Notable Modern-day Peter Pans
Several celebrities have been cited as having the Peter Pan syndrome, e.g., Peter Andre, Jamie Oliver, Davina McCall, and Holly Willoughby. A prominent example was Michael Jackson who said, "I am Peter Pan in my heart". Jackson named the 2,700-acre Los Olivos, California property, where he lived from 1988 to 2005, Neverland Ranch after Neverland, the fantasy island in the story of Peter Pan, and shared that it was his way of claiming the childhood he never had. He had built there numerous statues of children, a floral clock, a petting zoo, a movie theater, and a private amusement park containing cotton candy stands, two railroads (one 36" gauge with a steam locomotive (Crown 4-4-0, built 1973, with two coaches) and the other a 24-inch gauge amusement train ride-type), a Ferris wheel, carousel, Zipper, Octopus, Pirate Ship, Wave Swinger, Super Slide, dragon wagon kiddie roller coaster, go-karts, bumper cars, tipi village, and an amusement arcade; As The New York Daily News staff writer, Carrie Milago, reported on 26 June 2009: "On Jackson's dime, thousands of schoolchildren visited over the years, from local kids to sick youngsters from far away." Visitors "often recalled it as dreamlike", she observed, and a preschool teacher visiting the site told USA Today in 2003, Neverland "smells like cinnamon rolls, vanilla and candy and sounds like children laughing".
Read more about this topic: Puer Aeternus
Famous quotes containing the words notable, peter and/or pans:
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Among them was a Bishop, who
Had lately been appointed to
The balmy isle of Rum-ti-Foo,
And Peter was his name.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)