LEGO (35 page)

LEGO also released architectural sets aimed at the adult market. The sets, which consisted of only bricks and plates, included a ruler, graph paper, and instructions on how to design scale models. Adults weren’t ready to be fans, though, and the architectural sets were discontinued in 1965.

Bill calls everybody back into his LEGO room. He’s giving away some extra parts, and the grown men have descended like jackals on the plastic bags filled with minifig heads and specialty elements.

His models tell the story of how he has come to work at LEGOLAND. That makes sense for the self-taught artist.

“I’ve always been more comfortable expressing myself through drawing and what I build,” says Bill.

He shows me the hieroglyphics he’s drawn as part of his design for the Lost Kingdom Adventure—a new Egyptian-themed ride in the park. Above him, pirate minifigs peek out from among the shelves and models.

“It was Pirates that got me out of the Dark Ages in 1990. I’m standing in the [toy store] aisle for thirty minutes looking at the Black Seas Barracuda, thinking this was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The guy next to me says, ‘It’s okay. I’m a doctor and I do this too,’” says Bill.

There’s the cartoon white bunny, made from his first bulk brick purchase in 1992, which he bought with half of a $9,000 Nevada slot jackpot. A two-foot-tall Mickey Mouse stands as a reminder of the two years Bill spent as a freelance LEGO artist, building customized cars and bar mitzvah centerpieces on commission.

“I love theme parks. I love to draw and I love LEGO bricks. I’m in the perfect place right now,” says Bill.

So am
I, I jot down in my notebook.

After the meeting, Kate joins us for dinner, back from her day-trip to Los Angeles to visit her brothers. Gary is animated, excited about an episode of
Mythbusters,
the Discovery channel show that uses science to prove or disprove urban legends, that he recently filmed in San Francisco.

“What were the myths? That if you put together LEGO and MEGA Bloks, they’ll explode?” asks Bill.

The table erupts in laughter, mostly my own. I look at Kate, who is also laughing, and I find that at the intersection of my two worlds, I’m pretty content.

I can’t wait until we head home, so I give Kate the street sweeper set the next morning. I’ve been up for several hours, excited that we’re going to LEGOLAND California. We’ve arranged to meet Kate’s brother Sam and his girlfriend, Tai, when the 128-acre park opens at ten o’clock.

We pull into the parking lot and wander over to the Volvo family, a set of four life-size LEGO figures that are next to a blue Volvo XC90 made entirely from LEGO bricks.

“Jack, that’s what happens to naughty children, they get turned into LEGOS,” says a mother as she pushes a little kid in a stroller past his LEGO counterpart.

And I have my first parenting lesson of the day. Kate and I laugh, not at that relatively terrifying threat, but about the construction stories that Bill and Gary told us the night before at dinner.

“There is no C cup when it comes to LEGO. So she was either getting an A cup or a D cup,” said Gary, who helped put together the LEGO mom.

“It’s a weird thing to be holding the butt of a model as you work on the front and having people watch,” added Bill, who worked on the LEGO dad.

We wander inside the park while waiting for Sam and Tai to arrive. I immediately ask Kate to take a picture of me dueling an eight-foot Darth Vader with a LEGO light saber. The setup is designed for a ten-year-old, as evidenced by the line behind me, so the photo shows me in a hunched over fighting stance.

“You’re going to be a daddy,” says Tai, shortly after they arrive. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody call me that.

 

 

The next day feels a bit like Groundhog Day, as I’m headed to the park again early in the morning. It’s just after seven on Monday morning when I pick up Gary to make the thirty-mile drive north from San Diego to Carlsbad, California. It’s early, but Gary still looks cool in a leather jacket. With a neatly trimmed beard and brown hair that he clearly takes time to style, Gary is a “LEGO rock star,” according to Steve Witt. He’s extroverted—an animated storyteller and a natural as a representative of LEGOLAND. He was also a finalist in the master model builder competition of 2004, becoming friendly with the set designer Jamie Berard.

I’m shadowing him in an attempt to find out what life is really like in the model shop at LEGOLAND California. I’ve been wondering if adult fans can find happiness working at the park since I met Mariann Asanuma at BrickCon in Seattle back in October. With long, straight black hair and a need to speak her mind, she seemed destined to be one of those tough little old ladies who runs her neighborhood.

