Remember this quote:

“Things change.”

Loyal readers of this space may recall that Don Ameche uttered those words on-screen in a 1988 film of the same name. Yet, that sentiment is a good reminder; be it in life, a celebration, a vacation, or even on a battlefield.

You can plan out everything to the last detail, leaving nothing to chance. Have those ducks all lined up perfectly in a row. Everyone perfectly attired, all bright and shiny, shipshape and bristol fashion. All it takes is the slightest breeze and those ducks are no longer in a row but scattered across the pond, haphazardly arrayed.

In today’s world of instant gratification, those little breezes are more than just an annoyance. They are the stuff that brings Karen to the Customer Service desk, asking to see the Manager, in search of satisfaction in some form, preferably compensation for the perceived slight or inconvenience. Bring forth the free goodies and don’t spare the horses. As Verucca once said, “Daddy, I want it now!!!”

That’s the peril of planning. Now, I have been guilty of planning every last detail of what I had hoped would have been the ultimate magical moments; memories indelibly created, to be cherished for years to come. Only to have something intrude and throw those delicately crafted plans right out the proverbial window. Disappointing? Yes. Instead, the hastily constructed Plan B comes along and we are back on track; literally. In the lessons learned category, late trains become only one thing. Later.

I’ve been going to Disney theme parks for a while now. Okay, since 1965, if memory serves. In all of those years, I took a lesson from my mother. On our first park visit, she came ready for just about everything a mother of five could anticipate. For example, no stroller(s). If you couldn’t walk on your own, you didn’t make the trip for the day. My youngest brother, stayed with family for the day, safe and sound in the wilds of Pasadena. Considering how strollers have become Transformers over the decades since, meeting needs never previously considered, right down to being used as offensive weapons when negotiating capacity crowds waiting on the three o’clock parade. The Conestoga wagons have nothing on these modern miracles.

My mother also carried a lime green tote bag, filled with essentials, including the Disneyland ticket books for every member of the family. Other items included sunscreen, moistened washcloths, Band-Aids, and other first-aid essentials; even the trusty Brownie Hawkeye camera with black & white film. Not to mention the usual collection of things mothers typically have in their purses. But, no voluminous assortment of snacks, healthy or otherwise. No gathering of water bottles or juice boxes. Woe betide the child or adult who tried to add to the burden by having mom carry it. That bag was heavy enough without piling on more. While this wasn’t her first visit to Disneyland, previous family outings had given her the acquired wisdom to know the limits ahead.

One thing you can still count on, all of these 60-plus years later, is that there will be waiting for something at a Disney theme park. It can’t be avoided. At some point, you will wait with other Park guests, in a line. Disney as a company saw this very early on. They brought someone with experience in how to deal with this aboard and applied lessons learned.

A couple of those lessons? First, attraction ticket books. A through E. Thoughtfully crafted to offer guests a good mix of experiences for the price. With only so many tickets in a book, rationing returned and the question became what would be the best use of those tickets? After all, you might not be able to ride every E-Ticket attraction in the Park, so enjoy the favorite and use the rest of those A through D coupons wisely, too.

Second, plussing those lines or queues to make standing in them interesting. Even a small thing would make a difference. Like waiting for the Jungle Cruise, where skippers would make announcements about having those E-Coupons ready, adding humor to make the time seem to pass quicker. Or adding things to see, giving guests a preview of what lay ahead, like the Haunted Mansion’s Pet Cemetary.

Third, meal times mean longer waits for food. So even a couple of extra minutes waiting in line for the classic hamburger and Coca-Cola could be that breeze moving those ducks. Why not encourage folks to dine in other ways? Quick service, buffeteria, and sit-down dining all became available. Even think outside the box, and choose meal times that are outside the usual breakfast, lunch, and dinner times. Maybe a snack, like a Dole Whip or box of popcorn, could be enjoyed on the go. All of the options, but flexible to meet the needs.

When it came to ending the use of ticket books, I understood the cost savings including the labor needed to collect those tickets. An annoying fact is that many of today’s attractions have cast members at the entrance to answer questions or check height restrictions for younger guests; so the labor costs didn’t vanish entirely. With the introduction of Fast Passes, we saw something of the return of tickets for attractions. And now with the required park reservations, admission tickets, Genie+, and Lightning Lanes tied into the apps on cell phones, we have almost gone full circle. In some respects, I have wondered why Disney didn’t bring back ticket books in electronic form and include those costs in the single price of admission.

