Farewell, Pleasure Island

I was saddened to learn that Pleasure Island, Walt Disney World's hip and happenin' island of nightclubs, shopping, and food, is closing in September of this year.

Pleasure Island, or simply PI to its nighttime visitors, was the hot spot for students participating in the Walt Disney World College Program, which recruits college kids from around the world to work and keep the mouse world running. I participated the first semester of my junior year and liked it so much that I stayed for another semester doing an advanced internship.

Moving to Florida was a surprisingly easy decision. My first two years of college, while informative and sometimes fun, were a darker period in my life. I learned to analyze literature and literary criticism and complex characters but never learned how to apply my critical thinking skills to my own life. You're supposed to learn about who you are in college, but I spent my first two years losing myself. I knew and understood the characters in my books better than I understood myself. Escaping the life that I had been living was a dream come true.

I moved to Orlando without knowing anyone. At my job, I learned to overcome shyness by forcing myself to make eye contact and greet people that I passed en route to the break room (writing this now, it's hard to believe that I was ever that shy, but I was--and anyone who has fought an ever-present need to hide can understand). As weeks turned into months, I made friends with roommates and coworkers and developed a great social circle.

It was my second semester in the mouse house that I discovered the bacchanalian Pleasure Island. Most Thursdays and some Mondays (cast members got in free those nights), my roommate and I and our friends would giggle our way over in our tank tops and mascara, finding our place in the middle of the dancefloor under a cloud of humidity that the neon lights almost broke through. The most fun nights featured a dancefloor so crowded you couldn't move without bumping into everyone around you while still trying to maintain the groove that you and your girlfriends had going on.

Back then, 3 AM was a much more reasonable hour for being awake than it is now. Then again, staying up until 3 and then waking up for work at 8:30 AM was a lot easier than it would be now. Me at 21 was more resilient than me now.

I have a lot of happy memories of PI--sneaking into the valet lot every night after midnight to get rockstar parking, collecting the admission bracelets on my bathroom vanity, and being able to go sleeveless in the wintertime--but the real success came not from my memories but from learning to stretch my comfort boundaries and figuring out who I really was. The dancefloor of the Wildhorse is not solely responsible for the spirit, confidence, and independence that I learned during my ten-month tenure at Disney, but it was where I learned to dance like no one was watching, and that knowledge transferred to my life philosophy: Live your life the way you want.

So farewell, PI. I am sad for the countless college programmers who won't have the opportunity to experience the exuberance, debauchery, and magic of a Thursday night at PI, but as for me, I moved on after getting my groove back.