Summer Program at Disney

  Orlando, Florida
Saturday, June 17, 1995

My best memories of Orlando were when I spent a summer working in a college program. There were over 3,000 college students from all over the country living together and working at the various parks.  They ran out of room in the main apartment complex and about 300 of us ended up living in another apartment complex.  This turned out to be a blessing in disguis because as a smaller group we all got to know one another so much better.  In fact, the apartments were so much better!


I worked at Foto Toons in MGM Studios.  When the customers got off of the Great Movie Ride we would take your picture with different types of backdrops and then superimpose in the Disney characters that you like.  It was a fun job and we goofed off creating our own pictures all the time.  We even had our own picture of the day contest that I started in which we would try to create the silliest picture with a cuswtomer (without them knowing).  We hung pictures of all of our "winners" in the back room.

Working at Disney offered so many benefits.  It was so convenient to get in to the park and we could go to any park at any time for free!  Did you hear that?  Any park at any time for free!!!!

One time my friend and I wanted to get our hair cut so of all places we decided to go to the Magic Kingdom to get it done.  Most people don't know, but in the giant gift shop on Main Street there is a barber shop in the back.  It is even open to the public, but not many people know about it.  But what makes this story special for me is that when the public goes to the Magic Kingdom they must all go to a giant parking lot and then from there the only way to arrive at the park is via monorail or boat.  But as an employee I could just drive right
on in!!!  I would just drive past the Contemporary Hotel and then continue on and pull in to the lot right by Space Mountain.  Just like that I was there.  But even better is that the only entrance there is through the tunnel system so we would frive up to the park and then go right into the underground tunnels that run all underneath the Magic Kingdom.  From there we took the tunnels to the gift shop and came up in the barber shop.  We got to talking to the barber inside and he waved in the barber shor quartet that usually sings to the tourists on the street.  They came in and serenaded me the entire time I got my haircut.  Good times!

Another fun event at that time was the U.S. Olympic Basketball team visited and we
saw the parade with all of the members.  I was even out one night and ran in to Charles Barkley.

An interesting part of the college program is that they wanted to teach us about good business so once a week we would attend business workshops.  This is not my field, but they were very interesting.

Our apartments were great.  I lived with three other roomates.  We had a couple unreal parties at our place.

This summer was also the first time I played Around the World at Epcott where we had a beverage at each of the featured country's bars.  Being able to go to any park at any time was always fun to slip in to Epcott at night for the laser show.

One night they closed down MGM Studios from midnight until 4AM and opened it up just for the college program employees.  We rode the rides all night with no line.