Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
In pursuit of the mega Mickey Mouse rave, a handful of candy ravers aim to make the Happiest Place on Earth just a little bit happier.
Jun 18, 2001 | It's 1 p.m. Saturday at the Carnation Plaza Gardens in the center of Disneyland. The Vineyard Junior High Eighth Grade Chorus of Alta Loma, Calif., has just finished belting out a rousing set of elementary school standards. Meanwhile, three young candy ravers -- dance music fans dressed in tent-sized pants and draped with enough plastic bracelets, necklaces and other primary-colored juvenilia to decorate a romper room -- slump on benches in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle.
1 p.m. is the second meet-up time for the unsponsored, unendorsed, unofficial raver day that's supposed to happen at Disneyland. A raver day is a grass-roots, street-level happening where ravers agree to converge at a real-world event (as opposed to a rave or party) at a pre-arranged place and time. Together, they hook up with old friends, meet new ones and spread their well-worn message of peace, love, unity and respect -- PLUR. The logistics are worked out in advance via the Web, e-mail and message boards on sites such as www.raverlinks.com and www.candykids.net. Today's event was even promoted by its own Web site, thrown up by CWCC, a crew of SoCal rave promoters.
The specific aim of today's raver day as explained on the CWCC site is to secure a permit from Disney to hold a rave in the Carnation Plaza Gardens in December and fill it with the bouncing sound of happy hardcore, an extremely fast, raw subgenre of electronic music popular among candy ravers.
"They have cheerleading competitions here," says Pacey, 19, an optimistic lad clad in Kikwear pants so large that they enshroud his shoes and ooze out onto the blacktop like a denim waterfall. He adjusts his Adidas visor and slaps his headphones over what look like exceptionally painful piercings in his central ear cartilage. "If cheerleaders can get a permit to dance, then we can get one."
CWCC's efforts represent an interesting viral approach to promoting a positive raver presence at Disneyland. Ravers have converged for raver days here for more than two years in hopes of making the elusive Disney rave happen, usually prompting a turnout in the hundreds. But as Pacey -- a name that he has assumed to accompany his raver identity -- and the other two PLUR-ophiles are keenly aware, there's one big problem: No one is showing up today, not even Mike, CWCC's mysterious point man, whom I swapped e-mails with a few times earlier in the week.
Making the Happiest Place on Earth happier
While past Disneyland raver days have drawn throngs of glow stick-wielding warriors and featured tape trading, sticker giveaways, spontaneous acts of PLUR and boombox-aided dancing throughout the park, these three kids are the only ravers representing today, and the sun seems to have bleached away most of their enthusiasm.
"This sucks," says Michelle Applebee, 17, a raver from northern San Diego County who is part of the CWCC crew, her eyes hidden beneath her baby blue visor. "It sucks a lot."
"Where's Mike?" asks Pacey, eliciting another round of shrugs and grunts.
Like everyone else on this relentlessly cheery, tar-melting Southern California summer day, he's somewhere else -- at the beach maybe, or perhaps chilling in an air-conditioned room in a suburban Orange County home rocking Proskater 2 on the Playstation and waiting for night to fall. Or maybe he's just somewhere else in the park. No one knows.
All these three kids want to do is make the Happiest Place on Earth a little bit happier by adding a better soundtrack, but today it doesn't look like things are going to work out.
Why they even want to do this in the first place is a question that's a bit more difficult to understand.
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