The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  But neotraditionalism is not an homage to historical authenticity. In its New Urbanist version, it is supposed to resurrect only the best ideas of the past, not the whole kit and caboodle. In this respect, it differs from the ethos of those preindustrial villages, like Rockefeller’s Williamsburg, Ford’s Greenfield Village, and Well’s Old Sturbridge Village, painstakingly recreated by business tycoons to honor a way of life that their own industries, based on oil and automobiles, had destroyed. For the most part, Celebrationites are reluctant to view their surroundings as a historical rendering of the past, preferring to speak about the period decor simply as an emotional influence upon their daily lives. Almost universally, residents describe the traditional streetscapes as “warm,” “cozy,” “relaxing,” and “friendly.” Modern architecture, by contrast, is “cold” and “alienating”—“there’s nothing to relate to.” Asked whether they could imagine Celebration as a modernist town, most shook their heads vigorously. But a surprising number declared that it would make no difference to them; the period styles were less important than the way the town was designed for sociability and walkability. Some who had come to Celebration for a sole purpose—the opportunity, say, to enroll their children in the school—had absolutely no opinion about the housing styles. One such couple told me: “We could be living in stainless steel cubicles for all we care about the architecture.”

  There were even a few who actively preferred modern building styles. Younger parents like Lance and Karin Boyer, who had bought a townhouse opposite the school, were among them. Karin is a counselor at a Center for Drug-Free Living at a St. Cloud elementary school, and Lance shifted jobs, during the year, from Domino’s Pizza to renting out time-share apartments. Several years before, they had made a checklist of items for their ideal town: liberal, open-minded, strong on education, remote from nuclear power, semi-rural, low on taxation, and blessed with good karma. Independent spirits, the Boyers occasionally pay visits to a Buddhist temple on the Kissimmee strip. Lance, who led the residents’ initiative for a Montessori school in town, praises the old modernist dictum that “form follows function” when it comes to building design. “Why have shutters on a house,” he contends, “if you can’t use them?” Better to plan “in a utilitarian way for the future,” he believes, “than to copy the imperfections of the past.” He also believed all the houses should have solar heating. As a confirmed “pacifist and planetarist,” he regrets the flag waving and shows of patriotism that are associated with the small-town traditionalism of Celebration. Karin, accustomed to the liberal views of her fellow social workers, regrets that the rest of the county is so resentful of Celebration. She had wondered if her politics “would mean that we wouldn’t fit in here,” but she is grateful, as an “essentially private person,” that she has been drawn out socially, way beyond what she thought was her own “comfort zone.”

  The Boyer family and townhouses on Campus Street. (Photo: Jonathan Hayt)

  The Boyers had been attracted to Celebration by the promise of a town dedicated to thinking “outside the box.” They relished the “non-judgmental” character of their fellow residents and worried, like all good pioneers, that the homesteader esprit de corps was beginning to weaken. Lance noted that “only a quarter of the population had showed up for the last Halloween pumpkin carving,” and in the Phase Two homes being built in the North Village, he could see the steady infiltration of “isolationists” who “wanted to lock themselves away.” Rumor had it (and rumor was a friend in need to all Celebrationites) that TCC would soon be allowing “snowbirds”—those fickle, continental shuttlecocks—to buy their way into vacation homes in the South Village.

  5

  OUR MUCH-RUMORED LIFE

  “Gossip is news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.” —Liz Smith

  On a warm evening in late November, the lake wildlife is burping and croaking in the foggy distance, and the midnight hour is setting in. I am making a quick exit from Celebration’s downtown cinema, soporific from two hours of Hollywood’s crudest militarist propaganda (Starship Troopers). A cluster of teens is huddled on the tiled paving outside the theater, heads bent, legs akimbo, and voices at a low and uneven pitch. The small throng is more like a ragged raver grouping than the cleanly arranged prayer circles that I have occasionally seen over in the park by the lake. It’s a teenage hang, a fine example of a near universal genre. I recognize some of the seniors from school, where I’ve been helping out on their research projects, and I’m made to feel welcome in their circle. None of them has seen this film, and while I don’t recommend that they do, I try to explain that it’s a kind of nostalgic look back at the science fiction future that never was, not unlike the movie house itself—Pelli’s futurist moderne picture palace of the 1930s. No one seems at all impressed by my analogy, but they take the occasion to quiz me about the book I’m supposed to be writing. Am I here simply to boost the town and write about how cute it is to live in Back to the Future Land? Am I here to celebrate Celebration or will I be sketching the whole picture?

