Dreams of Goofy

Last Saturday Dragonwife, my lovely spouse, was once again struck by the overwhelming urge, probably encoded in her very DNA, to reorganize some aspect of the house whether it needs it or not. During such compulsions its best just to leave her alone as she takes every last item out from where it is stored, determines it usefulness, then with an attention to detail approaching that of a master sculptor places it back with an eye towards total efficiency and ease of retrieval. I am sure if a professional sport for such talents existed, she would be in the major leagues.

Usually, she targets one of the kid’s closets and to be honest, there are times when such reorganizations are desperately needed. In my son’s case on several different occasions after my wife reorganized his closet we found three missing textbooks, two empty pizza boxes complete with fossilized crust and cheese inside, an expensive graphing calculator, and once even an X-box gaming system that went missing one Christmas. However, last weekend the attic was her target for uber-reorganization and because of her efforts, a box of my stuff that I had forgotten about turned up.

Now her first idea was to trash the entire container and its contents naturally assuming that if it belonged to me nothing inside was important. I was able to save my precious but unknown crap by promising to look through it and then finding a place to store it were it did not take up valuable space. Of course, sometime in the forgotten past I am sure we had nearly the same conversation with me storing the box in the attic, which was my intention all along of repeating. But at the time of the discovery I was pursuing my muse writing some insightful and provocative piece of thought so I just pushed the box underneath my bed for investigation at a later date.

This morning after much cajoling and renewed threats to send the box to the trash dump I finally got around to looking through the contents. Truthfully, there was not much inside for me to get excited about,some paperback books, redundant National Guard forms, and a couple of old music CD’s. The one exception was a business card from an employment recruiter for Disney World that brought back some pleasant memories.

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My family and I have for years been a part of the Disney Vacation Club, it is a timeshare that allows us to stay at the Disney resorts right next the parks and those outside the Orlando area far from the mouse and its usual domain. One of these offsite resorts is located in Hilton Head, South Carolina and it is there that I unknowingly met a Disney employment recruiter.

Because we are only a couple of hours away from the Disney Hilton Head Resort my family and I often spend an extended weekend down there when we have the required points for a room and the free time allowing us to get out of town. With it being well away from the parks, it has a far more relaxed and easygoing atmosphere with plenty of activities for the kids and because of this, grownups can carry on conversations with other adults while drinking certain types of beverages children cannot partake.

During one of these extended weekends several years ago, my wife and I met Diana and her husband Mark while we were all soaking in the resort hot tub. The hot tub that day was especially relaxing for both couples since both our respective teenagers like my son Darth Spoilboy were walking a nearby nature trail and those around my daughter Darth Wiggles age were in the mud chasing terrified fiddler crabs. This allowed us adults to loosen up without having to worry about some sulking teenager intruding and begin whining about missing their friends or the younger kids demanding we all go and play putt-putt golf.

The conversation floated around a whole manner of enjoyable and intelligent subjects and to be honest I kept expecting it all to come crashing to an end with the kids mutinying on the counselors and showing up at the hot tub looking down on us with clear looks of disdain on their faces. Somehow, God even saw fit to smile down on us preventing any disturbance and things were so good that the four of us were able to make several trips to the conveniently nearby tiki bar so we could recharge our empty glasses. It was while I was returning to the blessed hot tub with a full container of an orange smoothie concoction complete with two shots of high-grade tequila that Diana hit me with a weird statement about my appearance.

“Ron,” she said only slightly slurring her words while watching me approach, “you would be a great Goofy.”

Even with the pleasant buzz going on behind my eyeballs, this struck me as quite the curious thing to say. “You have the perfect height and gait to pull it off along with the ideal Goofy personality for dealing with young children.” Diana said further with me totally at a loss for what she meant.

After slowly reentering the hot water trying not to spill my precious drink I looked over at my wife and saw her giggling senselessly. Feeling like I was on the wrong end of some joke I could sense the most unwelcome feeling of irritation displacing my warm orange smoothie assisted buzz. “Excuse me,” I said, “someone please let this poor fool of a country boy in on the joke.”

For some reason my confusion only made the situation even funnier for the other three. It took Diana’s husband Mark to explain what was going on. “Diana is a recruiter for Disney, she hires upper end talent for the shows but at times she has also hired for the costume characters. While you were away she told your wife that you were perfect for Goofy.”

With the situation explained, my bewilderment was replaced with an entirely different feeling. “Really? That’s freaking awesome because Goofy is my favorite Disney cartoon character.”I said to her with visions of quitting my job and heading down to sunny Florida and becoming a willing minion for the evil corporate Mouse. Now Diana went on to explain that they prefer hiring retired gentlemen because the pay for a costumed character was not that great, which was a slight bummer with having kids to raise but at least I have something fairly realistic to look forward to in my old age. 

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Yes dear folks, since that day in the hot tub I have a deep seated ambition to retire, move to Orlando, and walk around one of the huge Disney theme parks and be Goofy. My very supportive spouse assures me it is the one position in life that I am exceptionally qualified for without any formal training.