My name is Todd, and I am addicted to Disney theme parks.
This spring, I spent 10 days at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., even though I live less than an hour away from Disneyland, which I visit at least several times during any given month. For the amount of money it cost me to go to Disney World, I could have gone almost anywhere on the planet, a fact pointed out to me by a woman I had hoped to date.
"Why?" she said, with a mixture of confusion and disgust when I told her about my then-upcoming trip; she herself was headed to Spain for two weeks. The implication: Why didn't I take this opportunity, as a single man in his soon-to-be-late-30s, to explore the world rather than the World Showcase?
That's a good question.
It's not weird to be a fan of Disney parks. Just shy of 18 million people visited Disneyland alone last year, according to a report from Los Angeles consulting company Aecom, and the tourist franchise it spawned has shaped and reflected American pop culture for more than 60 years. And yet I recognize that my habit of visiting Disneyland multiple times each month could be viewed as odd.
So while I wasn't going to change my vacation plans, I realized I needed a solid answer to that semi-disgusted "Why?" _ one that went beyond the standard conclusion that it's "fun."
After things with the woman went bust and I returned from Florida, I rang up Marty Sklar. If anyone should be able to articulate why we love Disney parks, it's a former head of Walt Disney Imagineering who wrote speeches for Walt. So, I asked Sklar, why did I pick Disney World over, say, Spain?
"That's a hard question to answer," he said.
Clearly, this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought.
