Stephanie with the nieces at SeaWorld
On Sunday, we all went to SeaWorld, which I hadn’t visited since I was a little kid. Aquariums have never interested me much, but I loved SeaWorld, probably because you can get up close to the animals. We even got to pet a bunch of stingrays (they’re slimy and bumpier than one would expect).
In the dolphin exhibit, we saw a very excited boy-dolphin swimming around with his schlong out for all to see, and then we saw manatees doing dirty dirty things, which has left me scarred for life as regards sea creatures.
Scott and I went to ride the Kraken, which I’m pretty sure is the most awesome rollercoaster I’ve ever been on. I rode the whole way with my arms in the air, screaming my head off, and I was hoarse afterwards. My mom called right as we were exiting the ride to excitedly inform me that they were flipping through the newspaper that morning and found a picture of me making a feather-angel at pillow fight club occupying the top half of the front page of the outdoor section in the St Paul Pioneer Press. Holy crap.
We spent most of the day there, and were all drenched in sweat and overheated in the low-90s humidity. Scott took the kids home around seven, and Stephanie and Ali and I headed right over to Downtown Disney without so much as a reapplication of deodorant. We were stinky, and we were fine with it.
We had dinner at the bar in the Rainforest Cafe, one of the very few restaurants there that knew the word ‘vegetarian’. The wait was an hour and a half, but we were lucky enough to sneak into the bar right at the time that a couple people were leaving. As we were sitting there eating, a dude and his girlfriend came up behind me more than once to order drinks; he’d order a Jack and coke or something similar, slam it while he was standing there, then order another. I finally turned around and said, “Dude! You’re hardcore!” He replied, “That’s how we roll in Tennessee!” I told him of my love for Nashville, and we talked about Tennessee for a while. As they walked away, his girlfriend said in a horrible drawl that my sister and I imitated for the rest of the night: “Ah think she likes you.” Hahaha. I LOVE SOUTHERNERS.
After dinner, we headed over to the location of the evening’s main event: PLEASURE ISLAND, or ‘PI’ to those in the know. Now, I have trouble explaining just how funny a Disney-sponsored group of nightclubs is, but it seriously amuses me. It’s Disney, and yet there’s nothing Disney about them, except for the fact that drinks are served in plastic buckets and jello shots arrive in big plastic syringes, and that for most of the night I was carrying around drinks with a big blue-flashing ice cube in them, which enhanced the dancing at least 125%. SO FUNNY. We started at Mannequins, the ‘gay club’ with the rotating dance floor, but it was only 9:30, and the place was nearly empty. We checked out the top 40 club and the BET club and found that the only one with people dancing in it was the 80s club, because that’s where all the old people hung out. Ali and I didn’t care; we went in and started flailing to Wild Cherry and Run-DMC. After twenty minutes or so, Stephanie had rolled her eyes so far back into her skull that we decided to go elsewhere, and by then the other clubs were filling up.
We spent a lot of time at Motion (I am not ashamed to admit that top-40 dance and hiphop is my preferred shakin’-it medium, and the funniest moment of the night was when they played ‘We Like to Party’, the song my sister always sings when she’s imitating dancing on the rotating dance floor), more time at Mannequins on the rotating dance floor (I had one of those beautiful back-home moments when they filled the room with fog while playing Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’, a song you’re guaranteed to hear at least four times every time you go dancing at the 90’s), and ended the evening at the BET club, where we met a guy who told us he’d worked as a sous-chef at one of the restaurants in the Contemporary Resort for 9 days, working 30-hour days (yep!), and that one of his jobs was to go out and meet people as an ambassador of magic, or some such crap. We figured hitting on every chick in a club probably wouldn’t count towards his magical-ambassador award as far as Disney was concerned, but it was pretty funny. He kept welcoming me to Minneapolis. I told him I was glad to be there.
Posted in orlando on June 1st, 2006 by jenni | No Comments »
Tags: disney, family, florida, orlando, pleasure island, seaworld
