WED Enterprises was an exhilarating beehive of activity when I began my career there in 1978. The spark of an idea for both Epcot Center and Tokyo Disneyland had ignited, and the place was on fire. John Zovich, then vice president of engineering, had a sign on his office door in the executive “Gold Coast” just inside the front lobby that read: LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. And boy, did he mean it. At the opposite end of the Gold Coast resided Marty Sklar, who, with John Hench, his fellow senior vice president of the creative division, was manning the helm.

Marty and John were larger-than-life to me, not only because they knew and had worked with Walt Disney, but also because they were now the top dogs of the design and development of two major new Disney theme parks—one of which would be the first in a foreign country. I, on the other hand, was, well, in the grand scheme of things, nobody. I didn’t know a single person at WED when I started and my noncreative position was so entry-level that I took a cut in pay from my previous hourly job in the foods division at Disneyland. No kidding, I went from $5.75 an hour down to an even five bucks. And now I had to drive an extra fifty miles to work in a car that behaved like it didn’t have ten miles of life left in it. Friends told me I was crazy. But I didn’t think I was crazy, because I was crazy about this place from the first day I got my entry-level foot in the door.

At that time Randy Bright, who would later become my mentor, worked under Marty as the vice present of creative development and show writing. Every Wednesday morning from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Randy hosted something he called “The Wednesday Morning Breakfast Meeting” (breakfast not included). Every week he invited experts from across a broad spectrum of the entertainment industry to come in and help stimulate the creative juices at WED. The event took place in the center of our headquarters building at 1401 Flower Street in Glendale, California.

As busy as everyone at WED was, this weekly Wednesday morning meeting was an eye in the middle of the work storm, so it was always well attended. I was happy to get permission to attend my first one, which happened to feature a too-high-energy-for-the-time-slot improv troupe. The four improvers rushed onto the tiny temporary stage and immediately shouted out for volunteers from among the approximately two hundred sleepy, coffee-sipping Imagineers. (I was soon to discover that most Imagineers are not morning people because they stay up most of the night working on “work stuff” or filling their heads and hearts with just about everything and anything they can learn more about.) There weren’t any takers. “Here’s a volunteer!” proclaimed a boisterous member of the troupe as she ran to the second row and grabbed and dragged onto the stage a reluctant participant named Peggie. “Need one more,” suggested another improver, who ran all the way to the back of the room to grab another young lady seated in the last row. At that the audience gasped. And I mean a serious collective gasp, as if the building were about to collapse. “What’s going on?” I whispered to the drop-jawed person sitting next to me.

“They could not have picked a worse person for this,” he whispered.

“Why?” I inquired.

“That’s Lindsay,” he continued. “She is the shyest person here. She never speaks. She doesn’t even look at you. This is going to be a disaster.”

I scanned the now wide-awake crowd and the expressions on everyone’s faces; and the murmuring clearly verified what my neighbor had just shared with me. Meanwhile, Lindsay wasn’t budging. It finally took the combined force of the entire troupe to carry her up to the front, where they sat her and Peggie side by side in folding chairs facing the audience. I could see Randy Bright in the front row bury his face in his hands. “Okay, ladies!” the improv leader bellowed after asking their names (though he had to ask Lindsay several times because he couldn’t hear her response). “Here’s your situation. You, Peggie, are Calamity Jane. And you, Lindsay, are Annie Oakley. Ready? And…GO!”

But nobody went. Neither of the two women said or did anything. The thirty painful silent seconds that crawled by felt like an hour. Peggie bit her upper lip with her lower teeth and looked prayerfully towards the ceiling as Lindsey sat motionless, staring down at her hands folded tightly in her lap. This was going on way too long. Why, oh, why, I thought, didn’t the improv people do something?

Then it happened. Lindsay launched out of her chair with such thrust it snapped over backwards and folded flat on the floor with a bang. “Calamity,” she cried in her best Broadway stage–projected Western-style Annie Oakley voice. “We’ve been stuck on this here mountain fer over a month…AND I NEED ME A MAN!”

The place exploded. I guarantee that in the history of the world there has never been an audience reaction like the one I experienced in my first Randy Bright Wednesday Morning Breakfast Meeting. The whoops, whistles, and thunderous standing ovation lasted for a good five minutes. As a brand-new Imagineer, I remember asking myself at that moment, What just happened? What does this have to do with designing theme parks? What is this place?

Well, after all these years I think I have it figured out: this place was not at all what I expected. And everything I did there was not what I expected to do. What’s more, everything that happened there, no matter how strange or unexpected, had everything to do with designing Disney theme parks. When you get to be my age after having had such a rare job in such a rare place for such a long time, you can’t help but experience things, moments, and events that are so unbelievable or weird that they fall under the category of “You Can’t Even Make This Stuff Up.” What does that have to do with Imagineering? Why would an Imagineer ever do something like that? Who could have possibly guessed that my childhood interests, my hobbies, and even my favorite TV shows and TV and movie stars would someday be a part of my career? Strange that so much of that stuff would later intertwine. Or is it?

Here’s why. Walt Disney Imagineering has a mind, heart, and spirit of its own. It brings things together and draws people together as well. It does what it needs to do when it needs to do it. It survives and it thrives. It falls but leaps way back up. It calls talented people with varied interests to itself and gives them a chance to discover who they are so they can make a difference. It presents impossible challenges and helps its Imagineers, like Lindsay, rise to the occasion when they need to the most.

In a recent meeting, I was asked by a colleague to share a particular story they’d previously heard me tell (several times) with the younger Imagineers in the room. Whenever I’m asked to tell one of these stories—and I do love to tell them—inevitably, one of my colleagues asks when I’m going to write my book. In addition to that, I’ve been asked hundreds of times by new friends I’ve met along the way or by young people interested in becoming Imagineers themselves to tell “my story,” the personal story of how I became an Imagineer. Still others are interested in a detailed description of my typical day.

Well, after four decades of leading, following, and getting the hell out of the way, I’ve never had a typical day.

This book is for all of you. In it I’ll explain how I became an Imagineer and all of the crazy stuff that happened because I did, all of which will help explain why I have never had a typical day. Forty years of helping conceive and deliver shows and attractions for Disney parks around the world has been my extreme honor, profound privilege, and joyous pleasure. I have never taken it for granted, not a nontypical day of it. Ever. Putting these personal experiences on paper is going to be difficult because I’ve always said I was going write about it all “someday” at the end of my career, a career that has meant so much to me and has been so much a part of who I am that writing my memoirs means it’s all wrapping up. Wrapping indeed this beautiful gift I’ve been given!

There are hundreds of thousands of different jobs in the world, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who do the same job. But how many Imagineers are there? Well, only a few, really. And I was called to be one of them during the busiest heyday of Walt Disney Imagineering.

On that first Monday in 1978 when this new bee buzzed into the beehive I had no idea what I was doing, where I was going, or how long I was going to last. Fresh out of college, inexperienced, and dreadfully insecure, I found myself surrounded by the wizards, masters, dreamers, and doers of legend. These men and women were the best in the business. Many of them invented the business—or various aspects of it. Could I ever really be one of them? Would I ever be good enough? Did I really have what it took to be a real, honest-to-goodness contributing Imagineer? Most importantly, could I pull my weight in sharing the daunting responsibility of continuing Walt Disney’s theme park legacy?

For a shy young artist, it was a mountain of pressure. By Wednesday, though, the place had provided me with some insight for success. Sometimes you just gotta be Annie Oakley.