gracefully pulls up the walls. Watching the small deft movements that bring a form ever closer to its final proportions between the foot, belly, and neck provides the needed visual experience to appreciate a pot’s hidden movement in now twice-fired stoneware. SDC customers never watch the potter mix glazes or use them, but the at-once colorful, yet sometimes-unexpected, glaze finishes that fill the gallery
become a topic of discussion between potter and customer across the
demonstration area railing. More commonly, the potters speak to their audience about their immediate work at the wheel. They may speak about why they wheel wedge the clay first to homogenize the clay and avoid any air pockets that may cause problems in the fire. Or, as they throw, they may discuss the aesthetic choices made along the way, like deciding to leave the ridges made by the potter’s fingers to catch puddles of glaze, or about the practical concerns that motivate the potter to round out the lip carefully for ease of use. As the customer watches and listens, a window opens up into the potter’s perspective and aesthetic. As the
previous chapter suggests, the rift between Ms. Checkbook’s tastes and her potter’s may begin to close.
Secondly, the role of crafts demonstrator connects a pot with the experience of meeting its craftsman. Other buying experiences rarely offer this, as Frank Neef describes:
They can go to Wal-Mart and get a mug for a dollar and a half, not fourteen dollars like it costs at the City, and it will drink just as well. But it wasn’t made by hand. They don’t have the identity, identifying with the person that made it. I firmly believe today, even still, that’s why people buy handmade items; ‘cause there are just few things in the world that are made by a single person from start to finish. A single person takes the pride and injects some of his personal integrity into the construction of it, and they have that amount of time of that
person’s life when they purchase the item. And that’s part of the attraction of buying handmade arts and crafts. (2002)
At SDC, rather than at Walmart, customers connect the names scrawled on the bottom of pots with the faces behind the demonstration wheel. They can choose to buy pots by artists they have seen in performance and even engaged in
conversation. As Neef suggests, for many customers this may be the most desirable feature of the transaction.
To summarize, the crafts demonstrator uses the demonstration platform to help park visitors better understand both the skill and artistic perspective behind their work. The demonstrations also allow the potter to show the personal investment in each pot as well as to forge a brief, but meaningful relationship with guests that will further personalize a customer’s purchase. However, at SDC, where the park’s theme takes guests back to another time, the role of crafts demonstrator helps fulfill another important goal, that of joining in the park’s 1880s Ozarks heritage
production.
When the potters step before park visitors as crafts demonstrators, they take an active role in shaping SDC’s heritage production. For some, this process begins with scene setting. Park designers hide most anachronisms and “theme” the
physical space by filling it with objects that add “charm” and that meet guests’ expectations of what an Ozark-past should be. The total impact must be an
“atmosphere” that allows for guests’ imaginative transport to another time and place. This section will elaborate these points as well as show how SDC fits the heritage production model, through which objects, traditions, and sensibilities—long out-of- vogue—find new currency as exhibits of themselves. Heritage-making comes
through in the potters’ costuming, shop design, production methods, and in the pots themselves.
From the perspective of Sue Noel, the park’s theming coordinator, the potters and all staff at SDC find themselves in something like a movie. Because of this dramatic aspect of the park, Noel believes the creation begins with the right set. As she notes, guests moving about the park should feel transported to another time, and the staff must do its best not spoil that feeling:
If you were watching “Little House on the Prairie,” and Laura walked across the field in tennis shoes, it has pretty much destroyed the whole vision of what the T.V. show was trying to depict. And it is the same out here. So everybody needs to be really conscious of what they do, what they say, how they dress—because we are doing this for our guest. And in some sense we are in a movie, and I think once you have reached that, really, a point of no return when a guest can stand around and look around and really not see anything out of theme, I think that that feeling is just there from a guest’s standpoint. (Noel 2002)
Noel’s staff plays a key role in establishing the physical space that strives to bring guests to, as she says here, “a point of no return.”
Of the park’s construction process, Noel explains that the corporate design office leads the scene-making, overseeing all major changes to the look of the park. But while this office plans new rides and other large building projects (all to promote the park’s 1880s Ozarks theme), Noel and her staff, the “Maintenance and
Construction” team, build many of these planned structures and then see after the details of the park’s look. They build old-time cargo boxes and other clever cover- ups that hide electric meters and other anachronisms from guests’ view. Noel designs and her crew builds and paints signs with old-time lettering and pictures to mark a new ride entrance or to commemorate a longtime employee. When the Food
Division wanted to start selling pretzels near the train depot, for example, Noel oversaw the construction of a concessions cart that looks like an old-time freight car. She searches antique shops to find objects like old furniture, kitchen
utensils, and farm equipment to furnish the shops and decorate the grounds to take care of the finishing touches that add, as she says, “charm” to each space. As a rule of thumb, Noel says that anything pre-1920s works, pointing out that her goal is not authenticity, but rather a perception of pastness.
According to Sociologist Erik Cohen (1988), visitors to Silver Dollar City may still view their experience as “authentic” because they approach the park