Author Archives: Tin Man

Disneyland by Myself

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Last month I went to a work conference in Orange County in southern California. While I was there, I went to Disneyland. By myself.

When I told Matt several months ago that I’d be going to Orange County, he said, “You should totally go to Disneyland!” I said that I’d feel weird going there without him. We just took our first trip there last October, and I thought I’d feel sad and lonely being there by myself with nobody to share it with. I also thought I would feel weird being a man in my late 30s walking around Disneyland and going on rides by myself.

He responded that if the roles were reversed, he would have no qualms going without me. Gee, thanks, I said.

About a week before my trip, I started to regret that I hadn’t added an extra day before or after the conference to make a visit. I started to feel that it would be sad to be so close to Disneyland and not go. But it was too late to add an extra night at a hotel and to change my flight without paying an exorbitant fee. I thought maybe I could go on Friday after the conference ended for the day, but the regular price of a one-day/one-park ticket was $87, and Disneyland doesn’t sell half-day tickets. Since I wouldn’t be able to get to the park until late afternoon or early evening, $87 seemed way too much.

But then, while looking through my conference brochure, I saw a URL for discounted Disneyland tickets for conference attendees. It included a special , including a special rate for entrance to the Disneyland parks after 4 pm: $45 for one park, or $60 for both parks (Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure). That was much more reasonable. So I bought myself a $60 park-hopper ticket using the special website.

And on Friday evening in California, after my conference ended, I went to Disneyland by myself.

One of the perks of visiting Disneyland by yourself is that you can take advantage of Single Rider lines at many attractions. They don’t really advertise this; you have to know about it. Basically, if you’re going on a ride alone, you can get on a special line with a much shorter wait, which they use to fill in gaps in the vehicles. I planned to use this as much as I could.

As I arrived at the main plaza between the two parks, I felt giddy. I couldn’t believe I was back here at Disneyland, unexpectedly, just nine months after my first visit.

I definitely planned to check out Cars Land, which was still under construction last fall, as well as the main entrance and plaza at California Adventure, which was totally chopped up last fall and covered with plywood walls due to major renovations.

But first, the main park.

As soon as I entered the Disneyland park, I rushed over to Space Mountain and got a FastPass. Then I rushed back to the other side of the park for my first priority: Pirates of the Caribbean.

The biggest disappointment of our trip to Disneyland last fall was that Pirates of the Caribbean was closed for renovation. I’d really been looking forward to riding it, because the Disneyland and Walt Disney World versions are quite different; the Disneyland version is the original, and it’s nearly twice as long as the WDW version.

Fortunately, I knew it was back open this time, so I rode it first. I felt weird holding up one finger when the ride attendant asked how many were in my party, but the feeling quickly passed. I got placed in the back row of one of the boats with the whole seat to myself. The ride was fun — although it almost felt too long. But that might be because the boats stopped moving halfway through the ride, due to some malfunction. For two minutes I was stuck in the ocean between two pirate ships shooting cannons at each other.

After Pirates of the Caribbean I went over and rode the Haunted Mansion, which is a classic.

I should note: one of the advantages of being at Disneyland by myself was that I could maneuver around crowds much more easily. I could spot gaps in the crowds and suddenly dart around groups of people without having to make sure Matt was behind me, so I could get from place to place comparatively quickly. Comparatively.

After the Haunted Mansion I went to Splash Mountain, where I used the Single Rider option for the first time. It was hard to find; I had to ask a few different attendants. The wait was about 20 minutes, but that was OK, because the main line had a wait of more than an hour.

I didn’t feel as weird as I thought I would riding by myself. Nobody really noticed. Nobody thought I was the creepy lonely guy.

Next was Indiana Jones, also via Single Rider.

Then I went over to the Matterhorn, which has Single Rider as well. I was really looking forward to this, because they’d made some changes since last fall, including new cars. The wait was so short that I got right back on line after my first go-round and rode it again, this time on the other track. So much fun.

Next was dinner, and then I used my Space Mountain FastPass. I had forgotten how much fun this ride was. I had a blast, as you can see:

Me on Space Mountain

After I rode Space Mountain, the sun began to set, so I left Disneyland and headed over to Disney’s California Adventure in time to walk through Cars Land as dusk set in. I don’t know the Cars movies at all, but Cars Land is pretty cool — all lit up at night in neon.

Unfortunately, the headline attraction at Cars Land, the most popular ride, the ride everyone wants to go on — Radiator Springs Racers — was closed due to a technical malfunction. Had I got there earlier in the evening, I would have been able to ride it. But when I got there it had been shut down for an hour and they were saying it would probably be at least another hour before it was fixed. I was disappointed, because there wasn’t anything else in all of California Adventure that I felt like riding. And I wasn’t going to waste my time waiting for a ride that might or might not re-open. So I took a few photos and then went right back to Disneyland Park.

