The photograph above features the informant’s two children on a visit to Disneyland 2001 or 2002 upon completion of their conversion superstition – avoiding bad luck by finding Ariel and getting their hats!

General Information about Item:

• Customary lore, conversion superstition
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Kevin Korsh
• Date Collected: 2/25/18

Informant Data:

• Kevin Korsh is a retired commercial Real Estate lawyer who lives in Weston, Connecticut. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Scarsdale, New York (a part of the greater New York City metropolitan area). He attended Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts and then Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California. He first lived in proximity to Disneyland when he moved to Los Angeles after law school. In this period, he married California native Sally Korsh and fathered two daughters, Johanna and Karina. He never visited either Disney park as a child or young adult but visited around ten times as a young father with his family in the early 2000s

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: Main Street USA at Disneyland, the area at the entrance to the park, features numerous stores that offer custom Disneyland memorabilia. One of these services is an embroidery station at which visitors can have hats or shirts embroidered with their names, slogans, and Disney characters of their choice. One of the park’s other main attractions lies in the opportunity to meet and take photos with human impersonators of various Disney characters. These include all of the traditional princesses that are featured in Disney films and some more contemporary characters. In the early 2000s, Disneyland had yet to extensively organize and advertise opportunities for families to meet and take photos with Disney characters. This required visitors to act a bit intrepidly, wandering the park and the recreations of landscapes from various Disney films in an area called Fantasyland to seek out the character of their choice. This included Ariel, the main character from the Disney classic The Little Mermaid.
• Social Context: This superstition was developed among the folklore group of the Korsh family over the course of around ten visits to Disneyland in the early 2000s. While the superstition is told in the same way by both the Korsh parents and Korsh children, it has different meanings based on the age of the performer.

Item:

• The following superstition takes the form of a conversion superstition (if A, then B, unless C). If the Korsh family visited Disneyland, they would have bad luck if the children didn’t get embroidered hats and got to meet Ariel.
  • According to the informant, ‘bad luck’ for the parents signified the likely tears and temper tantrums of their children if they didn’t get their hats and didn’t meet Ariel on that trip. As health-conscious parents, the superstition also had a protection-oriented purpose in making sure our faces were safe from the sun under hats.
  • The informant believes that ‘bad luck’ for the children meant more of a fear of supernatural curses and omens that took after the ones they observed in Disney adaptations of fairy tales.
• The following is a transcript of the superstition as it was told to the collector in February 2018. Some words and phrases have been omitted from the original to allow for easy reading.

Transcript:

• “You [the interviewer] and Jojo [Johanna] had an extremely particular set of requirements for what constituted a successful Disney trip way back when. If you two did not get to buy custom embroidered hats, you’d throw a fit. If you two did not get to meet Ariel, you’d throw a fit. If neither of these were possible, the trip was a disaster. It felt like you two genuinely believed the world would fall apart magically if we weren’t able to do either. It was frustrating, but endearing. Seriously – they didn’t even organize meet and greets with the princesses back then. We’d wander Fantasyland for hours hoping we’d happen upon Ariel. But you know me and your mom – we were okay with it as long as we had sunscreen and those hats kept the sun off your face.

Informant’s Comments:

• “I love you both, but I’m pretty glad we’ve moved on from those days. Although those hats were definitely cheaper than the crazy phones and clothes you spend your money on now.”

Collector’s Comments:

• I really appreciated hearing this story in full from my father. Although I have vague memories of meeting Ariel and watching my hat be embroidered at Disneyland, I don’t have the capacity to recall the attitudes I brought towards my trips to Disneyland when I was so young. It was particularly interesting to discover how the same superstition had different significances to me and my sister vs. my parents. They feared more practical and health-related concerns, while we were young kiddos who genuinely thought we were entering our favorite fairy tale and irrationally feared what would happen if we couldn’t.

Collector’s Name: Karina Korsh

Tags/Keywords:

• Customary Lore
• Superstition
• Hats and Princesses, or else: a Conversion Superstition