipped into a Tigger costume, the look on my face was one of abject disgust.

What Tigger, Pooh, Eeyore, and anyone else strapping on a costume didn’t know was that I was more consumed with the angst of being in my own skin as opposed to the physical discomfort of wearing pounds of webbed feet, fun, fur, blue spandex, and a fiberglass head in Florida humidity. I remember being thankful that my stint as a character was only lasting four more days. I had bigger plans. I was heading back to college.

Fate had other plans. Five months later I returned from Florida State University for a summer in the Zoo. That part-time summer job became full-time and lasted six more years.

Roy’s transfer into the Character department from Foods that same year was engulfed in controversy. Everyone in the Character department had to serve time in costume before moving up the corporate ladder. This was so ensure that middle management would have an appreciation for those who modeled fur day in and day out.

Being tall and lanky, Roy would have been in line for the toughest, heaviest costumes in the department — the bears; Baloo from “The Jungle Books,” a couple bears from the Country Bear Jamboree attraction, and the most dreaded Br’er Bear from “The South of the South.” Not all the costumes available to Roy were instruments of torture. In an ironic twist, Goofy was also available to Roy. What the Goofy costume lacked in physical weight, it more than made up in popularity. Goofy was a VIP Character, along with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto, and Chip and Dale. Being a VIP meant that you were afforded no time to leisurely stroll around the park and bask in the anonymity of a lesser known character. No, that was not the life of a VIP. From the second a VIP Character stepped into the park, it was as sure as sunshine that they would be swarmed for photos and autographs til the moment they waved good-bye and were out of sight. Who on the planet didn’t recognize that green hat, orange shirt, and yellow vest? People might not know Goofy’s species, but they knew Goofy when they see him.

Roy transferred into the department as the equivalent of a foreman without ever having dropped a bead of sweat in a character costume. And because of that, it took a while for the die-hards to cut him some slack. But Roy won everyone over. He had an unforgettable laugh. It was a cross between a throaty guffaw and a seemingly life-threatening asthma attack punctuated by deep vocalized intakes of air. His laugh was as loud as it was infectious and if there was a Zoo Crew member within earshot, his laugh was followed immediately an outcry of “Roy!” that claimed him as one of our own.

Stories of groups of people bonding are fairly common, but our experiences were different. My fellow Zoo Crew members and I were a stew of humanity. The majority of us were in our early twenties and from different socio-economic backgrounds and different parts of the country. We were male and female, young and not so young, hard-core jocks and formally trained dancers, good ol’ boys and California girls, and for many it was their first experience with gays. We were Christian, Jewish, and undecided. We loved our job and were the envy of all the other employees. In incremental snatches of time, we anonymously made people happy by not merely taking on the persona of world-renowned two-dimensional cartoon characters, but by bringing them to life.

When other employees saw us at work, they only saw happy-go-lucky, energetic characters gleefully interacting with tourists or dancing down the parade route. They never saw us drenched in our own sweat after those meet and greets. Nor did they see the shear exhaustion of a character frantically ripping off costume pieces after performing in a parade.

It wasn’t until Roy’s funeral that we got a 360-degree view of the impact Roy had upon us. He brought so much more to the department than his signature laugh. In story after impromptu story told by family and friends during the service, the recurring theme of his life resounded louder than his laugh ever had.

Roy had a servant’s heart. He was always there to lend a hand by carting a costume for someone after a long day of meet and greets. No one could recall him using a cross word with anyone. He was able to steer clear of the melodrama, bickering, and pettiness that can spread like wildfire within any group of entertainers. No one could remember him using a cross word.

We Characters knew of the modest houses Roy purchased and rented to people for much less than they should have been rented. We thought of it as just another Roy-ism. We didn’t know that almost all of his renters were on the verge of being homeless when they moved into one of his properties. He was there last hope, their saving grace. And when his brother spoke, we learned something else. After his father’s death the family lost their home, and thanks to the help of relatives they were able to purchase a house of their own. Roy was living a lesson he learned early on.

And that 360-degree view was made complete when Roy’s other brother confessed that he and Roy hadn’t been in touch for a number of years.  He tearfully thanked us for showing him that his brother lived a rich life and was truly loved.

By the end of the standing room only service, with many friends listening out in the halls, a lot of the dots had been connected and the picture wasn’t a caricature. It was a beautiful illustration of a man who loved people and lived life to the fullest.

When I get to the end of my parade, I can only hope to have done more than simply walked through the Clay parade.  Hopefully, I will have done more along the me-centered parade route of my life than grumble about physical discomfort or fatigue, or the frustration of having grabbed two left-hand gloves in haste instead of taking the time to check for a left- and a right-hand glove. Because you know what? When I think about it, I honestly can’t remember one tourist along the parade route ever saying, “Oh, my gosh! Donald Duck has two left hands!”

Hopefully, I will have taken the time to break rank from my choreographed routine to genuinely give hugs and vigorously shake hands with the people.  Hopefully, I will have not been so self-absorbed with my own performance to have not taken the time to notice that there were others in my parade — some in far more glamorous roles and others in more thankless roles.  Hopefully, I was not so consumed with criticism to think that others were not giving their all. Hopefully, I was observant enough to notice that everyone in the parade was giving what they could.  And hopefully, I took the time to share in moments of unbridled joy with other performers along the parade route.

Of course, I was all those things I hoped not to be and probably more often than I’d like to admit. And I was probably the things I aspired to be far fewer times than I thought.  Roy and a cast of hundreds over the years unknowingly buffed off a lot of my rough edges and helped me see that I wasn’t as polished as I thought I was.

Being a Disney character wasn’t about being someone else. It was about discovering who I was and who I wasn’t. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were all uncomfortable in our skin. We all had traits we unsuccessfully tried to ignore. We were all trying to find our way. We all wanted to fit in.

Unfortunately, now I can’t tell Roy how grateful I am for inspiring me to give my best. Roy doesn’t know how grateful I am for every meet and greet; every picture posed for; every handshake given and every hug received; every parade I performed in; every Character breakfast and dinner appearance; every promotional trip taken around the world; every cruise taken on the Atlantic Ocean; every oral and written reprimand I received, not to mention the ones I deserved that were graciously withheld; and maybe one or two mobbings by tourists in numbers so great that my view of the sun was obscured.

On this side of eternity, Roy will never hear me speak my gratitude for him being an unsung but integral part of the years I spent producing more sweat in thirty minutes than people most do in a day. It wasn’t until Roy’s funeral that I realized that thanks to him along with all the Mickeys, Minnies, Donalds, Plutos, Goofys, and Chips and Dales out there, those glory days in fur were some of the sweetest and most cherished in my life. And we were a lot more alike than any of us could have ever imagined.

So in Roy’s absence I am left with one option: to be inspired by his life, his love of people, and his laugh, and to keep the memory of him alive by serving others.