I went over to Fantasyland to try and ride Peter Pan’s Flight, which we’d missed last time, but all the Fantasyland rides were closed because they were getting ready for the fireworks. So instead I went over to Tomorrowland and rode Star Tours — where, for the third time in a row, including two rides on our previous visit, one of the two randomly-generated scenarios was the pod race.

Then I saw the fireworks, and then I was exhausted — still jet-lagged, plus I had to get up before 7 the next morning. So I left the parks, went to Downtown Disney, and took a cab back to my hotel. As I was in the cab, I went online and saw that Radiator Springs Racers had reopened. Dammit. But that was OK, because I would have been too tired to go back and wait on a 45-minutes-plus line anyway.

Other than some minor disappointments and snags, I had a great time at Disneyland by myself. It didn’t feel as weird as I thought it would. It’s definitely more fun with Matt, but going there by yourself isn’t too bad.

The Clock by Christian Marclay

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This afternoon I spent 3 hours and 18 minutes watching The Clock, by Christian Marclay, at Lincoln Center. It was fascinating and profound.

It’s easy to describe The Clock, but it’s not easy to describe the experience of watching it.

The Clock is a 24-hour montage of movie clips that feature clocks or mentions of the current time, shown in real time. For example, if it’s 6:05 p.m. when you’re watching, it’s 6:05 p.m. on screen. Sometimes the clips are edited together to show similarities, other times to show odd juxtapositions. The sound from one clip sometimes bleeds into another. The clips come from all decades and genres and countries (though mostly American and British), in black and white and in color, in various moods. It’s like a Chuck Workman montage on steroids. The experience is addictive and hypnotic.

Lincoln Center is showing it through August 1. Admission is free, and you can stay as long as you like, but there can be a wait, because there are only about 100 seats. When I arrived this afternoon, I was told the wait was about 90 minutes, but I wasn’t doing anything else, so I decided to go for it.

Once I got in, I intended to stay for at least an hour, maybe two hours tops. But I wound up watching for more than three hours — from 3:14 pm to 6:32 pm.

The thing is, it’s easy to stay longer than you intend. You constantly know what time it is, and yet you also lose track of time. Even though the film is essentially a few thousand movie clips chopped up in a blender, a sort of narrative tension emerges. You keep wanting to wait and see what the next clip will bring… and the next… and the next…

There is also some built-in narrative structure. Starting at 15 minutes before the top of the hour, you see a lot more clips of people anticipating things that are about to happen. In movies, important things happen at the top of the hour: the bomb explodes, the train leaves, the store closes, the alarm goes off. As I neared the top of an hour, I had to wait and see what would happen. I watched what happened at 4:00 pm, then stuck around for 5:00 pm, and then before I knew it, it was nearly 6:00 pm, so I had to stay for that, too.

As the clock ticked down from 4:59 to 5:00 pm, Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt sat in his office, staring at the clock on the wall, waiting for his last day of work to end and his retirement to begin.

Just after 6:00 pm, Mr. Banks of Mary Poppins walked through the door of his house singing “The Life I Lead”:

I run my home precisely on schedule
At 6:01, I march through my door
My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02…

The Clocks also shows you how movies condense the passage of time. For example, at about 4:50 pm, there was a clip of Steve Martin in Planes, Trains & Automobiles impatiently waiting for a meeting to end so he could catch a 6:00 pm flight. (We see 6:00 on his plane ticket.) Over an hour later, we see another clip from the same movie as he rushes through the airport to catch his plane, only to find it’s been delayed.

Similarly, four or five clips from The Time Machine appeared over the course of an hour. (And I saw three clips from One Hour Photo; that was kind of odd.)

At one point, something freaky happened. I suddenly wondered if there would be a clip from Clue — and less than five minutes later, there was. It was uncanny. I don’t remember what time anything happens in Clue, but something about the time of day — early evening — must have made me think about it.

Because that’s another thing: you can feel the mood of different times of day while watching The Clock. The late afternoon feels like a long stretch of indefinable time: people have trysts, children stare at the clock waiting to get out of school. At 5:00, work ends. In the 5:00 hour there are a couple of clips of children eating dinner, then as it gets later, people start making dinner, and other people start looking forward to their evening plans.

Watching The Clock, you really come to feel like “The Movies” exists as a separate, palpable, ongoing world where every year, every event, every reality is happening simultaneously. The feeling is heightened by knowing that The Clock is still going on right now even though I’m not there. It’s like there’s this alternate universe where things are happening right now — an alternate universality.

It was such an amazing experience. I wish I could see the whole thing. And I regret that I won’t be watching at 10:04 pm, when lightning strikes the clock tower in Back to the Future.

