Fireworks at Disneyland

A tale of two summers

Aug 11, 2025

Summers of ‘92 and ‘93, I worked at Disneyland.

The Mouse went recruiting every year to various colleges, offering work experience, affordable housing, and if desired, cheap business courses you could take as part of your ongoing higher education. They stopped at my university in Tucson, and I heard about the application from a friend.

And I got the job! Though I get the feeling that as long as you were breathing and willing to relocate, you were halfway there.

So, I moved into the Oakwood Apartments in Anaheim, with three other roommates in a two-bedroom apartment, that cost me $75 of my paycheck a week, utilities included (roughly a third of my take-home cash). I didn’t have a car, so I had to take the bus to work, but Disney had some kinda deal with the city for bus passes, so even that, after a little paperwork, ended up being mostly free.

I think because I was a theater minor, I got placed in the Wardrobe Department. A lot of my friends and roomies got jobs in the park, as janitors and ride operators, meaning they were mostly “onstage,” and basically had to wear the Disney™ Face all day, as almost 100% of their time was spent interacting with (or at least visible to) guests.

I was mostly “backstage,” and didn’t have to interact with guests all that much. So I could be my surly self. Basically, I came to work, did my job, and got discounts on Disney products.

Which was kinda awesome for a 19-year-old.

I don’t know it for a certainty, but it seemed like they stuck all the misfit toys in backstage jobs. We were all a little goofy, many in the best ways. But I think Disney feared what might happen if we were exposed to the normies in the park.

Well, joke’s on them, cuz I loved it.

That first summer, I mostly worked on The Main Street Electrical Parade. I had been awestruck by it since my first trip to Disneyland. In ‘92, they were celebrating, if memory serves (which it doesn’t always), the twenty-year anniversary of the parade.1 They were selling crew jackets for something like $60 or $80 apiece, which in those days, as you could probably guess, was big money to me, since that was more or less my weekly rent payment. So I didn’t get one, though I’ve regretted it ever since.

The whispers in those days were that they were mothballing the parade for good, and we would be the last crew to work on it. That gave me kind of a cool feeling, being a part of that history.

Of course, the parade is still around in one form or another, last I heard, so that turned out to be a totally incorrect prediction. But I still got to be a tiny part of that history.

Rando memory: I got to ride inside the Pete’s Dragon float once, steering the giant tail. Legend had it that in the past some notorious goings-on happened in that tail. I cannot verify. Seemed a little cramped for any goings-on.

Sometimes the dancers/actors asked me out with them to go to Denny’s, or out drinking. I wasn’t old enough to go drinking, but I loved the Denny’s trips. It was like getting to watch comedians backstage at the Comedy Store, ripping each other assholes all night. I’d already started hanging with comedians back in Tucson, so I felt right at home.

My favorite part of working at Disneyland? That’s easy. Happened every night.

As Wardrobe, our job was to help set up and take down the costumes in the parade, and make sure they were cleaned and repaired.

Yup, that’s it.

But every costume was covered in light bulbs, and many of them, between those bulbs and their power sources, weighed AT LEAST forty pounds, and those poor souls had to dance for two hours a night in those things. Some, who were in much heavier outfits, would lose pounds of water weight each night, sweating in those things. And if they moved wrong or someone bumped into them, you could easily take out a couple rows of light bulbs. So as you can imagine, there was a lot of detail that went into maintaining those outfits.

I won’t break the magic (or any lingering NDAs) and tell you what we did or how we did it, but I think I can tell you, we were basically given a lot of free reign. Long as the costumes were ready to go by parade time, and the cast was dressed, we were given a lot of rope. It was the first time I’d had a job where I was mostly unsupervised, and trusted to get the work done. It made me feel all growed up.

(I suspect part of what made me ideal for the job was I also didn’t mind hearing the same music for two hours a night. Every night. Every… night.)

But my favorite, favorite, part was smack in the middle of the evening. We’d get the first round of the parade going (there were two rounds a night), get the cast off and dancing, then we’d drive to the other side of the park, where we’d meet them coming in and help them take off their costumes so they could relax before round two.

And meanwhile, in the park, once the parade was complete, as they had for decades before and decades since, they had a fireworks show.

And, being where we happened to be backstage, we had the best seats in the house. Guests in the park had to watch the fireworks explode above Sleeping Beauty’s castle, often from loooooong distances.

Well, where we were backstage, we were nearly right under Sleeping Beauty’s castle. So the fireworks were right above our heads.

Often, we would finish getting the cast undressed, send them off on their dinner break, grab ice cream, sit back and watch the fireworks.

I did that almost every night. Even when my crewmates ran off to do other things, I would lean under a tree, or lie on a bench, or just stand and stare up, neck craned.

Y’know how people will think back to their childhoods, drinking tea on a lake, or watching sunsets?

That’s one of my treasured memories of youth. Nightly fireworks at Disneyland. I remember thinking that there wasn’t much else I could ask for at that very moment, eating ice cream and watching fireworks as they exploded above our heads.

During my second summer on the job, I was kinda shifted around more, from the Electrical Parade, to the Fantasmic! show, to the nightmarishly hot Aladdin parade. It was fun, but not like it had been the first time around. And unlike the Electric Parade, there was nowhere to watch fireworks from during Fantasmic!, and of course none during the day parade. Maybe not a dealbreaker all by itself, but I’d left a girlfriend back in Arizona, and it was making me miserable to be around. And I was looking more and more toward moving to Los Angeles, and trying to get a career in entertainment going, so I wasn’t intending to keep working at D-Land.

Plus, the money wasn’t that great, as you may have picked up on.

So after that second summer, I packed my kitbag and never returned to the Anaheim Oakwood Apartments.

But I’ve been spoiled for fireworks ever since.

READIN

Finished that Cormac McCarthy “Orchard Keeper,” and am glad I didn’t it read it first of his stuff. His word craft is there, but I think he hadn’t quite figured out what he’d meant to say yet.

Or maybe I didn’t get it, which is always possible.

I read a review of the book from when it came out, where the reviewer sorta dismissed McCarthy as “another Faulkner acolyte,” and realized I still haven’t read any Faulkner, so I started “As I Lay Dying,” and saw immediately what the reviewer meant. I actually think McCarthy does Faulkner better than Faulkner, but Faulkner obviously did it first.

WARTCHIN

Been wartchin that “Smoke” show on Apple, created by Dennis Lehane, an author I quite enjoy. The show is really well done in all departments, acting, writing, design, all that. And it does a great job of setting you up for one thing, then whipsawing you another direction.

There’s something about it that doesn’t wholly click for me. And I can’t put my finger on what. And can’t tell you without spoilers, so you’re on your own.

But it’s worth checking out to see if you like it. Apple continues in their tradition of good shows that start with “S” - Slow Horses, Severance, Sugar, Silo, (The) Studio… I’ve heard Shrinking is great, just haven’t tried it, but maybe I will once Smoke finishes this week.

And I finished “Squid Game 3.” It pulls some shit I guarantee that if you’ve only seen the first season, you won’t see coming. It won’t work for everyone, but the ending is solid. And, best compliment I can give, the show is hard for me to watch, because it gives me anxiety, fearing for the characters. If you enjoy “The Bear,” you know what I mean.