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:
“Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it’s more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Vice is a creature of such hideous mien ... that the more you see it the better you like it.”
—Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936)
“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)