The Disney year

Dotsero; Jubilee

After spending nearly a year and a half on cruise ships, I spent 1992 in Orlando, FL, trying to get established on land as a free-lance artist. I also auditioned for the music “powers what be” at Walt Disney World and got hired as a musician with “casual” status. That means that they felt that I was capable of playing the theme park shows whenever one of their keyboard players was sick or went on vacation. As far as I was concerned, the best part of the deal was my WDW ID card that got me into the theme parks whenever I wanted. Second best, though, was getting away from the ships for a while.

Let me tell you about two interesting aspects of cruise ship life. My formative years in the Midwest galvanized me into a direction-oriented person. I can typically tell you which direction is which in half of a second thanks to a grid like road system that lattices the middle of the country from western Ohio to eastern Colorado. When I boarded each cruise ship for the first time, it was with the concept that I was entering a building, noting the direction that the ship was pointed, orienting myself inside and out from that perspective. Subsequently, when disembarking in virtually every port, I was thoroughly directionally adrift.

Second, cruise ship life doesn’t operate on a calendar; from a practical standpoint, time is governed in the large scale by the itinerary of the ship. As land-locked people, we live our weeks in such a way that we don’t need to look at a calendar to know which day of the week we’re in. We use our calendars to tell us what activities and events we have planned for any given day. But when someone works on a cruise ship that has twelve to fifteen day itineraries, the only feature that honestly distinguishes one day from any other is the port that is visited. The days of the week have no meaning.

My friend Stephen K. once identified for me the slippery slope from the “no calendar” state of affairs to the “realization” of the meaningless of time to the delusion that one is living each and every day without responsibility in some sort of paradise. A person who exchanges reality for an exotic, counterfeit pretense of Shangri-La quite often will have a difficult time returning to Kansas.

When I arrived in Orlando, I immediately joined a church if for no other reason (although there were lots of reasons) than to distinguish at least one day of the week from the others. I made many friends at St. John Lutheran Church. I joined both the early and late service choirs because of the amazing people in each one.

October of that year, however, brought the realization that WDW was mostly about keyboards and not pianos. I decided to load up my stuff, point the Buick toward South Dakota and return to the callous glam of the cruise ships.

But not before having one last day at WDW. My friend Jill N. had a friend who played in a band that was appearing at a bar at Pleasure Island during the first week of December. So we made a day out of it, hitting all of my favorite attractions at all of the parks, grabbing some pizza at a very hip pub and catching the last two sets of Dotsero.

Dotsero is a real band of brothers. David and Stephen Watts (bass guitar and saxophone, respectively) have led a contemporary smooth jazz combo for eighteen years. They take their name from a small mountain town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Their songs are original, but their sound bears a resemblance to the Rippingtons and Spyro Gyra with maybe a nod toward Solar Wind. I certainly enjoyed their show. David came over and spent his break visiting with Jill and me. I bought one of their CDs and asked them to sign it.

I worked for another two and a half years on cruise ships starting in January 2, 1993. But my time in Orlando grounded me for a while. With the exception of making marvelous new friends, this was the most valuable thing I acquired in 1992.

Credits: To the choirs of St. John Lutheran Church in Orlando, FL, for their commitments to musical excellence in worship. And for your invaluable friendship. Thank you.