The Enchanted Tiki Room
as told to E "Eddy" Edwards
"I'm wearing a 1930's tux my girlfriend is in a 1950's prom dress, we just graduated high school, so we're gonna do Grad Nite at Disneyland. Cool. Your average mid-70's high school graduate sweetheart dorks.
Except that we had both been doing lots of speed — lots — and we'd both been awake for at least 5 days. When we got there, we did the whole Grad Nite thing: pictures, stuffed Mickey with a diploma, and all that. Everything seemed OK until about 4:30 in the morning. Only about an hour left before we were supposed to get back on the bus. We're wiped out, but we can't really head out too early because we figure that people's think we were crashing from a massive speed overload, or so our massive speed overloaded brains were telling us.
Anyway, we're getting off The Jungle Cruise and as we stagger away from the dock, we both suddenly got the fear: massive chest-grabbing exhaustion-based "holy crap, we're strung out in Disneyland!" paranoia. Even in the weird light in Adventureland (or because of it), my girlfriend was staring to look like a zombie and I knew I was, too.
We needed someplace to hide, to get our shit together, so that we could at least make it down Main Street and into the parking lot. And there it was, our safe haven:
A nice, air conditioned room, those weird, yet comfortingly familiar stacking chairs, some "oh, so square they can't cause you any brain trouble" songs . . . just what we (we thought) needed.
The doors were already open so we went in, ignoring the cast member who was trying to steer us to front-row seats, and crawled into a corner, right next to one of the tiki-carved pillars.
Lights down, cue the lame show. And all was well . . . until . . . near the end . . .
The War Chant! All of a sudden, the happy flowers go away, the lights get scary, and the freaking tiki pillars start up with a war chant (OK, a very, VERY Disneyland, 1950's Goodyear Tire version of a war chant, but still). I was frozen in my seat. Yes, I had seen this show, dozens of times since it opened when I was a kid. But I didn't remember this! Not just the funky, guttural-but-acceptable chanting and the eerie high-pitched, Frankie Lymon-meets-Ondar-esque ululations!
My usual "too stoned in public for my own good" mantra kicked in: "Just sit still and pretend that you have not just landed in the 9th circle of Hell as scored by Martin Denny on acid.
And it might have worked, except I looked over at my girlfriend, her eyes now as wide as a startled manga heroine, staring at the tikis on the pillar.
Bad: the tikis were chanting and the mouth animation were both clunky and disturbingly out-of-sync with the sound track.
Worse: the tikis' eyes were rolling back and forth, leering, shifty, accusing!
The FEAR!
I'm jolted into near-coherency by my girlfriend who, grabbing me by my tux coat collar, dragged me through the chairs,out the exit doors, down the stairs, and back into Adventureland.
We headed back up Main Street, trembling, early, yes, but we realized that we were in the company of a significant number of other grads, looking, too, like they had hit the end of their pre-Grad Nite body chemistry ropes, and that made us feel a little less like the wild-eyed geeks we knew had become. But . . . we had survived and lived to tell the tale!
Needless to say neither one of us ever went back inside The Enchanted Tiki Room again.
Oddly, I was heartbroken years later when I heard they changed the show. Aw, well . . .
The Enchanted Tiki Room (1974 "Grad Nite / The Fear" edit)
Dear Mr. Shag:
I hope that my using this image falls under the category of "fair use" because:
A.) all of us here at DeScope are huge fans,
B.) it really fits in with the above related tale of tiki and chemical woe from the 1970's, and
3.) because we don't have anything at all of any value — especially money — so please don't sue our guts out, OK? We promise that when we hit the Lottery we will buy up a bunch of your prints from Shagmart, Corpo Nason, the M Modern Gallery, the Jonathon Levine Gallery, the Shooting Gallery, Pure Color, Laguna Beach, and the Outré Gallery. I promise.
Send Comments to E "Eddy" Edwards