  The Cinema (Cesar Pelli, architect). (Photo: the author)

  It was an honest question, and one I had already been asked many times in one form or another by residents even in the ten weeks I’d been here. Outsiders are outsiders, after all, and any fly-by-night writer is in a position to inflict severe tire damage on this fledgling community. Several journalists had already done so, and most residents are gun-shy of the press, suspicious at the least, at times quite hostile, and generally persuaded that there probably should be a moratorium on speaking to journalists on hard deadlines. This had not made my life easy. But as a scholar and a book author who had made the commitment to live within the community, I’d been evenly received as someone likely to be fair in his appraisals. In fact, most people I’d met were relieved that someone was taking the time and making the effort to speak to everyone at length. Among other things, my book was expected to dispel some of the widespread media misconceptions about the town and its residents. As for the company, my presence in the town had inevitably become another publicity item—having a scholar in residence was one more mark of prestige to tout around the media world.

  PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

  But the option of being “positive” or “negative” about Celebration wasn’t just a matter for outsider evaluation. It had permeated the daily lives of the residents. Earlier that week, Jorge Comesanas, a Cuban-Floridian from the 1950s exilio generation, and one of the disappointed claimants to the disputed title of Celebration’s first resident, told me he wished that residents would accept each other for what they were, rather than for whether they were “for or against the school, for or against the builders, for or against downtown, or for or against the company.” His comment spoke to conflicts that had deeply shaped the virgin years of this community, and had on occasion polarized the residents to a degree all but a few regretted. Seventeen months after Comesanas and other pioneers had settled in, this was a town on battle alert, its populace watching themselves move from one trial by fire to the next, all the while wringing their collective hands over the fragility of the community’s immediate future. Prominent pioneer Jackson Mumey, who runs a distance learning business and also works as liaison for Celebration School, explaining its mission to prospective homebuyers, expressed some of this anxiety to me at our very first meeting: “I have to say as somebody who intends to live here for a long period of time that it’s a little daunting to have folks writing books about what we’re doing, because it doesn’t give us much margin for error.” This abiding concern about the success or the failure of Celebration trickled down all the way from the Disney boardrooms to the school rest rooms. Would it be possible to have anything like a normal life in a town subject to so much examination?

  Planned with impeccably correct intentions, built with improperly low-wage labor, and sold on the basis of improbably lavish expectations, Celebration would be put to the test time and time again. Condemned from the outset to the journ
alists’ wrecking ball and to a constant loop of public scrutiny and self-analysis, it was a place that might forever have to answer to our society’s media-mulching mania for ceaselessly assessing its self-fashioned icons (Are they still hot?), its market leaders (Are their stocks still up?), and their performance scores (Are they still on top?). True to the ethos of the blockbuster box-office hit, would this town deliver on the promise of its business plan or its community plan? Or would it sidestep all expectations and play by a different script? Denied the small-town, bygone-days innocence it was planned to evoke, Celebration was a knowing soul from the beginning, and few of its occupants would be free from the performance anxiety that came with permanent residence.

  Least of all these kids, for it is on their performance that a large part of Celebration’s promise rests. Not long after I join the circle outside the theater, our conversation hits a patch of oil on the road and begins to skid onto the bumpy verge of youth disaffection. A little bout of hysteria breaks out, fed by the pressure they are feeling at the school, the tight vortex of all the town’s anxieties. Many of the seniors have fallen foul of traditional education and this is their school of last resort. They are now trying to make rapid sense of an ultra-progressive form of schooling that had been under siege from parents almost from the moment it opened its doors. However unfair, their ability to perform—to achieve high scores and gain admission to prestigious colleges—is the benchmark by which the community will assess itself and be assessed. All of them know this, and while it gives them some sense of self-importance, most are beside themselves with anxiety. Among other things, they know full well that TCC’s ability to sell houses depends directly on how well they and their younger siblings test. Teenage alienation and property appreciation do not make good bedfellows.

  Heather Kinneberg, a rangy girl with long blond hair and the most famous smile in town, is in a blunt mood. Bent on a career in the fashion world, she recently moved with her mother and brother from Columbia, Maryland, the vaunted 1960s planned community, and, like many of her peers, she finds the pressure intolerable. “Everyone in this county wants our school to fail. None of us can handle it. Especially the rich kids,” she adds, throwing in an uncharacteristic note of resentment, or was it empathy? “Everyone else thinks we’re all rich kids anyway.” Besides, the die is cast. “Disney has already decided to sell the town,” she announces, lending her flip authority to the rumor of the month.

  Andy Parsons, a charismatic hipster with lyrical blue eyes and loose brown ringlets lately shorn of their dreadlock weight, takes the gambit and leads the group onto his favored terrain—the rich lore of teen paranoia. Andy had been a temporary high school dropout in Massachusetts, and had taken his parents’ invitation to come to Celebration to complete his credits at a school that seemed to agree with his liberal-minded philosophy. Socially confident and resourceful, he wants to study anthropology at college. Since he belongs to the tribe of Phish, nomad successors to the Deadhead subculture, rap circles like this one are his element. “Half the kids in the school won’t come back next year. Their parents will pull them out, or else they won’t be able to hack it.” Another boy, with colored hair, broken teeth, and an air of shambling angst, has been on furlough for psychological counseling and has stories to tell about his adjustment therapy. Andy empathizes. He’s been there, or at least knows what atrocities the shrinks bring down on kids when their minds don’t match the regulation profiles.

