The Cult of Mickey

I don’t recall how it started, but it got way out of hand. Went from funny to weird in the space of a few months, sometime around the summer of ‘56. Nuns wearing Mickey Mouse wristwatches is one thing, but nuns taking a bus to Raleigh or Winston Salem on the weekend to get a Mickey tattoo on their ass or inner thigh is just plain disturbing.

Archie Briggs, former Everbleak Hospital Porter

Mouseketear Nuns worshipping a home-made Mickey in a private bedroom shrine.

Walt Disney opened Disneyland, in Anaheim California, in the summer of 1955. It was the culmination of almost thirty years of dreaming, planning and superhuman tenacity. Little did he know that a small party of Everbleak nuns would go there on vacation soon after, and take the Disney corporation’s icon (and Walt’s most precious personal creation) to its furthest literal conclusion.

Mickey Mouse is a cultural deity. A 20th century colossus standing astride the American dream, and arguably far more famous and recognisable than Jesus (and The Beatles – sorry John). He is the perfect host, the best merchandise salesman, the best PR agent, the best actor, and the greediest little money-whore on the planet.

The party of Everbleak nuns who were greeted by him on Main Street in the dazzling west coast sunshine, did not see him as an alcoholic hired hand in a sweaty, smelly suit. They saw him as a beatific presence bathed in holy glow. A divine being who had no voice, just outward physical expressions of love. For these addicts and lunatics in dirty habits, it was worship and lust at first sight. By nightfall, three of them had taken Mickey’s sacred communion, from behind, against a magic kingdom dumpster.

The party of nuns took their Mickey worship (and an unplanned pregnancy) back to Everbleak, where they offered prayers and offerings to their mouse god in secret. Crude icons and votives were fashioned for makeshift private shrines, alongside the primitive ‘official’ Disney souvenirs that existed at that time.

The cult of Mickey fermented slowly: underground and gaseous, like an ale of darkness. New members were initiated with a Mickey Mouse button badge pinned through their left nipple and worn for a week; the pain reminding them of the suffering that Mickey endured as the put-upon sorcerer’s apprentice. Rituals and incantations were guarded jealousy, and pilgrimages were made to the Greenville Picture House to see the sacred animated sermons of their lord and master.

Mickey promised them happiness, positivity, a love of animals (Pluto), and eternal life as an animated being beyond the travails of the flesh and earthly dust. They had not abandoned Jesus, just made him move over in their bed a little to accommodate Mickey too.

Cult of Mickey adherents started calling themselves ‘Mouseketears’, after the mascara-streaked holy tears that the divine could reduce them to. Especially after orgasm. And it wasn’t long before the Mouseketear nuns started recruiting other Everbleak inmates and staff into their cult. This is where it started to grow darker, as the old joy and lightness was gradually replaced with fear, draconian rules, and seances trying to summon Mickey into the mortal world. The cult members started decrying any official or commercial representation of Mickey, and started making their own (crude) masks and accessories. Their sinister appearance was perfectly in keeping with the new direction of travel: death-pacts and a desire to commit mass murder at Disneyland against the ‘false and frivolous followers’ besmirching Mickey with photo requests.

Cult members mock a non-Mouseketear nun. Note the crude homemade masks and gloves, introduced as a protest against store-bought ‘commercialisation’ of their icon

By the 70’s, the cult had largely evaporated through boredom and inertia. Nuns were finding new idols to follow: Burt Reynolds being the most prominent. For a short time, they would wear Burt moustaches and worship to ‘East Bound and Down’ from Smoky & the Bandit.

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin’