Fanatical, Part 1

You meet a wide variety of people in Walt Disney World.

Most of them are the fun families. Parents, grandparents, kids. Really, though, they’re all kids at heart- I’ve seen grown men hand their children and bags to their wives, and run through a shower of bubbles, screaming and whooping like they were five. It’s Disney…that’s perfectly normal behavior, no matter what the age.

So, quite a few of the guests I’ve come across are families like that, along with couples, happy individuals, or massive tour groups. They’re all, for the most part, incredibly friendly. True, tempers rise the longer they’ve been in the park, but we understand.

And then, you meet a few…oddballs.

I met one of those people yesterday. And don’t get me wrong…I may refer to him as an oddball, but he made my day. He was amazing. I was working in Uptown.  It had slowed down for a little while, so I was out on the floor, walking around.

When I spotted him.

Or, rather, his hat.

It was the Stitch hat we sell in the Chapeau. But along with the Stitch hat, he had the Stitch claws too. I don’t see people wearing that combination very often, so I had to go over and say something to him.

He responded to my compliment first in his normal voice, then in the Stitch voice. I laughed. One of my co-workers came over and told him to show me his pins.

He had about thirty pins. Some were on his lanyard, and the rest were on a corkboard stashed in his backpack. All of them were  Stitch related. A lot of them I had never seen before. We spread them out on one of the display cases, and he started telling me stories about how he got them, and why he had some of them.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more interesting, he started to talk about the American Idol Experience at Hollywood Studios. Wouldn’t it be cool if he went there and auditioned? Wearing the hat and claws, of course. Unchained Melody in the Stitch voice.

That would be amazing.

At my request, he started singing. In the middle of Uptown, in his Stitch voice. A lot of people were staring, but he didn’t care, and neither did I.

My one regret? Not learning his name. He was awesome.