Grumpy cat has met his match. “Angry Splash Mountain lady” Jordan Alexander, the woman whose stern face circulated around the internet earlier this month, tells Us Weekly that, in fact, she doesn’t take things too seriously.
The new mom — she and her husband, Steven, share a 3-month-old son — explained that despite appearances, she was simply having fun getting a jab in at her husband for ditching her on the ride at the last minute.
“By the time I was on the ride, I had calmed down [after being annoyed by Steven’s refusal to ride Splash Mountain], but I did know that I wanted to remember this,” the Syracuse, New York, resident tells Us Weekly. “I wanted to look grumpy. So I saw the flash and I looked over and I had no idea if I was still making the face.… But once I got off the ride, I saw the photo and I knew he was going to die seeing it.”
What resulted was a hilarious photo of Jordan, 35, staring straight into the camera with her arms folded and her lips pursed as the rest of the riders in her log look like they’re having the time of their lives.
The photo has already garnered 4 million views on Imgur and countless memes, including ones that feature her and the presidential candidates, one with Keanu Reeves, another one with viral sensation Grumpy Cat superimposed over her face and one with the Mona Lisa in place of where she would be sitting in the log (“that one’s my favorite!” Jordan said).
Steven said that the ride had been a long time coming — it was their first family vacation together with their son and Jordan’s parents, after two previously failed attempts to get away from their snow-laden hometown. (Steven, who was previously on kidney dialysis, wasn’t able to travel the first time around, and Jordan had gotten pregnant when they tried to plan a second trip.)
“It was hot, we’d already ridden a bunch of rides and we were headed over to Splash Mountain,” Steven recalls. “I said, ‘I’ll ride it with you.’ It was kind of a big deal, but when we were making our way over, we stopped to get a snack, and I said, ‘I don’t think I have it in me.’”
At that point, Jordan snapped back, “To ride in a log in a beautiful river?”
And thus, “angry Splash Mountain lady” was born.
“When we were saying our vows at our wedding a few years back, we got to the part about being there for each other in sickness and in health, and we just started laughing,” Jordan says. “We’d never been poorer or sicker. Most people don’t get that until later on in life … so the important thing is to keep a sense of humor about it all.”
