My Youngest, Scurvy, and an Adventure.

I have three talented children: my daughters dance and sing, and my son paints… well, so do the girls.  

Yes, I’m a stage mother, why do you ask?

My son lives nearby, my older daughter lives near Seattle and we miss her terribly so we drive up to see her at least twice a year; the youngest usually lives nearby, but  I haven’t her since the first week of January because of her current job. Her fiance checks on us every couple of weeks and we have dinner together, which is some comfort since we all miss her so much.

She has worked for Disney since she was 18.  She started out as Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, played various other parts including Minnie, Donald, Stitch, Lilo, Piglet, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland:

She moved on to dancing in “Snow White the Musical”;  she played the bluebird:

Here she demonstrates that she can fly.

She’s engaged to the raccoon, but the skunk is dancing with her.

The reason I haven’t seen her in six months:

She is currently working on Disney’s cruise ship The Wonder as a character and dancer.  Her ship docks in Port Canaveral twice a week, and travels to Nassau and Castaway Cay twice a week. She calls us on Thursday and Sunday every week, the days she is in port, so we’ve managed to keep up a bit.  She has a wonderful roommate and has made some good friends on this cruise.  Her fiance visited her for a full week in May and brought back some short video clips he shot with his little digital camera, but his camera isn’t really designed for that so they are marginal. The stills he shot are still with Katie, on the ship. 

These are some of the performers from Aladdin; she’s the one in green. I found this on her MySpace, posted sideways, and grabbed it and rotated it. She’s wearing a wig.

She’s not had an entirely great time on this cruise; homesickness, missing her fiance, the food for cast members is not so great with  a really starchy menu and not enough fruits or veggies available, a thief among the cast members, a rigid and inexperienced boss who doesn’t understand how to schedule cast members so that all of them have a chance to get off the boat once a week, and so that they don’t break, and the 70 hour+ weeks that she works leave her exhausted.

Scurvy:

This week she announced that she has scurvy, as a result of the diet on the ship. She described marks like bruising on her arms and legs that appeared over the past two weeks and described other symptoms, but these are now nearly gone since she realized and has tracked down some oranges.  This was a self-diagnosis, so I don’t know for sure if she really had scurvy, but it sounds like it.

She’ll need to learn how to talk like a pirate.

Like I said, she has a great roommate and some very good friends on the ship, but it’s a long haul.    The contract began with training in Toronto in January and six months on the ship; she will fly home on August 25th.

An Adventure:

In July we will be on her ship for a four-day cruise, right when the weather is hot and hurricane season is well underway; we will have An Adventure. Yay!

This weekend I ran across this video on Youtube that shows her dancing in one of the shows, shot by a total stranger.  Kind of a strange thing to find, but I was looking for one on the odd chance … and there it was, tucked in among all the ones with earlier casts.  The woman who posted it is the mother of another performer on the ship, one of the vocalists.  She very kindly sent me a DVD of the shows she had taped.  We’ve been amused by the idea that we  have been photographed accidentally by so many tourists, even though we try not to cross in front of cameras when we’re at Disneyland; usually we’re in the background and realize after it’s too late.

Green and gold seem to be her colors:

The Circle of Life