Lately I've been writing about Disney World a lot. In fact I have about ten stories finished - you can read three or four of them below - and hope to have about twenty before I call it a book.

The thing is, I've never been there. The times I was in Florida, I never had the money, or the time, and in spite of having ten children, same - never had a few thousand to drop.

But this doesn't seem to be a problem. I can put almost anything into Google and get reams of information about it. It's almost like you can walk through a door into an alternate universe. All of a sudden, Mickey and Minnie are real, and there's a host of other characters. Thousands of employees will tell you what it was like to work there. Usually they are able to explain how the Disney culture is different from the culture around.

Disney is extremely well marketed to the upper-middle class American entertainment needs. It has managed to stay at the top of its game for fifty years and, in spite of raising its prices astronomically at every turn, keeps the park full and the money rolling in. Their marketing is based on perpetuating the "happiest place on earth" idea and quickly eliminating anything that might tarnish that image. I'm not down on them for squashing people's right to say something negative - they're not after me now, for example - I think it's part of good marketing. If employees agreed not to say anything negative, hold them to it. What's interesting to me is the fantasy/reality line - that is, when people genuinely get confused about what's real and what's not, and Disney does nothing or doesn't quite know how to deal with the problem. There are a lot of people, for example, who stalk or fall in love with the Disney characters. Not the people who play them, the characters. There are people who are living the fantasy. I could in fact use my book to explore schizophrenia and why it is that some people just slip into a fantasy world, since the real one is putting too much pressure on them.

Instead I am mostly using it to explore the American family - husband, wife, two kids - in all its glory. Maybe I'll do the other kinds of families too, step-families, large families, no-kid families, I'm not sure how. In the modern world we don't really have much of the upper middle class, two-kid families anymore, so in a sense I'm investigating what's left of them. Who actually goes to Disney World? What happens when they get there? In what ways to the various folk tales that this whole world is built around, affect their experience?

It's a rich vein for a book, lots here. You might be mad at me for writing about some place I haven't even set foot in. But in fact I've read and read about it. I avoid some areas of it; there is no way I can cover it all. And within it are entire worlds - each movie, for example, has its own entire culture, with its characters represented and played out somewhere within WDW - which makes me even more of an interloper, since I can't possibly know them all.

Ah but that's who I am. This is as close as I'll get to the place.