One Thing I Have Learned Here at Disney

The one thing I learned while being here at the Disney/Dreamworks event in LA is that Disney really is a place where dreams do come true.

Not just for the masses passing through the Disney park gates every day, but for so many people who live and work here.

I thought about changing that first line because it just sounds so cliche. But we've just met so many wonderful people behind the scenes here at Disney, some big names, some not so big names, but for each one of them, being here is a dream come true and it's inspiring.

To know the blood sweat and tears, sacrifice and work it's taken for them to climb that ladder, it's inspiring.

I see now why it's the Disney motto.

It's for the people behind every.single.project. on the Disney lots. From the animator who showed us how to draw Piglet..



(He grew up wrecking every single notepad his mother gave him to take a message on by filling them up with drawings. "Those were supposed to be for my phone messages!"she'd yell, -- probably in a nice way of course.)

...to Stacy Snider, the co-head of Dreamworks (with Steven Spielberg) who cried while talking about picking up the movie The Help after we all laughed our hearts out and cried our eyes out watching this profound and important movie... (I didn't even get a chance to clean myself up before we met her! And today I woke up with big puffy post-cry eyeballs!)


...To the director of Winnie the Pooh, sitting there in Christopher Robbins' bedroom...

...all the way to the former museum curator in charge of the Disney Animation and Research Library where they store every drawing and piece of art from every Disney animated movie (I wasn't allowed to take pictures there so I don't have a picture of her but she is an older, sweet, beautiful woman with fiery red hair).

And every single person in between.

They've all dreamt of being in this place.

They've worked from the bottom up. Even modern day animating legend John Lasseter worked the rides at Disney during the summer.

It is a place that inspires dreams.

It is a place built on dreams.

It is a place built by dreamers.