MOMA has apparently bought a copy of The Clock, so if you live in New York and won’t get a chance to see it this time around, you’ll get another opportunity.

It really should be available to stream online, so more people could see it.

Into the Woods at Shakespeare in the Park

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Last night Matt and I saw the Shakespeare in the Park production of Into the Woods in Central Park. Free tickets are distributed at 1:00 p.m., but because they only give out a limited number and it’s very popular, you really have to start lining up in the park by 6:00 a.m. to guarantee you’ll get tickets. You might be OK if you get there at 6:30, but if you get there at 7:00 you’ll most likely be too late, because the line will already be too long. (Each person in line can get 1 or 2 tickets until they run out.)

So yesterday Matt and I took the day off from work, dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:25 in the morning, got ourselves together, headed out the door, hailed a cab, and got to Central Park a few minutes before 6:00. The park actually doesn’t open until 6, so we had to line up at the entrance to the park at West 81st Street and Central Park West. There were already several dozen people ahead of us when we got there. A Public Theater staffer watched over things, explained some of the rules (such as: you can’t switch off with someone else in line), and said that those of us already in line would definitely be able to get tickets. Whew.

At around 6:00 a.m., the park opened, and the staffer led the line a little ways through the park and over to the Delacorte Theater. We then plopped down our stuff in line along a path leading up to the box office window and settled in for a seven-hour wait.

The seven hours actually went by incredibly fast. We brought chairs, suntan lotion, sunglasses, snacks, and stuff to pass the time. I had magazines, my Kindle, my iPad (loaded with a couple of movies), my iPhone, earphones, and a book of puzzles. It was like preparing for an airplane trip, but with 3G access. (Alas, no WiFi in the park.)

I wish I’d brought a hoodie, because for the first two or three hours I was surprisingly chilly in shorts and a t-shirt. It was already light out at 6:00, but it took a few hours for the sun to rise high enough to start warming things up. We lucked out with good weather; it wasn’t muggy or too hot.

There are restrooms near the box office, as well as a concession window that sells food and drinks. There’s also a guy passing out menus from a nearby deli: you can place orders, and they’ll deliver to you in line. People don’t mind if you leave the line for a few minutes at a time to use the bathroom, buy some food, or take a quick walk up and down the line. I took a few short strolls — I counted about 100 people ahead of us, and at about 10 a.m., I walked in the other direction and counted about 250 people snaking away behind us, most of whom would not get tickets.

The whole thing was very civilized. It’s nice sitting in the park under a canopy of trees, watching runners and bikers and dog-walkers.

The time flew by, and then at 12:45 we were told to start gathering up our stuff and begin compacting the line. At about 1:00, they started giving out tickets. When you get to the front, you just tell the guy whether you want 1 or 2 tickets per person, and he hands you some tickets.

Matt and I got four tickets, because my parents would be joining us. We were given Section O, Row Q, seats 512-515, which, according to the seating chart, were all the way on the end of a row. Given how early we got in line, we were a bit bummed not to get better seats, but we realized most of the good seats go to donors. And after all, the tickets were free. Later in the day I did a Twitter search and saw that some people in line got seats a bit closer to the center, although I didn’t see any that got much closer to the stage.

We went home and napped a bit, and then a few hours later we headed back to the park and met up with my parents. Outside the theater we saw Wesley Taylor (best known for Smash), and while sitting in our seats I saw Michael Urie in the audience. Apparently Tom Hanks was also there last night, and so was Jennifer Damiano.

Our seats turned out to be not bad at all. It’s a thrust stage, not a proscenium, so we could pretty much see everything. We did have a little trouble seeing the (spoiler alert!) giant at one point, but we could see it fine at another point.

It was only the second preview, so there are still some kinks to be worked out — the show dragged at times and ended after 11:00, but that will probably improve as the cast finds its groove. For me, the standouts were Jessie Mueller as Cinderella, Sarah Stiles as Little Red Riding Hood, Gideon Glick as Jack, and Ivan Hernandez and Cooper Grodin as the two princes. Amy Adams was surprisingly good as the Baker’s Wife for someone who is not normally a stage actress, and she did a particularly nice job with “Moments in the Woods.” Donna Murphy, of course, did a great, comical job as the Witch. And it was wonderful to see Chip Zien play the Mysterious Man, since he played the Baker in the original 1987 production (which my parents saw without me). And kudos to young Jack Broderick, who plays the Narrator.

There’s something special about seeing Into the Woods performed outdoors, with real trees in the background, especially as the sun goes down and the moon comes out. (Every so often I looked up and noticed that the moon had moved. It sure travels fast!) We weren’t sure we wanted to get up at the crack of dawn and wait in the park for seven hours, but I’m glad we did it.