Greg first learned about Club 33 on an internet list titled, “10 Places You Can’t Go.” It’s a secret restaurant in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square, located within the suite Walt Disney once used to wine and dine corporate sponsors. The reason for its exclusivity: club members pay annual stipends of $3, 275. As if this wasn't ludicrous enough, there's an initiation fee of $10,000. The membership list has a fourteen year wait.
Being Greg, his first reaction was to pine bitterly for this forbidden temple. When we went to Disneyland with our friends Evan and Geoff last April, we even located Club 33’s entranceway: a nondescript green door next to the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop, embossed only by a bronze placard reading “33 Royal Street” and a hidden intercom. Evan had to be volubly dissuaded from using the intercom and trying to bluff his way inside. We left, moseying with defeat.
Little did Greg suspect that, two weeks later, one of his classmates was going to lean over her desk and say, “Hey, a bunch of us are going to Club 33 this weekend. Want to come?”
He’s a lucky guy.
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When we pulled into the parking lot that morning, a kid leaped from the van next to us and smacked the front of Greg’s car, yelling, “Disneylaaand!”
Because of our reservations with Club 33, we got into the park for free (that being the central reason I’d been persuaded to go). We spent the day with a group of Greg’s classmates, ambling around in plainclothes. When it came evening, Greg and I headed back to the parking lot. Trying to change into a dress in the sizzling leather car, I almost wept with frustration.
Finally coiffed properly, we passed back into the park, the staff members on security giving our fancy duds glances of amusement. We met up with Greg’s classmates in an alleyway of New Orleans Square, witnessed a guy proposing to his girlfriend (to which she responded, “Oh God, no!” before saying yes), and were finally buzzed into the lobby.
Club 33 might be the only place in the park where the staff doesn’t automatically smile. “Would you like to take the stairs, or use the French lift?” the hostess asked solemnly.
We were shepherded into an ornate, mahogany room with animal heads on the wall and stuffed birds in glass cases. I later learned that this was called the “Trophy Room.”
Our table had two servers: a corpulent, affable, completely insincere one who explained the menu—and a younger one, who, it became clear over the course of the evening, wasn’t allowed to speak. He poured Evian into our glasses and cleared away bespattered forks. Whenever I thanked him, he nodded, lips un-twitching.
As Greg put it, we didn’t just have waiters at Club 33: we had “waiters and minions.”
The menu itself was a flabbergasting item largely in French—most likely to convince guests to order “The Vintner”, a five course meal complete with duck jerky (excuse me, “compote”) and “artisan cheeses.” ‘Vintner’ was certainly the easiest thing to say. All the other options came with adjectives: “Alaskan Line Caught Sablefish,” “Pan Roasted Filet of Chateaubriand,” “Viking Village Day Boat Scallop.”
Club 33 is the only place in Disneyland that serves alcohol. We ordered the cheapest wine on the menu.
I spent the first half of the meal wondering whether I should wear my jacket or hang it on the back of my chair (the temperature in the Trophy Room was on the edge of nippy), and the second half wondering if it would be polite for me to get up and use the bathroom. The bathroom, oddly enough, turned out to be the most interesting aspect of the club: the porcelain toilet was encased in a woven pink basket.
It almost didn’t flush.
My overall assessment of Club 33: it was bland. The atmosphere was constricted, the food mediocre. At the end of the meal, we paid in a leaning tower of cash. We left, and rode Buzz Lightyear’s Astroblasters, shootin’ lasers at alien overlords in our fancy clothes.
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Coda:
“Hang on to your children, ‘cause this here’s the wildest ride in the wilderness!”
‘Wilderness.’ What an archaic and interesting word. It pops up in the iconic beginning of the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster, when a disembodied hillbilly gives the safety instructions. When I was a toddler and my family went to Disneyworld, we stayed in an area called “Fort Wilderness.” There’s a home video of me jumping around our cabin in my altogether, singing about the seven dwarfs.
That aside, I think this word ‘wilderness’ is at the heart of Disney’s theme park success. ‘Wilderness’ is a romantic word; a romanticized word. It’s an idea of the natural environment as only mildly dangerous. It calls to mind the ridiculously stereotyped statues of Native Americans that line Disneyland’s “Rivers of America.”
‘Wilderness’ is a place to have adventures, to be gently but never thoroughly scared: rather like Disneyland itself.
The danger of a wilderness is that you can forget it isn't real.
I delight in contrived, idiosyncratic, funky worlds. Because of Disney, I’ve been told by a robotic singing carrot to eat more vegetables. I like robotic singing carrots, and I really do like Robot Lincoln.
None of this, however, is anything more than a human construction: a dream. A dream built of concrete, and plaster, and microchips.
I fell in love with science fiction because it, of all literary modes, leads people to think about the nonhuman—to think about the truly wild, the truly Other experience of life. There’s nothing about Disneyland that points to (or respects) the reality of our interconnectedness with other species. I can't think of anything ecologically sound about Disneyland, or healthy--I wouldn’t jump into that green water for five hundred dollars. And those mice would never survive in the wild (no matter how well they can sing).
Perhaps this will clarify my point of view:
My family took another journey to Disneyworld when I was sixteen. I was totally excited about the theme park—but, in retrospect, my favorite part of the trip was the drive out of the airport. That was the only time I got to see indigenous Florida trees.
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