I won’t go into the subject of Annual Passes/Magic Keys; that’s another topic for another day. Same with Mobile Ordering for food, beverages, snacks, and meals. Knowing the challenges that the company has faced over the last few years, adjustments will continue. I don’t know that Walt would have agreed with everything that has come along in the guest experience. But I do know that he would have been willing to try. Because the whole point?

“Things change.”

In the months since I took a hiatus from writing now and then, a few changes have taken place.

First and foremost, we moved out of the duplex we had rented for the last 17 years and into storage. Hopefully a temporary condition, but low-income senior housing is in short supply. Most places are full, at this time, and if interested, I am suggested to join the waiting list, if one is open. Most, as you might expect, are not. Welcome to the housing market in the state of California. Thanks to family, we have somewhere to stay, but it is not what we signed up for.

Yet, hope springs eternal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… I have left behind the wannabe cowboy town that was Livermore some decades ago. It morphed over the time we were there into just another bedroom community feeding the metropolis of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and beyond. I did a stint of some 16 months of excessive commuting before common sense took hold and I went off “to explore other opportunities”; which I still am, post-COVID.

I have returned to the East Bay environs of unincorporated central Contra Costa County, outside the Walnut Creek city limits. When we first relocated here in the summer of 1970, we were leaving behind the tract home in the booming aerospace industry of Santa Clara County, in Mountain View. No more street lights or even sidewalks. No homes were built right to the setback of the lot line to get every last inch of square footage. Just up the street, open space called hikers and daisy (okay, mostly California golden poppies) pickers alike. In fact, my father got involved soon after our move with a group to save that open space from development or even a cross-country high-speed freeway.

My parents had built a custom home on three-quarters of an acre out at the end of paved streets in this odd little area. Just up the hill, asphalt gave way to gravel, and the more hearty folks had homes on good-sized parcels. No little boxes made of ticky tacky all jammed in side by side here. It wasn’t country living by a long shot, but it wasn’t suburban sprawl either. Comfortable was the word.

Fast forward fifty-odd years and the neighborhood ain’t what it used to be.

The house my parents built still sits as it did when first built. On the city side of the street, you guessed it. Urban sprawl. Complete with sidewalks and street lights. That gravel road at the top of the hill is paved now and leads to another area of urban sprawl, with neat garages and front lawns side by side where once were rolling hills. Yet, open space survives, just beyond the sprawl, despite attempts to intrude.

Downtown Walnut Creek isn’t much better. Again, what used to be a nice small business district where you knew everyone by name, wants today to be Rodeo Drive North. Where once was open fields and a small bar at the crossroads from the west, north, and south, is home to a corner with TIffany’s holding forth. If you know where to look, some structures from those days are still in place but are more likely to be pushing fancy coffee or trendy baked goods along with clothing boutiques that no one ever actually buys anything from. Give me the days of the Army-Navy Surplus Store and Flaky Cream Donuts any time.

You can’t fault progress, but you can fault the folks in the city government who gave approval to all of the changes. Real residents, who grew up here? Mostly gone now. Off elsewhere for affordable homes or jobs that offered more than just the same. In a way, you truly can’t go home. As I have said before, no moment is preserved in amber, waiting to be rediscovered. No place, either. But we can have an appreciation for those times, people, and places, as we fondly remember them.

It’s called “nostalgia”, and I will have a nice big slice. Yes, thank you…

Continuing from where we left off last time…

Over the years, I have been exposed to writing on several projects. In 8th grade, I ventured into the newspaper world through the school newspaper. In high school, I bypassed the school paper but did take a turn at news copywriting during a summer internship at a San Francisco radio station. In junior college, I delved into film and television script writing but never completed anything significant. Throw in editing a few newsletters for various groups along with my share of press releases, and I was a published writer of sorts. At work with AAA, I wrote training materials for processes and procedures.

On the visual side of the coin, I started out using my mother’s Brownie Hawkeye taking photographs in both black and white and in color. That led to the Kodak Instamatic and finally to 35 millimeters with a Canon EX on my 18th birthday. The big attraction was photographing trains as part of the interest passed along from family. A color image published in a national magazine was at best an ego boost, if not a major financial one. College also got me into the dark room with image manipulation long before Adobe ever envisioned Photoshop. The world of motion pictures included 8mm and Super 8, along with some early video exposure. Community access television allowed me to combine efforts by doing it all – producing, writing, directing, and editing a few finished works.

