A MAGICAL DAY AT THE WORLD'S FAIR

             I don't think there has been another World's Fair since the glorious Fair of 1964.  Remember--at that time DisneyWorld and Universal did not exist.  There was no CGI.   Cell phones, computers, Kindles and all the other electronics we have grown so accustomed to today had not yet been invented.  So what we experienced at the Fair was amazing, unbelievable, fantastic, unheard of.  And even though I had been born in New York, I had lived most of my life in a small Florida beach town.  So what I saw that day impressed me as nothing ever had before.  Paul and I went from one marvel to the next, agog.  We were like children exploring the Circus for the first time, the best circus the world had ever seen!

                           

I had no favorite exhibit; I loved all of them.  But Paul loved It's a Small World After All the best.  He continued to love it for the rest of his life and saw it over and over again when the exhibit came to DisneyWorld.  He liked to think that Small World was the world of the future--a place where all the people in the universe coexisted in peace and harmony, where no one was marginalized.  And we had reason to think it was possible as those years were the beginning of the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the birth of gay rights.

We were naive of course, but I remember that day at the Fair showed us a world of unimagined possibilities.  And just think of what we have now; it's almost beyond belief.  But the ideal of peace and harmony that Paul saw in It's a Small World eludes us still.  We're not even close.

And that breaks my heart.