One little-used park attraction was Elmer’s wishing well. This was a fake wishing well that people tossed coins into. The money, what little there was, went to Toys for Tots or some other Christmas-related charity. Over the well, set into the gabled roof, was a little door. Inside was an “interactive” and “animatronic” puppet shaped like a little elf. I put these words in quotes because, on a regular basis, it was neither. The idea was that an employee would sit in the PA booth, several hundred feet away and down a hill, and operate the puppet electronically. When someone donated a coin, the employee was supposed to pop open the door, and say “Thank You!” into a microphone, while simultaneously operating the controls that made the mouth open and close and the eyes move around. The delighted child would then start up a conversation with this technical marvel, and the employee, who could see the visitors from the booth, would amaze the customer by complimenting the kid’s blue hat or whatever.
At this point, I’m not even going to attempt to use sarcasm to describe how infrequently this system actually worked. The electronic system was decades old and failed frequently. Some typical outcomes:
- The door wouldn’t open, so this disembodied voice would just kind of emanate from the roof of the well. This either scared the crap out of people, or was lost in the crowd noise and ignored.
- The microphone/speaker wouldn’t work, so the employee couldn’t hear the people, or the elf would appear and soundlessly move its mouth and roll its eyes at the customers for a while before the door would close again without explanation.
- The mouth would get stuck open mid-word, a scene that has been immortalized many times by the Simpsons, in basically every episode where they go to an amusement park. Funny in a cartoon, not so funny in person. More depressing, really.
- To see the well from the booth, the employee had to practically stick their head out the window, and it was so far away it was impossible to see any details worth mentioning in conversation. For instance, “I see you have all your limbs,” does not make for lighthearted banter.
- The employee in the booth also had to make periodic announcements, keep the music in the park from slipping to nightmare mode, and do the voice for Tannenbaum, the talking tree (same deal), not to mention go to the bathroom and eat lunch. This means that people were often knocking on the little door for ages, looking for the damn talking elf, while their kids stood in the hot sun, whining and/or crying, until they finally gave up and stormed away, swearing under their breath about how it cost friggin’ 18 bucks plus tax (plus tax!) for them to each (each!) get in, and for what? Jesus!
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The park also had a few rickety rides, a puppet theater, a reindeer stable, and of course Santa’s House, where you could go in and visit Santa and get your picture taken, etc., etc. There were three Santas hired that year, and they each worked three days a week. If you do the math, you quickly realize that there was more than one Santa working on any given day. The extra Santa manned the reindeer barn, an important job which required him to sit in a chair outside the barn. To distinguish him from the Real Santa, he wore a green outfit and a different hat. His story was that he was Santa’s cousin Jimbo or something. Obviously that fooled practically no one but the very youngest. I felt kinda bad for the kids who were old enough to not be sure about Santa. Here they are, their parents drove them hours and hours with the promise of meeting the real Santa, at his workshop at the north pole, not like that guy at the mall, putting all their fears to rest, don’t you listen to what Brendon up the street says, Santa is Real. And after they do see Santa, here’s this other guy, practically the same guy they just met, sitting around the reindeer barn, sweating. You could just see in their face they weren’t buying it.
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