  We sit and smoke and commiserate. I feel pretty helpless. I try to point out that they are all getting a unique, firsthand look at how some educators try to work against the grain and against the odds. After all, it is a break-the-mold school and not a grade factory. Students are prompted to take personal responsibility in lieu of a system of constant assessment and surveillance by teachers and testers. They are not, in the anthemic words of Pink Floyd, just another brick in the wall. This doesn’t fly, they’ve heard it all before. Alternative values at Celebration School are the new orthodoxy, and like any new Establishment, must submit to the unforgiving artillery fire of teen cynicism. “They’re using us as guinea pigs, we’re just part of a social experiment,” insists a sleepy-eyed girl with an artful nose ring. “We all need grades and a GPA to get into college.” Conflicted, I shrug and nod at the same time. “But do you really want to mesh into a society that evaluates everything by classifying and number crunching? Surely this school is offering something different.” This is my last appeal, to no avail. It’s an adult thing, a repressive tolerance, a paternalistic imposition of freedom. If the kids really had a say, things would be different, but they don’t know how.

  We sit till one-thirty in the morning. Cars draw up, members of the circle peel off, heading for the bright lights of the Boardwalk in the Disney village. Andy has the superior staying power and launches into orbit, spinning a web of conspiracy theory that draws on characters from the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, the creation of AIDS, government surveillance, extraterrestrial activities, and other stock components of slacker lore, all of it seasoned with knowing skepticism about the dark designs of authority. Some of the kids left in the circle smile, enjoying the rant, tolerating his native genius for this discourse. Others, perhaps more gullible, frown as if considering his theses more carefully. The evening falls apart, and we go our separate ways.

  This could have been a group of white adolescents anywhere in suburban America at the end of the millennium. Disaffection is their lifeblood, and peer sympathy helps them get through the difficult days. In Celebration, their beef with paternalism takes on a special flavor. This is a town where rumor and conspiracy theory have a rich life, largely on account of the paternalism of the mega-company that built it. Rumors about the company’s doings are a natural response to the immense power of the town’s developer, its reputation for overcontrol, and its skittish reaction to sour publicity. Even when nothing much is afoot, speculation about Disney circulates among a population that hosts a sizable number of employees with varying degrees of insider knowledge about the workings of the company. Leaks are common, and it is virtually impossible to maintain the company policy of keeping a tight lid on its plans and intentions. Oftentimes, the rumors are a kind of defiance on the part of those who feel out of the loop, excluded either from the company’s grapevine or from the active core of pioneer citizens who have taken a leading role in community building. Knowledge about what’s going on is a precious commodity. It can be used to solidify or increase one’s standing in the community. The town has already produced its quota of citizen leaders, fully involved in the community institutions and organizations, and who have more ready access to this knowledge. In the absence of elected township officials (Celebration is unincorporated), these are the people who will carry the morale of the community through its formative years.

  TALES TOLD

  From an early point, I decided to document rumors, even the most farfetched tales, in the understanding that residents have stories to tell only about places they care about. After all, a community without rumors is like a sleepwalker living a half-life through automatic motions and private rituals.

  Among the celebrities rumored to be taking up residence in town were Julia Roberts (or her sister), Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Tom Hanks, Michael J. Fox, Patricia Schroeder, and Tiger Woods. O. J. Simpson had also been mentioned. The film stars were anybody’s guess. The ex-Congresswoman from Colorado made sense; she was judged by many to have the right “Celebration attitude”—caring, publicly minded, communitarian values. (For once, in her case, the rumor about her purchase of a house was true.) The golfer, while an Orlando native, would have satisfied the unofficial rule these days that every exclusive, and predominantly white, community host a minority sports celebrity. (In fact, Woods moved into nearby Isleworth, the elite, gated community that hosts Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, Michael O’Meara, and Sylvester Stallone.) Stories about Christian fundamentalists percolated; they were infiltrating the town with the intent of “taking over.�
� Then there was the Porch Police, an invisible band of style inspectors from whom you would receive a phone call if your public arrangement of chairs, potted plants, and hanging flower baskets wasn’t just so.

  There was much speculation about the Preview Center tower, closed off above the second floor. Walt Disney was alleged to be buried there. A related rumor placed Walt’s head in Disney World and his body in some undisclosed location on Celebration property. But more than a few residents agreed with my own interpretation, that the tower was closed to thwart a would-be sniper from claiming the ideal vantage point in town or to preempt a favored suicide spot. In reality, it was sometimes used as a make-out spot by teens, ideally remote from surveillance. Another Disney World spinoff held that the rotunda of Michael Graves’s post office was the top of a subterranean nuclear power plant (under the terms of its 1967 Reedy Creek dispensation, Disney World had the legal option, never exercised, of building its own nuclear facility). Yet another concerned a supposed system of underground tunnels beneath Celebration, the purpose of which would be revealed at some point in the near future.