Disney's Stories

Ever since I was a little kid there have been 3 things I loved to do more than any other. One, as evidenced by this picture, was performance.
This was during a visit from our grandparents- we decided to put on a show for them and it ended up being a reenactment of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence from the Disney film, Fantasia. We went all-out with the costuming, and really got into our roles. I got my brother to be the crocodile, using his green raincoat, green pants and green slippers and a red sweater for a cape; my sisters wore their gymnastic leotards to take on the role of hippos and ostriches. As the elephant, I went all in grey; grey hoodie and sweatpants, grey socks on my arms and feet, with a grey sock on a bent-up clothes hanger for a trunk, and a grey clip-on tie for a tail. The sign my sisters are holding up said, "The End," naturally (an early attempt at Brechtian techniques?). I guess this was also my earliest foray into the world of theatrical directing.

Disney movies seem to have played a role in a lot of my earliest inspirations.

The other two things I loved best were writing stories and drawing. In the room where I was supposed to work on schoolwork, we had a mickey mouse lamp, looking pretty much exactly like these pictures I dug up from ebay:
I still have the lamp, but the shade, being probably just as old as I was, crumbled years ago and was replaced by a more generic one. But while the shade still existed, I used to look at the characters on it, and one day c. 1990 (I would have been probably 8 then), when I was supposed to be doing math or something, I took some scrap paper and tried to copy the characters, then on the back of the papers I wrote a short story about each of them. Actually, looking at some of these, and given how young I was, I think now that I may have just put the paper up the the light and traced them. But I was proud of my accomplishment at the time...

on the page above you can see a partially erased rendition of one of the chipmunks.
maybe next time I'll put something up that wasn't traced...