The Unbearable Lightness of Mickey Mouse Balloons
Or, Nowhere to Go But Up
For years, I have wondered if balloons will save me.
This is a tall order for a flimsy bit of latex filled with helium. What is a balloon, anyway?
Today’s balloons are descendants of lofty ancestors. On November 21, 1783, a hot air balloon bearing two gentlemen rose over Paris, traveling five miles before setting down with its occupants still intact and well. These early balloons, designed by the Montgolfier brothers, had royal patronage from King Louis XVI of France during the waning days of his regime.
In the early days of hot air balloons, such spectacles were met with wonder. “Are you men or gods?” spectators reportedly asked some aeronauts.
Of course, those were very large balloons. What about small ones? The balloons you can buy in an amusement park today would not have come to be without the development of pneumatic chemistry— the study of gases. As seventeenth and eighteenth-century scientists experimented with combustion and its outputs, they used bags of paper, and then bags of silk, to show that some substances were lighter than air. From this, we eventually get the small rubber balloon, developed by Michael Faraday in 1824.
Here in the dark winter where the wind takes your breath away, I am thinking about balloons and about the word pneuma, the Greek at the root of our English word “pneumatic.” It is “breath” (or hot air), but it also, sometimes, means spirit.
Is there a spirit in balloons, for real? I wonder. And how crazy am I to think so?
When I visited Walt Disney World for the first time, I was thirteen. Old enough to know that a Mickey Mouse balloon was kind of a waste of money—it would just deflate in a day or two-- but young enough not to care and to want one anyway.
In fact, I was captivated not just by the balloons, but by the people who sold them on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom. Part of this was aesthetic. The colorful, modern bouquets of helium contrasted with the neo-gothic castle in the distance; their endless kinetics and shifts so striking, impossible to capture on film.
But the thing that most enchanted me how the balloon sellers were stationed at nerve center of the most famous theme park on earth. I imagined all the people they got to meet, every day. All the places the people came from. I marveled at their power to deliver these divine souvenirs. To make children smile. Then again, it was clearly a long day out in the elements. I wondered if they got bored.
When we returned home to central New Jersey, I wrote a short story called “The Balloon Man” for my eighth-grade English class. Last fall, I re-read it. Here’s how it begins:
“A street. Quiet and lonely, it stands in the early morning sun. Waiting. Waiting for the crowds it knows will come. Ready. Ready with its shining glass shopwindows, its gingerbread trim, its brightly painted storefronts.”
My old stylization is hysterical. Very choppy. And. Melodramatic. One to two adjectives per noun, three descriptive but un-original clauses: it reads just like the cheerful copy in a 1990s Disney World brochure.
The plot though—the plot was extra. It described a craven manager’s plan to replace the human balloon sellers with --- wait for it--- robots. The titular balloon man worried for the poor, sweet, children. His friend, an ardent feminist, yelled about capitalist male chauvinist pigs. They went on strike.
At the tale’s climax, the balloon man saved a small boy from drowning in the moat in front of the castle. The balloon sellers’ livelihoods were secured, everyone lived happily ever after, and I received a commendation from the National Council of Teachers of English.
On one level, this is just funny. A day in the life of the ‘tween writer, drunk on the power of the written word, hoping that her humorous sketch might save her—that she could write her way out, to a place beyond her provincial (suburban) life.
But my foray in fiction also shows that what really drew me to Disney was its promise of community. It wasn’t really about balloons. It was about people and belonging.
This is what has been sprinkled in Disney’s pixie dust all along. As historian Karal Ann Marling writes, “Disney motifs constituted a common culture, a kind of civil religion of happy endings, worry-free consumption, technological optimism, and nostalgia for the good old days.” Walt Disney created his nostalgic Victorian town square in 1955—just as interstates were built, spawning the kinds of sprawl I would inhabit a few decades later. (And just as those same interstates destroyed longstanding urban neighborhoods, thanks to folks like Robert Moses, but that’s a different newsletter).
Disney was remembering an idealized version of Marceline, Missouri, a place where he lived for just five years of his childhood. I was encountering a simulacra of something I had never seen (In a way, as with all such simulations, no one really had). At the heart of both dreams was a vision of belonging.
So, fitting in—the holy grail of nerdy, awkward thirteen-year-olds everywhere--- explains why I was obsessed with Main Street. Still, though…. Why balloons?
At the close of Mary Poppins Returns (2018), Jane and Michael (the siblings from the first film, now adults) take Michael’s three children to a spring fair in the park by Cherry Tree Lane. There they encounter a balloon seller, played with great charm by Dame Angela Lansbury. “Life’s a balloon that tumbles or rises, depending on what is inside,” she sings. In the first chorus, declares:
“Look inside the balloon and if you hear a tune, there’s nowhere to go but up. Choose the secret we know, before life makes us grow, there’s nowhere to go, but up.”
As Michael pays her for some balloons, she stops singing and gives them all a warning.
“Choose carefully, my deary ducks,” she tells the family. “Many have chosen the wrong balloon. Be sure to choose the one that’s right for you.” She insists that he pick first.
Michael laughs. “Those days are long behind me. I don’t think I’ve held a balloon since I was a child.”
