My Year With The Mouse

And this is the part where Shelby takes a deep, cleansing breath and finally gets to post! As some of you know, I’m pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and my final “packet” (big old bunch of stuff–creative work, critical essays, annotated bibliography, letter, list of reasons why I’m not lame, etc.) of the semester is due on Wednesday, which is also my birthday. In addition to wrapping everything up, my computer decided to totally die on me. I’ve been eyeing new computers anyway, so when I saw that one I wanted also had a $100 off coupon from Costco, Kevin went out and bought it that day. However, transferring everything from one computer to the other turned out to be pretty much a 24-hour process, during which I was working off my thumb drive on Kevin’s Macbook and NOT doing anything relating to MYWTM. Obviously. But anyway, I am mostly back in action, so thanks for sticking around!

If you didn’t die of boredom from that last paragraph, that is.

So today’s entry is about the restaurant that can’t decide what it wants to be called. It’s at the end of Main Street on the left (facing the castle) and the part that faces the hub identifies the restaurant as the creatively-named “Refreshment Corner,” which is pretty much the lamest name of anything in the entire park. I mean, refreshment corner? That’s just one step away from “Place Where You Buy Food.”

This Place Where You Buy Food is brought to you by Coca-Cola!

And seriously, how weird is it to see “Coca-Cola” typed out like that? I had to check and make sure it wasn’t “Coco-Cola.” It’s brought to you by Coke, okay?

Anyway, the Disneyland website also refers to this eatery as the Refreshment Corner. But then, on the side that faces Main Street, you get this:

Corner Cafe? Wut?

Yes, it says Corner Cafe. Now isn’t that a MUCH better name than Refreshment Corner? Yes, it is. However, the Disneyland site doesn’t make any reference to the Corner Cafe. I suppose they don’t want it to be confused with the Carnation Cafe which is a few stores back down Main Street, but still. I mean, did they just spend all that money on the cute little Corner Cafe sign so they left it up and hoped nobody would notice? I don’t know.

The best part of the Corner Cafe other than walking along its edge is sort of a shortcut to Adventureland, is the Ragtime pianist.

I'm trying to think of a recognizable ragtime song, but I'm coming up blank

Let’s take a closer look at our natty friend.

I just think these costumes are adorable.

The Ragtime Pianist plays at more or less regularly-scheduled time slots. It also has the piano player’s name in case you wanted to chat with him or something, or like on the bus where it says “your driver is…”

Apparently Alan has to play every single performance of the day, or something

The menu of the day–well, every day–calls for hot dogs.

Hot dog, chili dog, chili cheese dog, chili without the dog

They do offer turkey dogs, but only on the children’s menu. Weird. If a hot dog and/or chili isn’t quite your liking, you can also get a Mickey shaped pretzel. And shockingly, a variety of Coke products.

Except not root beer! This is my real pet peeve about Disneyland. I don’t drink caffeine and I’m not a huge Sprite person. Is it too much to ask for root beer? Barq’s is Coke’s brand (and yes, I know it has a very small amount of caffeine, but I can tolerate that). Yet only a handful of places actually carry the root beer. Why not? Do that many people really buy Fanta, that we need to replace the root beer with Fanta? WHO BUYS FANTA??? Other than my husband, that is.

The Corner Cafe also features some cute detail above the registers.

If those were Mickey cutouts, that would be really cool

So, the Refreshment Corner or the Corner Cafe–whatever you want to call it, there it is.