Dancing with the Mouse!

My week was jammed packed full of fun! The start of the week was normal just work FHE and sleep! Tuesday at work I got to go to the warehouse to get some stuff for festivals and because of that I got to wear jeans! I like it when I don't have to get all dressed up for work. The warehouse is huge and full of old a new stuff for Disney, kind of cool the things that are in there. Wednesday I got to work on my talk to speak in church today. I had a very different topic, speaking on the perpetual education fund and the other offerings on the tithes and offerings slip. It went well and I'm glad it's over. Then Thursday was an amazing day. I guy that works on my floor his wife works for La Nouba. Crowds have been down and to make it a better experience for everyone they were giving out tickets and so he secured some for us. La Nouba is an awesome show, I have now seen it three times and I love it. This time we were on the third row, and I didn't like too much being up that close. When the trapeze artists were performing it was hard to watch because they were right above me. I prefer seats further away so that I can catch everything.



When the show was over our manager had us wait around for a minute, we thought he was just going to tell us stuff about work, but no we were wrong. A friend of his works there and took us on a tour. I had gotten to go on a tour the first time I went with a guy from the ward, who had just left La Nouba a few weeks ago because he got a part in Dralion and is now training in Canada to join them on tour in Australia (rough life huh?). We got to see pretty much everything in the building, all 9 floors! It was neat to see how everything works in the show. I am usually not too afraid of heights, but the catwalk 7 stories up was a bit scary to look down. We even went up to the 9th floor and walked around on the grid, high above the seats! It was way cool. It was an amazing experience, that I wasn't prepared for, I was wearing heels, not good footwear for a 2 hour tour, but I survived and finally made it home at 1 am. Lazy Tiffany and her roommate slept in and Tiff didn't go to work the next day because she was too tired.

Incase you haven't figured out yet, I really love my job. It is pretty much one of the best jobs ever! My manager is amazing and knows all sorts of people. Friday after La Nouba all of us at work were like "Did we really just do that?" Who does our manager not know? I had even more fun at work on friday. I got to go shadow a Magic Music Days Guest Talent Coordinator at the Magic Kingdom. I was so excited because it was my first time ever to work at the MK. We met the marching band over by Splash Mountain and brought them backstage to the Magic Music Days facility where their bus was waiting for them. We gave the band some instructions and then had them get ready to march before the 3 o'clock parade. We got to lead them down the parade route through the Magic Kingdom. It was so fun, and we got to make sure that everyone was out of the way for them to march through. This is a job I could do more often. Then we took them back to the MMD facilities to change to go back into the parks. It was fun to talk to the kids and see how things were, how they were liking the trip and their favorite part. Some of them even wanted to know how I liked my job and how I got there. I like guest interaction like that, makes what I am doing more fun. Then after work Tiff, Tiauna and I went and saw Confessions of a Shopaholic. Go see it, HILARIOUS! It is funny and has some good lessons to learn.

Saturday morning I got to wake up way early to be at the Magic Kingdom by 7:30am. I was able to pick up a glorious 12 hour overtime shift for saturday helping with this crazy event called Twirlmania. We were meeting our first group of baton twirlers at 8am. They were marching at 10am. It took awhile to get them all gathered and marched backstage to MMD to get lined up for their march. This group was funny very interesting. It was about 200 girls from somewhere in florida. They were all ages, but that wasn't really supposed to happen. You see at Disney there are some things you see backstage that can be traumatizing to some, so they make it a rule that they need to be at least 8 to come backstage. We were talking to some of them and finding out how old they were. One girl told us that she was 5, but her mom told her to tell us that she was 8. So we marched them down the parade route and then released them back to their families and then took a lunch break and then got our next group of girls. The next two groups were intense, 500 of my closest baton twirling friends! We would get them gathered and start sending them down to keep things moving and relieve the congestion where they were gathering. Then we marched them again, and this time they were before the 3 pm parade, so there were lots of people already lining the parade route.

Getting ready for the last parade of the day was kind of the best and craziest. We had to take them to the staging area backwards because of timing of other shows and yada yada yada. We got them to the staging area and then waited for the new "Move it, Shake it, Celebrate" floats to come back in. When characters and other performs come backstage they quickly leave character, so they weren't too happy to come through the gate after dancing the past 30 mins to see 500 people waiting backstage. The Mad Hatter had the greatest face, he finished the song and then look over and made the face of, oh crap there are tons of people over there, dang it! I'm sure he might have been thinking other things but they aren't too Disney friendly! We then got to watch everyone take their costumes off. For some it is traumatizing, for me intriguing, I love the whole backstage process of stuff, and it doesn't ruin the magic for me. After that was all cleared it was time to step off for the 3rd time. I had so much time leading these twirlers, it must just be my love of performing and being onstage. I would love to pick up more of these shifts. Our first festival is this weekend. I am so excited to see how it goes. It is the Jazz Celebration, the first one that Disney has done, so it is fun to be part of the inaugural event, and there are some big name Jazz people coming. All I have to say is YAY for overtime! I'm excited for my paycheck the next to weeks.