A Blog by Margaret Rose
Disneyland was not only a fun place to visit with my Dad; it became an inspiration to me as I found my way into a career as a storyteller. Walt Disney told stories with his movies and in the three-dimensional environmental story of a theme park; my chosen medium is musical theater, but the concepts of telling a story are similar. On one trip to Disneyland – as an adult, long after my childhood visits with my Dad – my best friend Annie introduced me to a little detail in Disneyland’s storytelling that impressed me, perhaps, more than any other.
So there we were, Annie and I,
I live in Orlando now, and spent seven magical years working at Walt Disney World. But my childhood was also spent at a Disney theme park. Every summer, I would go on a road trip with my Dad from my Northern California home, all the way south to Anaheim. We would spend an entire day at Disneyland, Dad and I, from park opening until
I’ve always hated doing improv. Whether in acting classes or on the speech and debate team, I always wanted the script ahead of time. I wanted to be able to memorize it, rehearse it, try different phrasing, different delivery styles, wanted to be sure of my lines and sure of myself. Put me on a stage with a bunch of comic geniuses and nothing more than a couple of prompts, and I froze in terror.
In life, I want a script, too. I’m a list-maker. And when life throws me a curve ball and something
No one to whom I ranted ever took my side. They all nodded to indulge me, and I got the impression I had taken my obsession with accuracy in lyrics too far. No one else cared about the fallacy of this lyric in the hit song:
IT’S ONLY HALF-PAST TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
But honestly, it would have been an easy fix for Mr. Jackson’s songwriters. It could have been written like this, and then it would have been accurate:
IT’S ONLY JUST TURNED TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
That would have solved it all. But record sales continued, and time passed. Other songs
All of my friends know how much I love listening to musicals. Some of them also know my guilty pleasure of listening to country music, and many of them know I’m a bit of a Parrothead, too. So a few years ago when Alan Jackson posed the question, “…What would Jimmy Buffett do?” and was answered by Jimmy’s Gulf-Western twang chiming into his duet, my friends weren’t surprised that this musical theater-country music-Parrothead wanted to
