Today’s prompt in the blogging series I’m doing with my friends Jay of The Scented Library and Julie of The Redolent Mermaid is to discuss how we’d put together our perfect Fall event or vacation. For our dreamer purposes, the real fun in this hypothetical planning process comes from the fact that we are unencumbered by any real world concerns – money (or a lack thereof), professional and personal schedules, ANY of the usual obligations. So please do check out both Jay and Julie’s blogs to see what sort of autumn shenanigans they’d get up to completely off the chain!
As for me, come on, you know it all begins and ends with Disney’s Haunted Mansion! A wedding – hmm, a Halloween vow renewal for two Disney nerds coming up on their 14th? – the actual ceremony of which takes place in the lobby, in front of the fireplace, beneath the changing portrait of Master Gracey. Afterwards, guests (and did I mention I have a team of makeup artists and costumers on hand to garb our guests in the finest of the Mansion’s moldering fashions?) will pass through the Stretching Room before boarding Doom Buggies draped in swags of jet black roses. Upon reaching the diningroom reception, guests will disembark (please don’t ask me how they’re going to climb down, particularly encumbered by dusty, gothic fashions; this is my crazy, impractical dream!) and enjoy a sumptuous feast of, well, this (this being a strip loin steak topped with balsamic shallot butter on a bed of four cheese pancetta and arugula pasta from Mama Melrose’s in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.)
And for my husband and our other vegetarian guests, there will be a plant-based option that tastes EXACTLY like a steak. Actually, come to think of it, if that were an option, the entire meal would be veggie. I ultimately kind of hope that if such a thing actually existed, the entire world would be veggie, but I digress. No one will drop even a crumb of food down their fronts, and everyone will remain on the responsible, pleasant side of intoxication. Because there be margaritas a-plenty!
After dessert (my mom’s homemade apple pie, 13 tiers of it and miraculously calorie-free) my new-old husband will waltz me around the dance floor, weaving in and out among the ghosts, to the strains of twenty one pilots, who are there because we’re personal friends and I can just call them up like that. Josh will NOT be wearing a shirt with sleeves.
This actually reminds me of the ever-so-hopeful exploratory phone call Mr. Finger Candy placed to Disney event services when we were planning our wedding nearly 14 years ago. He had asked me at one point shortly after we got engaged what my dream wedding looked like, and I gave him pretty well all of the details I laid out above (minus the twenty one pilots stuff, although then – and now – I’d also accept Green Day. Mike Dirnt’s got nice arms for a bassist.) So one day he rang them up and asked real casual-like how much it would cost to actually rent out the Mansion, or a portion thereof, for a private event.
Later on that evening we both nearly laughed ourselves into asthma attacks as he recounted the very pleasant and also very delusional Disney rep who quoted him a figure just north of 50K, including a whole host of guarantees we had to make regarding room, food and alcohol sales. And that was for a two or three-hour event, at best, held in the dead of night after park close, and without any access to the actual ride itself. I suppose if you had REAL money, you could close the entire ride down just for yourself (hell, close the entire park down just for yourself) but for us regular plebs “just” looking to shut down a small portion of a beloved ride in the most popular theme park in the world (!!) we were looking at a solid $75,000 investment.
So it might have taken 13 years to get there, but I’m feeling really quite positive about our decision last year, on our Halloween anniversary, to ride the Haunted Mansion 13 times in one day. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had on our anniversary, a total bucket list item, and it didn’t cost us 75 grand!
Finally, just to keep it wax-relevant, here’s a bit of the Melting Duck’s Foolish Mortal, a Haunted Mansion-inspired blend I picked up some weeks back. It smells like peppermint-vanilla gum, herbal and a little bit tingly, and the shapes and colours are perfection! Love everything about this ghostly lovely.
Finger Candy 