Mrs. HolyCoast and I decided to go to Disneyland for a little while to have lunch and walk around in the hot weather. Even before we got on the parking lot tram I began to notice that things did not look like they normally did. The first indicator was the cloud of marijuana smoke that was emitted from the car that parked next to us in the parking garage. That normally doesn't happen.
The last time the scene appeared a little odd was back in October when my family found ourselves attending the park during Gay Days. I wrote about it here. This time I noticed an unusual percentage of attendees wearing black and decorated in other Goth-style attire. We had once again entered the park on a "special" day.
As I later found out, this weekend was "Bats Days at the Fun Park", an event which draws Goths from all over the world and even has its own website. I'm not sure whether Disneyland provides any kind of official support for this event, but the park was full of 'em, so I assume it was pretty well planned.
I learned a few things about the Goths during our time at the park. It rapidly became clear that good-looking, athletic people are not attracted to the Goth lifestyle. I hate to judge anyone by their appearance, so I'll try to say this as delicately as I can; none of these folks will be pitching their diet books on TV anytime soon. We didn't have to play "guess the gender" as often as we did on Gay Day, but there were some folks there who were clearly a coin-flip.
During lunch a group of them came in with all kinds of tatoos, black outfits, and fez's on their heads. They looked like a group of Goth Shriners. I half expected to see little bitty motorcycles parked outside.
The day's events also included a group photo in front of the castle at 1:30 pm. We were walking through the area and saw hundreds of them all crowded into the hub in the center of Disneyland. I'm sure security was loving that. An aerial photo of Disneyland at that moment would have looked like the X-ray of a smoker's lung...a big black spot in the middle. I tried to capture the scene with my cellphone camera, so pardon the quality, but this is the best photo I could get:
After taking a few photos we sat down at Carnation Gardens stage so I could email the photos back to myself, and while sitting there, were treated to the amazing sight of one of the Goth "princesses" having her picture taken with one of the fairies from Snow White. There was something really surreal about that.
When the photos were over, the entire black-clad mob disbursed throughout the park, and everywhere we went we saw every manner of Goth attire. I can't imagine how hot it must have been wearing those heavy black clothes on a 90+ degree day, but anyone who dresses like that isn't going to earn a lot of points for common sense anyway.
All in all, very entertaining. I'm already planning to attend this year's Gay Day in October. You just can't find that much entertainment in one place anywhere else. You can just sit on a park bench and entertain yourself for hours watching the characters walk by (and we're not talking Goofy and Pluto here).
Oh, and this time, I won't make the mistake of wearing red.
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