THE LITTLE GIRL with the butter-scotch curls who lives in our house has a fond affection for the flickerings of the TV tube. And that is how it all began. On Sunday evenings she and her brother, the crown prince, who is five, watch the wonders of Disney unfold on the electronic storyteller. They came to know well the fairyland whence all these dreams are made. One winter the little girl could stand it no longer and, approaching her father, said, with the proper pitch of plaintiveness, “If you take me to Disneyland, I will be your best friend.” Being a small girl, she knows very handily that her merest wish is her father’s command, and to be her best friend is to be smothered with a daughter’s kisses. So when summer came, we gathered up the queen mother and the crown prince and flew off to Disneyland.
As dreams go, it was a cross between Oz and Wonderland, for we shook hands with Pluto and Pinocchio, bumped against the rubber stomachs of the Three Little Pigs who walk about the premises considerably larger than life. We sailed off in Peter Pan’s flying boat and submerged in a submarine to see the giant clamshells and the live mermaids. “Wow!” said the crown prince of the latter, an exclamation repeated by his father.
It was a glorious day, and all that could be said wrong with it was that our hotel was clear back in Beverly Hills, nearly 30 miles away.
“Can we come back next year?” asked the crown prince. “And stay at the Disneyland Hotel?” asked the little girl, an observant sort, who had spied its many-storied splendors rising in the mist somewhere beyond the plastic alp and abaft a cardboard castle, which is the domain of the Sleeping Princess.
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