Owning a Private Piece of the Public Disney Rock: Consumer Response and the Main Street Electrical Parade Light Bulb

In the 1980s, a new American cultural phenomenon erupted right alongside Mt. St. Helens: the desire for Mt. St. Helens's ash. Americans bought everything-from ash-filled clocks, hourglasses, and ballpoint pens to ash-filled pendants, broaches, and gumball containers. Artists used ash in paint, pottery, and glass. Smokers even bought ashtrays made of ash. And, for purists, ash was available in a plastic bag.1 Mt. St. Helens's ash, in its various consumable forms, is an example of what the cultural critic Beverly Gordan calls a "piece of the rock" souvenir. The "piece of the rock" souvenir is often an actual "piece" from a public space, brought home for private consumption.2 In 1996, the Disney company took its own turn with the "piece of the rock" tradition, honoring a twenty-four-year-old Disneyland event.3 Disney released light bulbs, similar to the ones used to decorate Christmas trees but without electrical wirings. What could possess Americans to purchase disconnected light bulbs at $10 apiece? The tiny objects once helped to light the Main Street Electrical Parade, a Disneyland interactive event from 1972 to 1996. Three years later, the Main Street Electrical Parade light bulb continues to serve no particular, utilitarian purpose. Instead, each disconnected bulb attains its significance as a small piece, plucked off a greater, public whole. As I see it, each consumer who received a light bulb actually received a tangible form of his or her parade experiences. Each bulb acts as a cultural artifact, reflecting the bulb owner's private connection to this very public event. In "The Significance of an Artifact," Yi-Fu Tuan explains that "it is an essential characteristic of being human that we feel the urge to reify experience, to give those fleeting moments of pleasure and pain a narrative outline or visual shape" (462). As advertisements once warned, the Main Street Parade is now "glowing, glowing, gone" from Disneyland. But each light bulb continues to offer its consumer a tangible, visual shape of his or her fleeting parade experiences. Students of American culture may better recognize the private side of this public event by asking what exactly light bulb consumers wished to give shape to. I asked a small group of potential consumers for their ideal pictures of the Main Street Electrical Parade light bulb.4 How did these consumers hope the bulbs would look when delivered to their homes? The packaging, shape, and color were unknown. This opened an opportunity for subjects to create their own texts for interpretation. Each subject created a visual text, representing his or her ideal bulb and bulb packaging. The subject's picture was then used as a springboard for discussion about the private significances he or she attached to the Main Street Electrical Parade. Christina Guerrero, 18, describes her interest in the bulb as follows. "That's the thing that lights," she says, "That's the thing that gave me all those feelings. A T shirt or mug is not the same thing for me." For her, the bulb is not just a picture of the parade on a T shirt or mug. Instead, the light bulb is a piece of the parade itself, her piece. From my perspective, the light bulb and various other "piece of the rock" souvenirs may typify the private side of public American culture. A parade or other public event is taken in by a viewer, and a piece of that event, the viewer's subjective experience, is taken home. Viewed from the contextual homes of my sample subjects, the private side of the Main Street Electrical Parade combines personal experiences with Disney and other public ideologies. Discussing these ideologies may make them easier to recognize in sample consumer texts. The cultural critic Richard V. Francaviglia explains that in the 1950s Disneyland "was envisioned and designed as an international ambassador of Yankee ingenuity, national nostalgia, and collective visions of the future" (152). …