Free Chris Mitchell by Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoir

Celebrators are wearing white, so the camera’s automatic meter function overcompensated for the brightness. We can all learn something from this. When there is a lot of white in the photo subject, remember to open the aperture a little more. One or two thirds of a stop should do the trick. Can everyone remember that?”
    Everybody in the room nodded, their eyes like buttons on stuffed animal faces. Slowly, they grabbed their cameras and wandered back out into the park. Marco approached me, beaming.
    “Hola, chico. I hope you don’t mind if I point out the flaws in your photography.” His words were draped in false sincerity.
    “I don’t mind,” I shrugged. “I really didn’t think the photo was that great.”
    “An artist has to be open for constructive criticism,” he said, fluttering his Maybelline lashes. “It makes his work better.”
    “I don’t know if this qualifies as art,” I said.
    He put his hand on my arm and smiled. “What you do is not art.” Then, with an effeminate head flick, he did a little pirouette and walked out.
    I recognized the type immediately. In polite beach society, we called him a kook, but there were plenty of other names for guys like Marco: ass-kisser, backstabber, liar. Kooks talked a big game. They tried to work their way into the tribe with fast talk and stories about twenty-stair handrails that nobody ever witnessed, but they were always undone by their actions. I hated kooks.
    “Your alpha dog just pissed on my leg,” I said when Orville appeared at my shoulder.
    Orville had the plastic smile of a game show host who didn’t care which contestant won, just as long as the camera stayed focused on him. “He’ll get over it. Now, get back to Camp.”
    One of the perks of being a Disney photographer was getting to spend time in the air-conditioned character break rooms where performers changed out of their costumes, rested, and prepared for the next set. The Camp Minnie-Mickey break room was located right behind the kiosks, hidden from sight by hibiscus bushes through Cast Members Only gates. Unlike the underground tunnels of Magic Kingdom, the backstage at Animal Kingdom was outdoors at ground level. It was a world without landscaping budgets or background music; the barely contained swamp of Central Florida where crabgrass and creeping vines struggled for space between mobile trailers, aluminum-sided office warehouses, and cracked concrete patios; and a place where Cast Members could sit down, eat, and point with one finger and frown. Of all the frowning people backstage, the most morose were the ones in the character costumes. Sprawled out in lounge chairs, wearing fractions of sweaty animal costumes, they swore and smoked and looked genuinely miserable.
    At first, it was disturbing—these big, furry animals with sweaty human heads, but eventually, I grew comfortable with the foulmouthed hybrids. At that point, it didn’t seem so strange when, one morning, checking under the stall walls for a free toilet, I found a lineup of big colorful feet: Rafiki, Goofy, Brer Rabbit, just doing what comes natur’lly.
    After a week or so in the kiosks of Camp Minnie-Mickey, I got to know some of the character performers. There was a Pluto named Alan, a Goofy named Rusty, and some guy doing Tigger who changed his nickname every few days and would only respond to the proper moniker. It didn’t take me long to cross the line.
    Some kid had just punched Mickey in the nuts and run off, trailed by profusely apologizing parents. The woman in Mickey was a sweet-natured, bespectacled woman in her fifties named Sunny, who always brought her own vegan lunch in a brown paper bag. She was doubled over when I reached her side, white, four-fingered gloves clutching at her mouse belly and the Mickey head grinning amiably.
    “Holy shit, Sunny,” I whispered, low enough that no guest could hear. “Are you okay?”
    The Mickey head jerked up and the white glove slashed across its throat in the