Mariann, thirty-one, had been a master model builder. She was the first American woman hired in the model shop at LEGOLAND. She got used to being the odd one out in a club reserved for boys.

“The first few months were not that fun,” Mariann told me when we talked at BrickCon. “I’m kind of an outspoken woman, and they didn’t know what to do with me yet.”

Her voice got notably softer. This is what Mariann must have been like as a child, I thought. I wasn’t surprised that she remembered telling her elementary school teacher she wanted to be a master model builder.

“She said, ‘That’s nice, dear, but you have to have a real job.’ But I knew it was a real job—I’d seen it in magazines. So, it’s almost like I wanted to prove it to her,” said Mariann.

She applied to be a model builder five times in the first three years the park was open, before landing a retail job in 2003. She stocked shelves for three months at a Toys “R” Us before being transferred to the park.

“Working in retail really opened my eyes to LEGO as a business. All people don’t love it; to some it’s just a job,” said Mariann.

When I hear adult fans talk about the business side of LEGO, it feels like a loss of innocence. They’re not naive; it’s more like willful ignorance. But that doesn’t stop so many of them from wanting to wear a red polo inside the LEGOLAND model shop. While working at the park, Mariann befriended some of the model builders and began showing them her portfolio. When a model gluer position opened, her knowledge of LEGO elements and her relationship with the model builders helped her get the job. She was promoted to model builder right before the Master Model Builder Search in 2004.

“You quickly learn the company value of a brick as opposed to the value perceived by an adult fan. A model builder would just build with old brown—and I’d be like, we can’t do this, it’s not available anymore,” Mariann told me.

Her last project was working on Miniland Las Vegas, where she spent three weeks building the MGM lion. A LEGO mouse is hidden in the lion’s stomach.

“It was a nice way to say I was here, I did this,” said Mariann.

But it wasn’t enough. Mariann left the model shop in 2007 to pursue a career building models on commission, in the hope of becoming the first female LEGO certified professional. Even for someone who had dreamed of working at LEGOLAND since the age of six, being a master model builder wasn’t a dream job. On some level, I’m sure that’s because no job is perfect, especially when compared with the freedom the average AFOL has to build whatever he wants. Thinking of my conversation with Mariann prompts me to wonder how Gary feels about working at the park.

“Do you have to separate your world as an adult fan from your job at LEGOLAND?” I ask him.

“You have free rein as a hobbyist, you’re only limited by your patience. Whereas as a professional, you always have the limits of a budget and time constraints,” he replies.

Gary flicks on the lights in the model shop. It’s weird to be on the other side of the huge plate-glass window that has been set up for park visitors to watch models being built. When I later visit the new Sea Life Aquarium exhibit, I realize that the model shop is not unlike a human LEGO fishbowl.

Four solid wood tables painted green, each with four grates, sit in the center of the room. Gray vacuum tubes snake down from the ceiling like Doctor Octopus’s tentacles. The grates and tubes remove the fumes from the solvent used to make models. Large gray shelves span the entire width of the room and are covered with primary-color bins that hold bricks and elements. A tan skull and limo sit behind Gary’s workstation, where he is in the middle of putting together a bust of Oprah Winfrey.

“Let’s just grab some bricks and the repair list, and then it’s off to do park check,” says Gary.

He consults a repair chart on his clipboard that keeps track of the model, its location, the reported problem, and whether it has been fixed.

On the cement pad outside the shop, Gary points to what is essentially a yellow adult tricycle. “Usually I’ll take that, but we’ll take the cart today,” he says. A short walk takes us behind the administrative offices, where we climb onto an electric golf cart.

As we ride, Gary waves to a cleaner walking through Miniland. The cleaner is using a leaf blower and a brush on a long stick to sweep away leaves and pollen from the streets and buildings of the miniature cities. He’ll also do the job that Mariann once did, when she was nicknamed “Miniland Mom”: overseeing the daily maintenance and repair of Miniland. She used to spend two hours every morning walking around with a small glue bottle and a loose mix of bricks. I recall her telling me what it was like to walk around inside a miniaturized world.

