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Disney Reunion: A Tale of Kindness

Posted: Mar 18th 2025 By: Mick Foley

My time as a guest at the Nashville celebrity con was just about up. It was a slow Sunday, and it seemed like all the wrestling fans who had wanted to meet me were already gone. I was in the beginning stages of packing up when I saw a striking woman with husband and adult child making their way to my table. “You will never remember me”, the striking woman said. “But I used to work on Main Street at The #MagicKingdom.

The woman, Carrie Romero later told me she simply wanted to mention a moment she had shared with my family over 20 years earlier, never thinking I would have the slightest recollection of that moment… but I beat her to the punch!

“You helped my son when he was crying in 2004!”, I said. To say Carrie’s eyes got wide would be an understatement. She wondered how I could possibly remember such an event from so long ago. “Well, my son, Mickey was having a monumental meltdown, and you went out of your way to help him. I will never forget it.”

There were smiles aplenty during those final few minutes at Celebrity Con; smiles, and hugs, and photos, and a couple of teary eyes. My son Mickey, three at the time, was melting down to the point we thought we might have to return to the hotel, only ten minutes after arriving - which would have been a huge disappointment, given the many months we’d been planning this Disney vacation. Mickey was a huge #Disney fan also, with Peter Pan on the Foley VCR (remember those) at least once a week, and many of the other animated classics (Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, etc) on regular rotation. He was even wearing his green Peter Pat hat, and had been talking excitedly about this trip for the longest time. Suddenly, this meltdown had seemingly placed the whole vacation in jeopardy. Tears were streaming down his face, joined by thick rivers of clear mucus flowing from his nose. Yes, this could have turned into the worst vacation ever, had Carrie Romero not leant a helping hand.

She sat my son down at a table away from the hustle and bustle of Main Street. She got him a drink of water. She talked gently to him, figuratively sprinkling a little bit of that Disney pixie dust that somehow turned a bad day into a great one.

She had no idea who I was when she sat with my son. It was not until she arrived for work the next day and heard a co-worker talking about the famous wrestler, that she put two and two together. So she wasn’t doing the right thing because this crying kid’s father was a WWE wrestler. She was simply doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do.

Carrie later asked me in a follow up email how I could possibly remember something that happened so long ago. I told her I had learned that our brains tend to hold on to only the experiences that were very good or decidedly bad. It has been that way with the matches that made up my wrestling career. There are some matches from 30 years ago that I remember every single moment of. I remember those matches where it felt like I could do no wrong - and I remember those matches where it seems that everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Everything else is just a blur.

So it is with life itself. For many years, I had a paperweight that said, “no act of kindness is ever wasted”. Carrie’s act of kindness that day was certainly not wasted. It has stayed with me for so many years because of its thoughtfulness, its genuineness. It has been said that in a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind. I’m so glad Carrie Romero made the choice to be kind that day. In doing so, she helped turn a difficult moment into a magical day.