“When my earthly trials are over carry my body out in the sea.
Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me”*
Mississippi John Hurt’s Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me
The back story is the road trip me and my writer friend, Javier de Pison, took from Miami Beach through Ft. Lauderdale and the Wreck Bar up the spine of Florida to Weeki Wachee off highway 19 (a wreck of a road, time has forgotten) stopping at forbidden soul food restaurants and fish shacks all the way to Ocala, Florida and back down the right coast into the arms of Christy Strong, Miami mermaid and grand daughter of Maria Stinger, Bunny Yeager’s favorite model (if you don’t count Betty Page).
Every dry land sailor dreams of mermaids and Javier and I are no different. At one point I looked at him and smiled. We had somehow talked are way into the mermaids’ dressing room of the world famous Weeki Wachee, as the young beauties applied water proof make-up and slittered into their tails. This was a dream… right?
It all began years back on another road trip he and I took to Key West, Fla to visit a collector friend. At the time I was smoking Cuban cigars and had to stop to smoke outside the rental car. We pulled into an inlet and I wandered to the water’s edge, wishing to see a manatee (the first mermaids) and suddenly out of the mangrove tangled murky water came one huge manatee, then another, then a baby manatee. We only had potatoe chips, but that sufficed.
First stop, the Wreck bar in the Ft. Lauderdale Sheraton hotel 6pm on Friday. It’s a fantastic show produced by Marina (MedusaSirena). She reminds of my friend Dita Von Teese, very controlling, very successful in her operation. Like Dita, she is bringing vintage glamour back into today. Like so many other beautiful females I know, they are busy every minute of the day. Between the tropical thunderstorms and her hectic schedule I never learned very much about her but I went back a second time and this time went topside to the pool the mermaids were performing in and watched them from above. I could see how sailors thought manatees were mermaids. I found it very erotic. I thought people pay money to swim with the dolphins…why not set it up that people could swim with mermaids. But I’m a photographer and not a producer. Contact info: Sheraton Fort Lauderdale Hotel
1140 Seabreeze Blvd. Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. 954-524-5551. Fridays from 6:30pm to 7pm the sleek mermaids swim by portal windows behind the bar of the Wreck bar. It’s free. MeduSirena can be reached by email [email protected].
Three hundred miles north of Miami on the west coast of Florida above Tampa, off rt 19 is Weeki Wachee, surreal home of women fish that swim in the natural Spring. It opened in 1947 and my guess is it hasn’t changed. Presently, a state park, contact information is: Weeki Wachie Springs State Park 6131 Commercial Way. Spring Hill, Fla. 34606. 352-592-5656 9am-5:30pm daily. To do photography contact John Athanason state park ranger and media contact: [email protected]. A very good guy and a photographer. Naturally, I lost my heart to one of the mermaids- blonde blue-eyed Tara with the tourquoise tail but that’s another tale.
If one goes to Weeki Wachee one must eat at Becky Jack’s food shack down the road. They have a bevy of hot sauces including one in the shape of an outhouse!
I have several closets filled with vintage and fetish fashion and I wanted to add a mermaid outfit. I drove further out into the country to Sandy’s living room where she makes mermaid outfits for her daughter and others. (mermaidsrus.com) I wanted an old one and she sold me the first mermaid tail and top she ever made!
A day later we stopped at a funky motel across from Silver Springs Park in Ocala, Fla.
I needed a mermaid and found one next residing in the room next to the motel’s laundry room. It took some convincing and some small money to get Valerie to dawn pantyhose and wiggle into the tail. Her husband, J.J, did the hoisting and the motel pool provided the setting.
Back here in the Tucson desert, I keep dreaming of mermaids in clear blue water.
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It’s a truly surrealistic landscape that could have been created by Salvador Dalí or André Breton, a myth recreated live before your eyes in the crystal-clear waters of a blue lagoon formed by a spring so deep that they say its source has never been found.
Seven beautiful creatures, with the head and upper body of a woman and the tail of a fish, swim in front of the glass windows of an underwater theater, performing their version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
The vision of mermaids dancing in the turquoise waters, surrounded by fish and turtles swirling around them, provokes a hypnotic effect in which logical thought returns to a primordial state, and symbols and legends rule the mind.
In Florida’s Gulf Coast, about an hour north of Tampa, the mermaids keep singing the same song that long ago seduced Ulysses, and Jason and the Argonauts on their mythical voyages. Not only do they sing, but they dance as well in an underwater coreographed ballet that has attracted visitors to Weeki Wachee for over 60 years.
This fantastic place, known as Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, is one of those old Florida roadside attractions from the 1940s still operating and offering three Mermaid Shows per day.