“The fence, even though it’s only a foot high, is like a magical barrier,” she said. “I was able to walk across that fence and walk through the cluster. I got to kneel down and see what the actual models were. It was like I walked into Wonderland.”

The park is quiet just after 9 a.m. The whine of our golf cart is the only noise as we putt across the concrete walkways.

“There are some models that will always be issues. I just want to make sure that there are no sharply broken bricks or exposed steel,” says Gary. A pizza chef model is missing an earlobe. A DUPLO mechanic has lost several buttons from the front of his shirt.

“We have firefighters everywhere,” says Gary, as we stop in front of a fire truck in Fun Town. A bolt has jimmied loose, popping up the black LEGO bricks from the right foot of a firefighter model.

“I don’t have the right bricks,” says Gary, as he tries to find a way to repair the foot.

“Do we have to go back to the shop?” I ask.

“Nope, this will just take a minute.” Gary holds up a 2 × 10 black brick that he proceeds to saw in half with an X-Acto knife.

“You made a 2-by-5 brick,” I say. “You’re creating LEGO. It’s like the 1-by-5 brick.”

“Where did you hear about that?” asks Gary.

“Maybe Steve Witt. Why, you know it?”

“I coined it, along with [LEGO certified professional] Dan Parker. He used to work as a bag boy in a grocery store and they’d say, ‘We need a cleanup on aisle twenty-seven.’ So, we tried to figure out what we could say about LEGO,” says Gary.

He checks his clipboard, jumps back on board, and hits the accelerator. Gary points out a LEGO dog where someone once thoughtfully left a real leash. Our next stop is the Wild Woods Miniature Golf Course.

“I’m not sure golf clubs and LEGO models were the best combination,” says Gary, bending down to look at an upscaled minifigure that is missing a nose. After drilling a hole, he attaches a new yellow 2 × 2 brick with a screw. A 2 × 2 plate covers the head of the screw, and we head back to the model shop. Motorized carts aren’t allowed in the park once guests are inside.

The paved road of the back lot gives way to a rutted dirt one. As the cart bounces across dirt moguls, we come upon a large white tent. Miniland trucks sit stacked outside the entrance, along with flamingos and leaping fish. The tent is where models are sprayed with crushed walnuts in order to extend their life at the park. The sunny conditions turn translucent and white bricks yellow, and chrome tiles gray or translucent. Most models have a life span of ten to fifteen years, except clear bricks, which usually need to be replaced or repaired within five years. The mild abrasiveness of the shells helps to wear away the exterior of the models that has been dulled by the elements. A blasted model has softer corners and rounded studs that no longer say LEGO on them.

Those models that can’t be polished or are being retired end up in the adjacent model graveyard.

“This is where AFOLs usually get the most upset,” says Gary, gesturing to the open wooden crates that look like Hollywood missile containers.

An oversize Hagrid leans on his side against a lizard in blue-and-white shorts. Loose park brick and prototypes that have been written on in black marker are stacked inside the wooden bins. I gently finger the top half of a friar’s head.

Gary drives us back to the concrete loop, and as we get closer to the park, I hear the sounds of children screaming from the Dragon roller coaster.

“You get to work in a place that has “Darth Vader” stenciled on a crate. Not too shabby,” I tell Gary as we whiz into the storage area amid replacement coaster cars and the park’s on-site hardware warehouse.

In the middle of a cul-de-sac is the model shop storage tent, what looks like an open-ended hangar filled with seasonal models. Pumpkins and Christmas ornaments are waiting to be packed away. Gary hops off the cart and stops a forklift operator moving a LEGO Santa and his sleigh into a crate. The base is too low and the model is about to be crunched.

“Santa tried to kill me once,” says Gary. In his first year at the park, he was in the flatbed of a golf cart. Another model builder was driving, and Santa was riding shotgun. When the driver got up out of his seat, Santa’s foot slipped onto the accelerator and the cart took off with Gary in the back.

“So, I’m standing there holding on to Santa’s head as we take off. Thankfully, the other guy caught us after about a dozen feet.”