“Then you’ve forgotten what it’s like,” she replies.
“To hold a balloon?” he says.
“To be a child!” she declares.
It’s predictable and treacly, sure, but Dame Lansbury can sell any line, and the music has heart. As Michael gazes into a pink balloon, we hear brief strains of “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” the similarly boisterous number that ends the original Mary Poppins (1964). His feet leave the ground. Michael floats up into the sky and shows real joy for the first time in about two hours (The film’s plot revolves around his grief—he is a widower—and how he no longer believes in magic).
“It’s all true!” he exclaims. “Every impossible thing we imagined with Mary Poppins—it all happened!” Like his father before him, he is redeemed by a bit of string and something that flies.
Soon the entire cast is aloft, bouncing above the park. They sing with gusto in waltz time, “And if you don’t believe, just hang onto my sleeve, for there’s nowhere to go but up!” It’s chaos. There are dogs and bicycles in the air. There are somersaults. It’s a riot. Finally, Michael sings, “let the past take a bow, the forever is now!” and everyone concludes, “there’s nowhere to go but up, up, there’s nowhere to go, but up!”
The balloon seller is not a Disney invention. She comes directly from the pen of P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series. In Mary Poppins Comes Back, the nanny and her charges encounter the balloon lady in the park after some errands. “When I was a girl,” she tells them, “people really understood balloons.” Here, too, she urges caution. “Remember, there’s balloons and balloons, and one for everybody! Take your choice and take your time.” Here, too, everyone ends up in the sky—even the Prime Minister. And for everyone, there is a specific balloon—and one balloon only.
Balloons aren’t just a symbol of childhood, ephemerality, or friendship (see also: Winnie the Pooh’s red balloon; Le Ballon Rouge (1956)). They are also a container of spirit.
Pneuma is often used to translated the biblical Hebrew word “ruach”--- wind, breath, but also, sometimes, spirit—not soul, but something a bit more than just the weather. In modern usages—especially American usages—ruach can mean spirit in the sense of with energy and feeling—i.e., at a summer camp—“once more, but with ruach this time!”
I can’t blow up balloons. I literally don’t have the breath to do it. I huff and I puff, and…. The balloons remain flaccid. It’s sad, really. In theory, I exercise enough my cardio capacity must not be that terrible. But somehow this simple task eludes me.
I have always felt—perhaps irrationally—like I am choking when I try to blow up a party balloon. But on some gut level, isn’t this—kind of logical? Isn’t there something uncanny about the balloons we blow up ourselves? Aren’t we placing our life force into a little plastic grave each time we inflate one? Capturing our spirit outside of our bodies?
This is what those first balloons—for flight, for science—were for. They were filled with other, lighter gases, not the carbon dioxide from human lungs. This is how we fill balloons for big parties or parades or theme parks.
But I keep thinking about wind, and breath, and creation. “Are you men or gods?” The creation story in Genesis 1:2 uses the Hebrew word ruach in its description of the primordial world—it says “a ruach Elohim”—a “wind of God”—sometimes translated “spirit of God”—moved over the waters. Balloons are so easily personified because they are always on the edge of escape. What does it mean to contain something so light that it tries to float away?
Perhaps, when I was thirteen, the balloon sellers in Disney World didn’t just fascinate me because they symbolized romantic small-town Americana. Perhaps there was something just a little bit uncanny—a little bit suprahuman, beyond the norm—about their power.
The first time we took our daughter to Disney World, she was five years old. She chose a pink Mickey Mouse balloon. On our last day, I took photographs of her walking around our hotel, the balloon perfectly matching her pink dress. She looked a bit like she was in a movie, though it was years before Mary Poppins Returns came out.
Unlike those magic balloons in Mary Poppins Returns, her balloon was not destined for her alone. It still had a great deal of helium, plenty of life left. But it could not come home with us on the plane. We talked with her about what to do. She agreed, with both sadness and generosity, that it would be best to find someone to adopt the balloon. We went to the lobby of our hotel to search for a “new” kid—a child who was just arriving, who didn’t have a balloon yet. Someone to watch over the pink balloon.
One of the cast members in the lobby helped us to find another little girl, just about our daughter’s age, shyly wearing her own orange “first visit” button. A solemn ceremony ensued. The girl and her family were delighted. We took a photograph to commemorate the exchange. The cast member wiped away a tear (I’ll admit, I did too). “This is what makes working here so special,” she said.
We reenacted the same ritual a few years later, with a royal blue balloon. Now my ‘tweenage daughter—a bit more jaded about Disney World than I am because, well, I’m her mom---seems to be past buying balloons.
Like Michael Banks, I haven’t held my own balloon in a very long time. Last September, I was in Disneyland on the day before the D23 fan convention. As it happened, it was “Disney+ Day.” As a promotion, they were giving out free blue balloons in Town Square.
I’m not sure why I didn’t take one.
Maybe, heeding the balloon seller, I was being careful. Maybe I just didn’t see my reflection in a balloon that day.
Maybe I don’t believe in balloons as much as I thought I did.
Or maybe I believe in them too much— and I am scared of where they might take me.