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."
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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.
The spring is a phenomenon in its own right -- it pumps out over 379 million liters of crystal-clear water a day and feeds it into the adjoining Weeki Wachee River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It is the springhead that forms the mermaid tank; the rest of the spring snakes far underground, and the bottom has never been found.
Aware that water is a precious commodity in Florida, the city of Weeki Wachee recently sued to get possession of a local water utility that it feared might someday tap into the spring, another potential bad ending for the park.
In several months of training, new mermaids learn CPR, then become certified scuba divers before trying the peculiar art of hose-breathing. Newton Perry, a Navy diver who built the underground theater and opened the mermaid park in 1947, invented the technique. The breathing hoses scattered around the tank have buttons to adjust the air pressure -- if it comes out too hard, it can bruise the lungs. Mermaids bite down to stop the flow of air, and slowly exhale through their noses while sashaying to numbers like I've Got the World by the Tail.
Anderson is blunt about the job's many demands. "You're in a tail, 16 feet (5m) under water, breathing on a hose," she said. "If you think about it too much you can freak out."
Mermaids occasionally have panic attacks, when they suddenly feel claustrophobic or breathless and rush to the surface. New performers face nasty ailments like ear and sinus infections as their bodies adjust. There is also the issue of creatures from the Weeki Wachee River invading the mermaid tank.
"Yesterday we had a manatee in here the whole time," said Sativa Smith, who does sound, lighting and stage direction for each performance from a tiny control booth next to the tank. "We get otters, gators, three kinds of turtles."
Once, a large alligator swam unseen into a hole under the amphitheater and popped out while a mermaid was in the tank cleaning the glass, Smith said. The mermaid quit. Now, technicians do a "water check" before every show, and if an alligator longer than four feet shows up, they cancel. Manatees are welcome, however -- they like to visit when the mermaids are cleaning the tank with sponges, to get their backs scratched.
Mayor Anderson, who oversees mermaid auditions, said a lot of women have shown up for tryouts with no idea of what it takes. Many "aren't very good swimmers, believe it or not," she said. The perfect candidate can endure the chilly water, lip-sync, hold her breath for up to two minutes and swim with a smile -- but no diving mask -- without scrunching up her face. She will also perform happily, without seeing her adoring audience, for pay that starts at US$6.50 an hour.
Thursday morning, four women who fit the bill swam out from behind a curtain of bubbles that shot from the bottom of the tank when Smith flipped a switch in the control room. They were a few minutes into their act when Smith saw a flash of lightning, then another. The phone in the control room rang; it was Anderson, who had also seen the bolts. Smith turned on the loudspeaker in the tank, which the audience cannot hear, and ordered the mermaids out.
They disappeared into "the tube," a narrow shaft to "the hot room," a hidden, heated platform where mermaids huddle between scenes in towels and bathrobes.
Anderson said she had already made some of the repairs that Swiftmud requested -- shoring up rotting beams at the Mermaid Gallery restaurant, for example -- but she is holding off on others: The county fire marshal told her the mermaid theater had enough fire exits, she said, and she does not want to connect the park's sewage system to the county's until the busy season ends.
The city plans to ask Swiftmud if part of the lease payments can go to repairs -- "We have to help each other out here," Anderson said.
But she and other park devotees are also coming up with ideas for generating income. Anderson wants to expand the kiddie pool at the Buccaneer Bay water park that earns Weeki Wachee most of its money, and perhaps create a second mermaid show, with new costumes and choreography.
Wynns, the former mermaid, believes Weeki Wachee can go even further: Why not put on bathing-suit fashion shows in the mermaid tank, bus tourists the 142km from Disney World, even have a mermaid circulate through the park, like Mickey, Minnie and Goofy?
Among other things, Wynns would like to see the algae -- "scrunge" to the mermaids -- removed.
"We had silky white sand and emerald eelgrass, and when the bubbles stood on it they looked like diamonds," she said wistfully. "I believe we can make this place magic again, with the right money."
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