The Underwater Ballet

In the summer of 1964, I lived in a shared cottage on the Weeki Wachee River, my hair smelling permanently of sulfur and river weeds. I was eighteen years old, and my job was to perform three shows a day in a cold, spring-fed theater, twenty feet below the surface. We were the famous Weeki Wachee mermaids, trained to smile at a glass wall of tourists while performing slow acrobatics without nose clips or masks. The work was exhausting, demanding a physical stamina that our delicate behavior completely disguised. Our primary instruction was to make the act of breathing through a rubber hose look like a natural, effortless extension of our grace.

The water in the spring was a constant seventy-two degrees, which felt like ice after twenty minutes of underwater ballet. We wore fitted lycra tails that restricted our legs, requiring us to swim using a dolphin kick that bruised our lower backs. Between numbers, we would drift backward toward the air hoses hidden behind the plastic coral scenery, taking a quick, silent gulp of oxygen before swimming back into the light. It was a strange, silent world where our movements had to be double their normal size to register with the crowd behind the thick glass window.

Decades later, when I return to the springs as a tourist, I am struck by how small the theater seems compared to my memories of it. The current still flows at a strong five miles an hour, pushing against the weeds like a heavy green hand. The girls underwater today perform with the same clean, smiling grace, but they seem to belong to a professional era that is far removed from our loose, improvisational summers. For us, the spring was not just a stage, but a damp, cool sanctuary from the heavy Florida heat that slept on the roads outside.