A Decent Proposal, Part 1

Originally published October 27, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1406

“I have a plan… and it’s so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel.”—Edmund Blackadder

I wasn’t going to write about this, but several friends of mine in the fan community have told me I should because they thought you guys might be interested. And I suppose it’s somehow appropriate: Although it was never anything I’ve intended, I’ve lived my life in this column. Ups, downs, good times and bad; it’s been like weekly therapy sometimes, the differences being that I don’t have to pay for it and I’ve got about twenty thousand therapists… most of whom don’t say all that much to me in terms of guidance, but then again, many therapists just sit and listen, and the only time they speak is when they say, “Time’s up.”

So…

I decided to ask Kathleen, my girlfriend of three years, to marry me.

It was not something I did lightly, and certainly not without some degree of trepidation. Nevertheless, it felt good, it felt right, and it felt like it was time. But how to do it? I only knew that I wanted to do something stylish, because I felt she deserved it. And I also knew that I wanted as many of my children as possible to be present when I did it, because it was going to affect them as well. If they were going to share in her being their stepmother (something I knew they supported since I’d spoken to each of them about it individually), they should also get to share in the emotionality of the moment rather than Kathleen and I just coming back from a dinner and our saying, “Guess what?” Only one place seemed suitable:

Walt Disney World.

We were going to Disneyworld anyway on a family vacation at the beginning of September. Shana was flying down from college to join us, so we’d all be together, staying in one of those cool family-sized cabins at Ft. Wilderness. The question then became, Where at the Park? One popular place was the restaurant inside the Castle; it’s such a popular venue for popping the question that there’s a whole department in Disney that helps stage proposals there. But if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that relationships weren’t storybook, weren’t flights of fancy. They were more of… an adventure. And that’s when it hit me:

The Adventurer’s Club

To use the official Disney description, the Adventurer’s Club—situated on popular night spot Pleasure Island—is “an interactive entertainment experience in a setting reminiscent of the fictional 1930’s gentleman adventurer clubs, as depicted in Hollywood films of that era…

Think of the AC as a theater that is presenting a play. In ordinary theaters, the audience is seated while the action continuously unfolds on the stage in front of them over a fixed, limited period of time. The AC, however, has the action sporadically occur all around you, even to the extent of your functioning as an extra in the play. At the AC you are a visitor to the Adventurer’s Club, circa 1935, and are treated as such by the resident cast of characters.”

The cast includes “Fletcher Hodges, the slightly off-center Club curator,” “Graves the Loyal Club Butler,” and others. But two other characters, found in the Club’s Man Salon, are Babylonia and the Colonel. Babylonia is a gigantic talking goddess mask, and the Colonel is a 1930s-style British Raj-style officer. Both of them are puppets.

It was perfect. Kathleen is, by trade, an editor, but by training, a puppeteer. The plan leaped from my brow fully formed (scaring the cats and knocking over the furniture): I, the writer, would write a script for one of the puppets, who would then propose to the puppeteer in the Main Salon at the AC… provided I could get the folks at the AC to go along with it.

A few calls to Disney put me together with a fellow named Bill Shepherd. I’m still a little murky on his exact position there, but he was definitely the go-to guy for setting something like this up. I explained exactly what I wanted to do, and sent him the copy for what I’d want the Colonel (it was quickly decided that he would be the more appropriate conveyor of the proposal) to say:

“You’re here in the Adventurer’s Club, Kathleen, so you must be an adventurous girl. Tell you what, Kathleen: I’m going to invite you to take part in an adventure right now. You see, the rather round fellow you’ve been dating for the past three years—Peter—is standing next to you with an engagement ring. And Peter’s hoping that you will accept this proposal of joining in the adventure of marriage, and become a wife to him and a stepmother to his three daughters—preferably not an evil stepmother, because we all know where that leads. What say you, Kathleen—?”

Of course, if she said no, I’d look like the king schmuck of the Universe. But then again, writing this column for ten years has certainly prepared me for that feeling.

Shepherd set the whole thing up. The question of course was when. I worked out an itinerary of our stay at the Park one evening and casually said to Kathleen, “How about we hit Pleasure Island on the 3rd (of September), say, around… oh… ”

“Ten p.m.,” suggested Kathleen.

“That sounds fine,” I said, and gleefully informed Shepherd of exactly when we’d be there. He had to know the time so that the Club “members” could work the proposal deftly into the evening’s activities without throwing the normal schedule off. I was told to touch base with “Fletcher Hodges” as soon as I arrived in order to put the thing into motion. “He’ll be wearing a pith helmet and a skirt; he should be easy to spot,” Shepherd assured me. Everything was in place.

Now—here was the slight wrinkle in the cunning plan.

My sister Beth and her husband Rande had decided to go down to Disneyworld for a second honeymoon. They were arriving early on the 3rd. Beth had not told me of this impromptu plan, because what she had concocted with Kathleen was that they would meet up with us at the Adventurer’s Club to surprise me. So now we had two siblings both trying to arrange surprises, with Kath the co-conspirator of one and the target of another. Naturally, we wound up working at cross purposes to one another.

The morning of the 3rd, while we were all walking around at Universal (you MUST do the Spider-Man ride) Kathleen got a call on her cell phone. She said “Uh huh,” and “okay, sure,” a couple of times, hung up, turned to us and said, “That was Sheila (Kathleen’s sister). Had to ask me something.” We shrugged and thought no more of it. But in point of fact, it had been Beth calling to say, “Y’know… why don’t we make it nine o’clock instead? Ten might be a little late for us.” Kathleen said no problem, waited an hour or so (so we wouldn’t associate what she was saying with the phone call) and then said, “How about we go to the Adventurer’s Club at nine tonight instead of ten? Because I don’t know how much energy I’ll have left by the end of the day.”

Well, now I was screwed. If I said, “No, no, we have to stick to 10 o’clock,” it’d sound suspicious. So I did the only thing I could: I said, “Sure. That sounds fine. Nine it is.” Fortunately since it was hot out, the sweat on my brow seemed perfectly understandable. But inwardly I was panicking, because we were going to arrive an hour early and the whole thing was in danger of being thrown out of whack. 10 o’clock was the time, all was in place, the puppeteer who operated the Colonel was ready to go. For all I knew he wouldn’t even be around an hour earlier. I had to find a way to alert the folks at the AC that there was a change in plans… except I had no direct line for the Adventurer’s Club (and there wouldn’t be anyone there during the daytime anyway), Bill Shepherd had the day off so he wasn’t around, and besides, I was never alone. The girls or Kathleen were with me at all times. This was, after all, about family togetherness. So I had to find a way to ditch my loved ones long enough to wend my way through the Disney phone chain and connect directly with the AC to alert them. And somewhere, at that moment, Beth and Rande were gleefully rubbing their hands together, anticipating the look on my face when I saw them that evening, not realizing that their good-heartedness had just thrown my cunning plan out of whack.

The adventure concludes next week…

Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He thought it was a hoot when Gore and Bush came out dressed identically. I think next time Gore should wear an evening gown.