NEWS ITEM: The Polish government is offering entertainer Michael Jackson several sites in its country for a family theme park he plans to build.
Deciding we should have a different vacation this year than the usual beaches, mountains and interstate highway rest stops, my wife and I bought a couple low-fare, non-business-class, ride-with-the-luggage-and-shut-up airline tickets to Krakow, Poland, where we hopped a hay wagon and rode out to the new Michael Jackson family theme park, “Oooooooooohland.”
We found a lovely pastoral enclosure with life-sized children’s storybook figures set up on a rolling meadow — one of whom proved to be actress Elizabeth Taylor.
She directed us thither to Michael Jackson himself, who was dressed in a spangly “Nutcracker” toy-soldier costume and, in Pied Piper of Hamelin fashion, was leading a procession of happy children in a gambol over the grass.
“Hey, all these kids are young boys,” I said to Miss Taylor, who turned out to be a theme-park tour guide wearing a Liz Taylor costume, much like the Mickey Mouse and Goofy costumes worn by Disneyland and Disney World tour guides. “Where are the young girls?” I asked.
“For those, you’ll have to go to the new Roman Polanski family theme park in Bucharest,” she said.
Instead, we went to Transylvania, where New York City had opened a big “Funappleland” family theme park.
It had all the expected horrors — cramped taxicabs where the only English spoken came from recorded messages by fading showbiz stars reminding you to take your wallet when you leave; Manhattan-style intersections where barricades had been put up to prevent hordes of pedestrians from crossing the street as a way to ease congestion, and a huge building sign showing a stream of constantly changing, many-digit figures that I took to be the constantly increasing national debt or the Dow Jones stock average but turned out to be the purchase price of one-bedroom apartment in Midtown.
I turned to the female tour guide, who proved to be Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dressed up in his deeply rouged and wildly bewigged “Saturday Night Live” woman’s ensemble, and asked where I might find some colorful, Disneylike theme-park characters in “Funappleland.”
He/she pointed me to this blimplike character badly in need of a haircut who turned out to be Donald Trump being chased by a horde of newspaper photographers. Blinking, I looked again and saw it was a actually a horde of newspaper photographers being pursued by Donald Trump.
“Let’s go see a real theme park,” said my wife, and so we moved on to Ekaterinburg, Russia, and the new Disney “Anastasialand” family theme park.
There, on the site of the house where Czar Nicholas, his wife, children and puppy dog were shot, bayonetted and clubbed to death by the Communists in 1918, was a fabulous Disney re-creation of the Russian Revolution.
At a gaily colored replica of the Imperial Winter Palace, we watched a troupe of dancers, led by a bulbous-nosed Father Gapon character who looked a little like the dwarf Grumpy, do a “Where’s Our Bread?” production number. They were then mowed down by a troop of Cossacks, whose commander sang, “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rabble You.”
After a roller-coaster ride through “World War I Country,” in which a million ragged plastic robots were knocked down all around us by incessant make-believe shell-fire, and a sleigh ride on “The Big Frosty,” which took us through a make-believe Siberian labor camp kept artificially cooled to a zesty 100 degrees below zero, we came to “Rasputin’s Den.”
There, a cute, cuddly mad monk character swilled wine, ate greasy food, burped and slept with an endless succession of decadent Russian noblewomen until two handsome princes bounded on stage and poisoned, shot, clubbed, strangled and drowned him.
“It sure is cute, but let’s get as far away from `Anastasialand’ as we can,” said my wife, so we did, finding ourselves in a place where a dark-haired, white-skinned woman looking like Snow White badly in need of a diet wandered from restaurant to restaurant pursued by a ring of antic news reporters and camera crews.
Hurrying away from this, we came upon a woman whose wildly uncombed blond hair looked much like Mayor Giuliani’s wig, and watched her being pursued by another ring of antic news reporters and camera crews.
Hurrying away from that, we came upon an antic mob of news reporters and camera crews that we standing about doing absolutely nothing in front of a stone building with big doors that were all closed.
“This theme park is boring,” I said.
“Wait,” said my wife. “Look! Over there! I think it’s a tunnel of love.”
So we went through some gates into this passage and into this big round room where a colorful character with a big bulbous nose tried to grab my wife. When she said, “No!” he retreated into the shadows and started playing bongos.
“Oh dear,” said my wife. “We’re back in Washington, D.C.”
