I have a friend who is a heterosexual cis male. Yeah, so Mickey and Minnie, their heights are 4-foot-11 to 5-foot-1, so Mickey and Minnie are usually women. So the gender of the performer doesn’t matter much? I had no idea that there might be a woman underneath the mask of Winnie the Pooh at Disneyland. I was so stoked when I got through training, and then I did three weeks in a row of just Winnie the Pooh. And once you’re approved for fur, it’s two days of training for each “face character”. It was wild to me, I thought the training would last about a month. The last two days of training you go out into the park with character attendants, and meet people. So you’re in business-casual but the hands and head of Chip and Dale. There’s a really creepy portion where you wear just the head and hands of the character. The first three days of training is sitting and watching videos of what you can or can’t do. You have to be trained and approved in fur characters first. When you’re accepted in entertainment, nobody is just a princess or just a prince.

It may be different now, but for me, the training was five days. When you got to entertainment, how long was the training regimen? Sotakoun’s rendering of Mulan’s signature. You feel like this is an iconic Disney character walking past you. It’s not like they say, “Listen, these people are so much better than you.” You just feel it. Walking backstage in my yellow polo with khaki shorts, if Peter Pan would pass me, I would go quiet. When you’re working at the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids playground, is getting into entertainment the holy grail? I’m from outside of Chicago, and they said, “Could you read that again, and this time don’t say ‘Poca-HAHN-tus.” They took pictures of me, and they said, “You’re in!” I put on the costume they had me read a prewritten line. Being half Asian and half white, that was a surprise.

They pulled me after the audition and told me I would be Pocahontas. At the end of the program, after three months, they held auditions for entertainment. It was glorified babysitting - you watch kids climb over this giant ant - and that was a lot of fun. So I worked at the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids playground first. I didn’t start as a princess you’re not allowed to audition for entertainment in that program. I immediately told my mom that I wanted to do this, and she said, “Okay, maybe for a couple months.” I think it was to try and get kids into the workforce. Basically, you graduate school, go straight to Disney. I wish I could tell you that I glamorously walked in and they said, “We love you.” But I was in high school in 2008, and Disney came to our school and talked about the Disney CareerStart program. So how did you get your foot in the door at Disney World? Sotakoun and I talked about the sliding pay scale at Disney parks, the after-hours scene with the cast members, and what it was like for her, a woman with no Native American heritage, to be asked to play Pocahontas.

Instead, if she’s recognized by a park-goer at Target, Sotakoun and her former coworkers are urged to say something like, “Yes, I’m friends with Pocahontas.” The company discourages its entertainment staff to talk openly about their time working at the parks, and asks all of its Ariels, Belles, and Snow Whites never to acknowledge that they play their namesake characters.

Sotakoun hasn’t worked at Disney World in nearly a decade, but she’s one of the few former princesses who’s willing to share her experiences candidly with anyone curious. From crying children to leering grandpas, she’s seen it all. Afterward, she was let loose on the campus so she could briefly lose herself in the “happiest place on earth.” In that time, Sotakoun became familiar with every curveball the Disney World Resort was capable of throwing at her. At the beginning of her shift, she’d enter the bowels of the Magic Kingdom and be costumed as either Pocahontas, Mulan, or Silvermist (a Peter Pan fairy of East Asian appearance who first appeared in the Disney Fairies direct-to-DVD films). Sotakoun, who is half Laotian and half white, went through an intensive crash course for each of the characters she played in Disney’s “entertainment” division, which refers to the iconic costume characters that cheerfully reside in the amusement parks. Today, at 30 and with a job in the video game industry, she says she looks back at her princess era with only good memories. Sotakoun worked at Disney World for four years, starting in 2008 when she was just 18.

Cinderella disney princess