Vacations are vital to my family simply because the memories associate with it. But in my kindergarten teacher’s and my grandmother’s case, there’s a time and place to talk about what have I done on those trips. In fact, an activity on a particular subject in school is not the germane time to talk about a chance meeting with Roger Rabbit at Walt Disney World days after spring break. It was not until grades kindergarten and two when I learned this lesson.

I returned back from a seven-day cruise on the MS Tropicale (a former Carnival Cruise liner) in the fall of 1995. When I struck up a discussion on the cruise with Mrs. Ofmani in my New Jersey elementary school, she declined to hear this. No, I was not conjuring up sightseeing Tulum ruins on the Mexican island of Cozumel, basking in the sun on one of the Cayman Islands, or even touring New Orleans, Louisiana.

Instead, I was talking about my favorite part of the liner – Tropicana Lounge, which was a show room that featured dancers, singers, and a house band with saxophones, trumpets, and trombones. Mrs. Ofmani’s way of refusal to enter in my cruise vacation talk was just as simple as those three words: “No Tropicana Lounge.” The same holds true when I attempted to discuss about the Cinderella story or even 911 (as a result of a fake call to the police at home). Therefore, I did not speak about Tropicana Lounge until later conversations about childhood memories.

What started the “No Tropicana Lounge” fiasco

On the spring break of 1997, I went to Walt Disney World for the second time during its 25th anniversary celebrations since I last vacationed there in the Christmas of 1996. As I was playing in the front yard just before my school bus came days after my Central Florida sojourn, my kindergarten memories resurfaced when my grandmother said, “Forget about Ellen.”

Before you guys ask me, “Ellen Who?” I was trying to chat about the then-revamped Universe of Energy attraction in Epcot, which featured (and now does) Ellen DeGeneres (the person my grandmother wants me to keep mum about) and Bill Nye. I was incredulous that my grandmother did a Mrs. Ofmani with the same old “No Tropicana Lounge.” principle as if she is paraphrasing what she would have admonished me if she were my second grade teacher in lieu of Mrs. Morris: “No Epcot,” or even worse, “No Ellen.”