The Seminole Indians called the site Weeki Wachee or “Little Spring.” The largest collection of Spanish artifacts in North America was located here in 1970, as well as burial mounds of the Timucua, the Indian tribe believed to be first to make contact with the Spaniards in Florida.
The Timucua believed that “Yayjaba created the world, first the Spirit of Water… Then he created the swimmers that would live on the bottom of the waters –there they would always live, feed and help to hold the land from sliding further into the waters.”
A more modern myth began when Newton Perry conceived Weeki Wachee as a roadside attraction, in 1946. Out of an abandoned spring, Perry built an 18-seat theater six feet below the surface, and trained local high-school girls that he called “Aqua Belles”, to swim and breath underwater using a clever network of air hoses.
Newt, as he was called, opened his first show the next year, and tricked everybody by developing a series of underwater domestic scenes that he shot and sent to newspapers and magazines.
So clear was the water in the photos Perry sent to the media that, at first, editors did not believe they were real. Only when they saw the bubbles coming out of the mouths of the performers were they convinced the scenes were shot underwater. Many of the actual visitors to the old live show thought the same, that it was some kind of trick.
Thousands of people went to see the Weeki Wachee mermaids drinking soda, eating bananas or cooking hotdogs, all below the spring’s surface. They also performed synchronized ballet moves in the style of Esther Williams.
The attraction was so successful that by the 1960s half a million people visited Weeki Wachee every year, including celebrities such as Elvis Presley and Howard Hughes. By this time, ABC had bought the spring and built the current theater, which seats 400 and is 16 feet below the surface, and had developed elaborate underwater shows such as Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan.
At least three photography books — “Weeki Wachee City of Mermaids,” “Weeki Wachee Mermaids” and “Weeki Wachee Springs” — have documented the history and evolution of this famous park. The reprinted vintage photographs on the books have an old-time charm difficult to resist, attesting to the witty and eccentric creative vein of old Florida roadside attractions.
The underwater shows opened a new door in people’s imagination. Hollywood came running to shoot movies such as “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” (1948), starring William Powell and Ann Blyth as the mermaid, which can be considered a prequel to the more modern “Splash” (1984), with Daryl Hannah.
The mermaid shows produced a chain reaction of related events as well, and jump-started the development of underwater photo and movie cameras. Photographer Bruce Mozert, who in 1938 traveled to Silver Springs to take pictures of Johnny Weissmuller, who was shooting there “Tarzan Finds a Son,” gives credit to Newt as “the forerunner in underwater photography.”
When photographer Eric Kroll and I visited Mozert’s studio in April 2013, we saw the first rudimentary boxes he used to enclose his cameras. Mozert, who is 96 years old, recalled stories of his friend and Weeki Wachee mermaid trainer and filmmaker Ricou Browning. Ricou doubled as the monster in the classic sci-fi film”Creature of the Black Lagoon” (1954), produced the movie “Flipper” (1963), and shot and choreographed the underwater battle of the James Bond film “Thunderball” (1965).
The allure of mermaids is obviously rooted in myths common to mankind. Mermaids have provoked a powerful attraction in people since ancient times for their legendary beauty and honeyed voices. Initially described in Greek mythology as half bird – half woman, the mermaids are creatures that lure sailors into a trance with their voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their Mediterranean island.
The earliest literary description of mermaids or sirens goes back to the “Odyssey,” Homer’s follow-up epic poem to the “Iliad,” where he recounts Ulysses ten-year long voyage back home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
The legendary song of the mermaids, a hard to resist temptation that when followed has tragic consequences, probably symbolizes the power of delusions that turn a man away from his right path. In the case of Ulysses however, the words of the sirens entice him by offering to let him know if, after his death, he would be regarded as a Trojan War hero. In ancient Greek literature, honor was the most sought-after quality.
These mythological stories have also compelled people to cometo Weeki Wachee from all over the world to become a mermaid, which requires good swiming abilities and a long training. If you cannot make it as a pro, the park actually offers one-week-long Mermaid Camps for children and adults, where they teach you the basic ballet moves the mermaids perform in the shows.
In Weeki Wachee, where the Mayor of this small city is appropiatedly a former mermaid, you don’t have to plug your ears with beewax like Ulysses did to his mates to avoid the captivating music of the sirens. Just enjoy the beautiful performance of creatures that you thought never existed, take pictures of them or with them, and swim and dive in the timeless waters of the lagoon.
Ancient Greeks, Native American tribes and Spanish Conquistadors all seem to have been searching for a sorority of mermaids you can still see for yourself.
After all, Weeki Wachee could very well be the Fountain of Youth that Spanish Conquistador Ponce de León was after when he first set foot on Florida, exactly five centuries ago, in the year of 1513.
Text by Javier de Pison
