I know I seem good natured when people tease me about liking WDW. After all, I know why people don’t like it - they either have preconceived notions and haven’t been there for awhile or they’ve gone and experienced it all wrong. That, or their hearts are hardened into shriveled, cynical, and ironic little balls and they don’t have the capacity to find real pleasure in anything. I’m not the one to judge.

Anyway, the fact that WDW is more than a silly amusement park comes as a surprise to Florence Fabricant, who enjoys telling us that she thought about it for about 5 minutes and then took her own little ones to Italy instead of WDW when they were small. In her June 27, 2008 NY Times article, “Call it Disney’s Food Kingdom”,  she took her grandchildren, and has apparently discovered the New World -  Hey there,  Christopher Columbus!  We Vikings have known about this for a long time. She uses words like “clever”, sophisticated” and “intelligent” to describe the attractions and notes the “excellence” of  the restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the vindication, but I can’t help thinking that my friends will read this and now suddenly find credence in what I’ve been saying for years.

She has discovered the Ying and the Yang of WDW, as I talked about in my very first blog entry. The real sushi next to the kids’ “sushi” (rice crispie treats covered with gummy fish), the fine wines with Dole Whips, and international cuisine hand in hand with character meals. She has discovered the wonder and imagination of Animal Kingdom and the magic of seeing little ones become princesses.

I guess I can’t really blame Florence, because aren’t all converts like this? So excited to “discover” something as if they were the first to ever see it? We old timers should thank Florence for the good press. Maybe the eye rolls we get when people say “You’re going to WDW again???” will someday be a thing of the past.