Disney

The wonderful world of Stacey, the star of Disney hotel TVs

The Princess of Perkiness, Her Highness the Hyper. You hate to love Disney's TV tour guide, but you can't tune her out.

By Sean Daly
Published June 15, 2007

Adventurous, energetic, even a bit annoying, Stacey J. Aswad hosts the TV show Top 7 Must-Sees at Walt Disney World.
	[Special to the Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Handout photo] Stacey J. Aswad

ORLANDO - When you first meet Stacey, your dreams of the perfect Disney World vacation are still pure. No tears have been shed, no Goofy dolls lost, no deep family resentment seeded after a barfy drop on the Tower of Terror.

You have just checked into your room at a Disney hotel. You plop down on the bed, the kids scrambling here and there, and you turn on the television. There she is - Stacey! - the host of the Resort TV channel. Stacey's info show, the 30-minute Top 7 Must-Sees at Walt Disney World, runs on a loop, all day, every day.

In more than 24, 000 hotel rooms.

For tens of millions of visitors a year.

You can't look away from this supernaturally perky tour guide, always in motion, always yammering, always go!go!go! She is nothing less than a human exclamation point.

Look, there's Stacey riding the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at MGM "Love Aerosmith? Love roller coasters? Hellooo!!!". And there she is extracting a "water-powered wedgie" from her tasteful bikini after zipping down the Summit Plummet slide at Blizzard Beach ("Straight down the chute, brotha! Let's get it on!"). Stacey visits four theme parks, two water parks, Downtown Disney and a golf course in a half-hour. You're impressed.

You're also a little annoyed. She talks fast, sometimes high, sometimes low, sometimes in an awkward slang that is akin to watching your mother do the Electric Slide ("If you excuse me, I'm about to get my ride on!"). Stacey is impossibly cute, wholesome, the girl next door, Marcia from The Brady Bunch.

As you watch her, you think, maybe you will have the perfect Disney World vacation. Maybe you will be just like Stacey, tackling life with fresh feet and a big smile.

And when you return after your first day - exhausted, sweaty, broke, your dreams tainted - Stacey is there, unchanged. So you watch her again. And again. Your kids memorize her lines ("It's a lot like going to the real Africa, but without all the malaria shots and stuff!").

Stacey. We love her; we hate her. We want to be her; we want to mute her. Stacey.

We can't look away.

Who is this woman?

People "aren't sure if I'm adorable or annoying, " explains Stacey J. Aswad, who is as hyper on the phone as she is on TV. "My inherent energy is a little high. There are times when I (think), How high IS my voice? But hey, I live with myself every day."

Stacey is 38 years old, the youngest of five daughters from Binghamton, N.Y. She remembers "doing a one-woman Nutcracker" for her family as a little girl. She was a five-time national champion at competitive artistic roller skating. She earned a degree in dance from the prestigious Juilliard School. She has filmed a few commercials (recently Selsun Blue: "I'm the girl with the hair blowing"), a few cable-TV shows (the faith-based 7th Street Theater on the Trinity Broadcasting Network) and even a feature film (Me & You, Us, Forever, out in 2008).

She has just been named the in-arena host of the L.A. Sparks WNBA team, where she'll work all of the team's home games at the Staples Center. When the hoops team is down by three in the fourth quarter, Stacey, a one-woman cheerleading squad, will be working the crowd, pumping them up. Or driving them bonkers.

No job has given her the exposure of the Disney gig. Top 7 Must-Sees is now in its second year and is scheduled to run through the end of 2007. There's even a growing cult of Stacey on the Internet, where Disney World fans like to rip her work ("she was incredibly annoying") or praise her, albeit in backhanded ways ("our holiday was kind of punctuated by Stacey"). When told of the cyberchatter, she issues a chirpy laugh and says, "It's an addictive show!"

'Finding your Stacey'

A few years ago, on a tip from her agent, Aswad auditioned for the Disney in-room hosting job. It was an open casting call. "There were a million people there, " she says. She got a callback and booked the gig. One small problem: Aswad had never been to Disney World.

"When I first went down there in April 2005, I was excited, but it was scary, " she says of the shoot's first day. "There's no teleprompter, no ear prompter, no cue cards."

There was, however, a 25-page script. That's right: Stacey wasn't improvising. So whether you like her or not, you have to admit that she sells those lines as if they were her own.

"The whole thing is about finding your Stacey, " says Paul Manutes, the 36-year-old screenwriter behind the Top 7 Must-Sees. "She's a little top, man. She can go all day. She gets it."

Even he is shocked by her powers of seduction. "I wanted people to watch it from top to bottom, " he adds later. "But I didn't try to build an addiction into it. Now there are people requesting copies."

Over the course of seven days, spread out over a few months, Stacey and a small crew worked the entire Disney property, shooting main footage, plus "B roll" of her mugging with kids and characters. "I had people come up to me and ask, 'Is this Girls Gone Wild?' " she laughs.

No, this was one young woman giving hope to millions, conquering the herculean task of pure Disney nirvana. Our hero.

So Stacey, how did you do it?

"It was physically and mentally demanding, " she says, sounding defeated for the first time. "It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."

Wait a minute. What?

"Hey, when you dance on your toes, it's all relative about what's painful, " she says. "I think I had a couple blisters (from all the walking around the parks). But I'm used to bloody toes."

Bloody toes?

She continues: "Oh, and I did have some bruises from some of the water parks, colliding with the cameras and all that."

Bruises?

"Oh! And I did get this funky dermatitis in the Animal Kingdom! I must have leaned against something. I ended up having to take steroids for three days. This doctor had to come to the resort. It was creeping down my arm!"

Stacey got a rash? Ewww.

Sensing that a fantasy has been shattered, Stacey drops her voice into a warm, chummy tone. She knows her job. Enough of the nasty talk. It's time for Stacey to be Stacey.

"Everything at Disney World is so bright and clean and there's music everywhere!" she says. "Wouldn't it be great if the world was like this everywhere?!"

That's our girl.

Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8467. His Pop Life blog is at blogs.tampabay.com/popmusic.

[Last modified June 25, 2007, 15:57:32]