My online writing career goes back to the AOL days as I created content for the Television Viewers Community. When the Internet took off, I followed a fair number of folks who were creating websites that shared their passions for various subjects. One, in particular, was the projects of the Walt Disney Company; especially theme parks, and in particular, Disneyland. At that time, things were pretty much in infancy and it was learning to crawl before you could walk. At first, plenty of people used message boards as a way to share tales about the latest and greatest goings on. That grew into full-fledged stories and as digital imaging became better (and simpler), photography added the next component.

Credit for my next step into the online world goes to one of, if not, the best friends one could ever hope for in the guise of Michelle Valladolid. If you’ve been online for a while, and are a fan of Disney, you may remember her from various websites and names. One of the most memorable was the Fabulous Disney Babe or just Fab. Her ex-husband, Jim Hill was in the early days of his website, Jim Hill Media; and Michelle was a partner in that venture.

I had strong feelings after a visit to Disneyland with my family and wanted to share my thoughts on a particular subject. I pitched a story to some folks at a Disney fan site where I participated in message board discussions. They passed on adding my cautionary tale to their site, but when I mentioned it to Michelle she encourage me to share it with Jim and see if he might be interested. Long story short, in October 2002, I joined the team at JHM. After a few stories, I decided to offer occasional Disney content along with stories that showed there was life beyond the berms of theme parks of the Mouse. Those columns eventually became known as Ruminations. Here’s a link to most of those stories.

Disney has always had an interesting relationship with its customers, and the fans online were no exception. Recall that in the earliest days of Disneyland, the park sold souvenir books that offered guests the chance to take home printed copies of memories of days and nights enjoyed. And those books were extremely attractively priced. One of the sharp pencil accountants looking to increase profits is rumored to have approached Walt to raise the price of those books as popular as they were. It’s told that Walt replied that if guests took those books home, they were going to share them with family & friends. Which would likely lead to those family & friends becoming theme park guests on another occasion. Word-of-mouth advertising and worth every penny. The price of those books stayed low.

Enter the online era and people began to share more and more of the content from the theme parks. As personal technology improved, more and more copyrighted materials went out to do the same work that those souvenir books had done. But this time, it wasn’t Disney controlling the dissemination, it was fans who were doing it. Before then, whenever there was a new movie or theme park expansion, there were the traditionally invited media for previews. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television would send reporters to be treated to the latest and greatest, complete with all the hospitality, including the free shrimp.

Now had the company been forward-thinking enough, it would have gotten into the online world on its own. But it was slow to do so and was behind the curve when it came to social media. Its first official podcast didn’t come along until Disneyland’s 50th-anniversary celebration kick-off in May of 2005. The company slowly realized that there were folks who would gladly evangelize to the faithful and all it would take is to share some of that free shrimp with them. Invite these new online media folks to these press events and reap the benefits of increased guest interest. Just like how those souvenir books did their part; now the online communities could do theirs.

That didn’t mean that Disney opened the floodgates to anyone with a website. It still took getting an invite from the Press & Public Relations office at the parks. My first event was the Disneyland 50th Anniversary Celebration kick-off. I was there as Michelle’s guest and filed a few stories for Jim Hill Media as the result. A column I wrote about memories of Disneyland visits led to the opportunity to do a live one-hour radio remote for CBC-One out of Saskatchewan, Canada on July 15th, 2005. After that, I had the opportunity to cover two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie premiere events at Disneyland. Yes, I got to enjoy my share of free shrimp.

Jim and all of the folks at JHM were very generous in giving me the venue to share with readers my various adventures (and misadventures) along the way. However, in January 2007, I struck out on my own. The name of the new site came about after one too many late-night viewings of “Casablanca”. Thanks to Ken Mitcherony, the art that graced the wall of the establishment of Senor Ferrare (as portrayed by Sidney Greenstreet) became our logo.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Going forward, yes, we all have been through a lot in the past few years. I hope to share some of the stories I have written before, with perhaps an update now and then. Plenty of new things still to share as well, and yes even some Disney content, too. For several reasons, I don’t make it to the wilds of Orange County (on either coast) as often as I might like, but that doesn’t mean nothing is going on there.

The best I can offer, loyal readers, is “stay tuned”.