Dear Mr. Disney, (I know you liked to be called Walt…)
As we commemorate your birth and death in this first half of December, I wondered how you and your magical world came into my life.
So I went back to my childhood. My dad (born in 1928 like Mickey) and my mom had discovered “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” at the cinema when they were young, which at the time was an exceptional release. Mom was amazed, dad too, but he was a boy, so we didn’t show it as much. And it is thanks to your first feature film that you burst into their lives and thus into mine, because from my early youth, they had bought an 8 mm film projector and reels of short films among which there were: the three little pigs, the old mill, the ugly duckling among others, and with my cousins when we were good, we were entitled to a “private” projection.
And another memory came back to me, every December 24, there was the movie session before Christmas Eve and it is with delight that we went as a family to see “the Disney of Christmas”. Oh yes, in the 60’s and early 70’s, we only had one feature film (your great classics), per year. And this single film was released, in the vast majority of cases, at Christmas… and so every year, I dreamed in front of your films: The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Tramp, the Aristochats among others…
When I was about ten years old, I heard for the first time about your park in California, from friends of my parents who traveled a lot and had the chance to visit this park. The lady had brought back from her visit an adorable little colored Mickey that she had mounted on a “gold charm bracelet” (sort of the ancestor of our Pandora bracelets of today with their Disney charms…)
And that’s how your fairy world entered my life and never left. When the project to open a Disneyland park in Paris was taking shape, I was finishing my studies in tourism, and I had been contacted by the teams that were recruiting to join the teams that would train the future CMs of the reservation centers, but as I was getting married, I declined the offer (with a little regret, though…).
But as soon as the Parisian park opened, I became a faithful guest, I would even say addicted… this was the beginning of a spiral that has governed my leisure activities for the past 30 years (I even celebrated my silver anniversary as an Annual Passholder in 2020!).
Here you are Mr. Disney, you and Mickey are an integral part of my life and with these few words, I wanted to thank you for having decided one day to give life to a little mouse that has become so important to me…
A young woman in her sixties, completely addicted and a fan, but I reassure you, not a fanatic…