Barbara Wynns has never stopped thinking about the days she spent in an enormous water tank here, somersaulting and backflipping in a sequined tail fin while sucking air from a rubber hose. It was the late 1960s, when young women from as far away as Tokyo auditioned for the privilege of being a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs, doing shows for half a million people a year.
These days, the mermaids at this aging water park are locals who tired of waitressing and retail jobs, and their celebrity does not extend much past Hernando County, all scrub pine and suburban sprawl on Florida's west coast. Attendance at Weeki Wachee has dwindled, and the park has a long list of problems, not least an excess of algae in the mermaid tank.
"It's sad," said Wynns, 54 and dainty, who quells her nostalgia by filling her home with hundreds of mermaid figurines and passes out business cards with a tiny portrait of her mermaid self, circa 1968. "To me, this 27-acre (11 hectare) park is a universe that I love more than breathing. But not everybody gets it anymore."
The troubles became a crisis in June, when the park's landlord threatened to end its lease if it did not fix dilapidated structures, add fire exits and resolve sewage problems and a possible termite infestation.
The absentee owners, a group of investors, had put off repairs while trying for more than a year to sell Weeki Wachee Springs, one of the last and best-known of the kitschy theme-park dinosaurs that ruled Florida in the decades before Walt Disney World. The bad news for Weeki Wachee arrived just months after another faded roadside attraction, Cypress Gardens, closed abruptly after 67 years.
But just when it looked as if the mermaids were going to have to hang up their Lycra tails forever, the owners proposed a last-ditch plan: Why not donate the park to the city of Weeki Wachee, which has nine residents and not much to concern itself with except the park's well-being? Mayor Robyn Anderson, a former mermaid who is the park's no-nonsense general manager, was gung-ho.
"If anybody should have it, it's the city," said Anderson, 29, flipping her long blond ponytail as rain bombarded the roof of her office and the few visitors wandering the grounds ran for cover. "The people who live and work here actually know this place and would keep an eye on it better than people who are never around."
The deal was completed last week; now all the city has to do is pay a US$112,500 rent installment by Aug. 30 and make a few crucial repairs by later this week. The payment can be made in time, Anderson said, but maybe not the repairs. That could mean more trouble with the landlord, the Southwest Florida Water Management District, known as Swiftmud.
"We could move to terminate the lease if the deadlines aren't met," said Michael Molligan, the communications director of Swiftmud.
The show, meanwhile, goes on, even on rainy days like Thursday, when a mere 20 people awaited the morning's mermaid performance in an amphitheater that smells of mildew.
It is taxing work: The mermaids have to stay in the 22.2℃ spring water for up to 45 minutes, holding their breath between swigs from strategically placed air hoses. For the last eight years they have performed The Little Mermaid -- the original Hans Christian Andersen version, not the one that has helped make that other, bigger theme park in Orlando so rich.
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