Read Online Chris Mitchell by Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoir - Free Book Online Page A

right range for Genie, Captain Hook, or one of the princes; therefore, you’re ‘prince height.’”
    Brady guided me down a tunnel and into a room filled with wigs on Styrofoam heads. Two women were perched on stools, brushing the wigs. They barely noticed us standing in the doorway. “Face roles,” Brady continued, “are more specific, and for that reason, they’re more highly coveted. Hair color and style are incidental as every performer wears a meticulously maintained wig. This is nonnegotiable. Disney doesn’t care if your stylist sculpts your mane into a perfect Snow White bob. You will be wearing an even more perfect Snow White hairpiece. To an extent, race doesn’t matter. Most of the Pocahontas girls are Puerto Rican or Dominican, while the Chinese princess, Mulan, might be anything from Brazilian to Vietnamese. But to be a face character, you have to exhibit an explicit list of facial features. Alice, for instance, has a soft, roundish face, while Jasmine has angles reminiscent of her Middle Eastern ethnicity. Tarzan is lean, Jane a little more filled out. Meg has Mediterranean eyes. Snow White has big round eyes. Eye color itself doesn’t matter, thanks to the invention of colored contact lenses, but a smile always has to be natural.”
    Brady looked at his watch. “I’m afraid that’s the end of the line,” he quipped with the twang of a Wild West prospector. “Until next time, keep your hands in your pants and reach for the stars!”
    Confined as I was to the Animal Kingdom photo lab, I didn’t have many more opportunities to interact with the character performers. Still, I had plenty of time to meet my teammates on the Disney photo squad, and I could see Orville hadn’t been exaggerating about their skills. Of the fifteen men and women in the department, only two had any photo experience whatsoever, and I was one of them. Most of the shots that passed through my hands were underexposed, blurry, or off center, a condition that never escaped Orville’s watchful eye.
    Eventually, I was promoted to film runner. My duties consisted of muling rolls of film from the photographers in Camp Minnie-Mickey to the lab and 5” × 7” prints from the lab to the sales desk. It was a minimum-wage duty that was usually reserved for the mentally challenged Cast Members, but I was working my way up, “earning my ears” as Orville would remind me. I didn’t mind running the film though. It got me out of the lab and backstage where I could finally interact with my fellow Mouseketeers.
    The Cast Members who worked in Food & Beverage were the most talkative. They would ask to bum a smoke and then chat about anything. The souvenir salespeople were equally friendly, as were the maintenance staff and anybody who carried a broom and dustpan around the outskirts of the park. The performers in the character department, however, were impossible to crack. They would survey my wardrobe and inquire politely about my job. Then, they would drift away. It was like pulling up to a Hollywood party in a Kia.
    For all outward appearances, there was no single feature that united Disney Cast Members. They didn’t have perfect skin or straight teeth. They didn’t have to be beautiful or striking in appearance with Cinderella blue eyes or Charming high cheekbones. Some came straight out of high school, their hearts filled with innocent altruism, whereas others were working through their retirement years. Men and women joined up in even numbers being myopic, bald, buxom, disabled, or wearing braces. There was no one representative race, religion, or hairstyle. In fact, if it weren’t for the stringent appearance guidelines outlined in the The Disney Look book, there would be no way to pick a Disney character performer out of a crowd.
    I wanted to believe that being a Cast Member was like being part of a kibbutz, everybody collectively working toward the same goal. But I couldn’t fool myself for long. Eventually, I had to face the