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The Celebration Chronicles

Page 25

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.


  The Red Rose Ball is an event to be seen at, not an occasion to let your hair down. Especially active citizens are honored with community awards, and snapshots and footage of a year in the life of Celebration are shown on a big screen. After the compulsory dance rituals of the Electric Slide, the Macarena, and a few slower standards, the crowd is homeward bound in a hurry. In the adjacent ballroom, a wedding party is in full swing, and the guests are seguing into bump-and-grind dance numbers to the accompaniment of stripper tunes. I am not the only Celebrationite tempted to linger.

  There are much better parties in Celebration. Every so often, Town Hall or the Foundation throws one down by the lakeside, like the surprise party in April, where a block party trailer was unveiled. Brent Herrington and David Pace from TCC management took to the stage to exhort residents to turn the town over to an orgy of reveling. “We want Town Hall flooded with complaints about the noise.” Events like this draw an intergenerational crowd. Kids and young teens try out the latest hip-hop moves alongside the rocking parents and jiving elders. The DJ makes some concessions to contemporary sounds, but the preferred standard is usually precounterculture rock ‘n’ roll, a direct link to the boomer age of innocence, just before the life of youth in America got seriously complicated. The R & B and doo-wop classics also rule at Max’s Café, downtown’s central eating institution, and they are broadcast into the street during the waking hours of the day to compete, bizarrely, with the piped TCC Muzak. When the school band plays at picnic gatherings, the Beach Boys are a sure bet—the early, pre-druggy Beach Boys, at least. In a town devoted to the rearing of its young, it is often the parents’ own youth that is referenced most in the community’s social gatherings. The generation that invented youth culture seldom misses an opportunity to remind its offspring of this achievement. For visitors, the town also hosts a variety of concerts in the park and by the lakefront, and the restaurants have jazz, reggae, and Latin music performances, but the official soundtrack is Grease, Happy Days, and American Graffiti, and the area’s vintage Cadillac owners often provide a drive-in backdrop at the festive events.

  Celebration’s own Grease-aged teens are not likely to show up at these definitively uncool events. They have their own music wars that need to be staged out of the public, or at least the adult, eye. In a valiant attempt to meet teen social demands, Sarai Cowin, the vivacious Parks and Recreation manager, raised Nuyorican in the Bronx and a Jewish convert by marriage, occasionally puts on Teen Nights in the school cafeteria, where adult chaperones are in close attendance. On at least one occasion, an open-air dance was permitted in Lakeside Park, but the anticipated attendance of rowdy outsiders drew a heavy security presence that soured the party mood.

  Like generations of their forebears, Celebration teens are fiercely devoted to their accursed exclusion from the mainstream life of the community. The proverbial complaint that there is “nothing for us to do” is the vital, low-calorie diet of youth culture in suburbia and small towns. In part, the complaint is self-affirming. After all, “doing nothing” is a crucial feature of teen life, and it actually covers a wide variety of youth activities and rituals. In Celebration, this protocol was not confined to the street hang. The school’s loose scheduling had actually made room for some of this dedicated nonactivity. To the parental eye, flex time in the neighborhood hearth areas could resemble a festival of indolence, with limp bodies clumped inside the sofa squares and conversation in apparently random holding patterns. In fact, a good deal of peer socialization occurs in these communal moments. Youth learn how to interpret and identify with each other in an unplanned setting that is not separated from their work or study environment, as it is on the street. This quality of bonding is lost when students are running from one fifty-minute class to another—classes where they learn to compete against each other in relative isolation. Seniors testified to the loss of this connection when block scheduling was introduced in August. Simultaneously, a great sigh of parental relief could be heard all over Celebration. In school or on the street, the spectacle of youth inactivity was an irksome, if not subversive, affront to the town’s self-image as a place where community health was pursued actively.

  Town teenagers at the end of the millennium. Jason and Andy. (Photo: the author)

  On the other hand, there really were no outlets for youth activity. Teenage needs are almost always the most neglected item on the planner’s agenda. It was so in Columbia in the 1960s—where the kids called the town “Endsville”—and it still is in Celebration today. Much of this is due to thoughtless planning, although when push comes to shove there are few blueprints for activities that respond so little to planned forms. Attempts of adults and town officials to build structured activities for youth (at times, Cowin’s singular mission was “getting the teens away from hanging out”) are likely to meet with a cool reception. Teenagers need amorphous spaces they can customize for their own purposes. Failing that, they will choose two kinds of places to gather: those that are as remote as possible from adult surveillance—to make out, get high, and otherwise self-indulge—and those that are directly in view of the community—for the purpose of posing, provocatively. The proximity of Celebration’s downtown to the lakeside and wetlands provides ideal locations for both kinds of hangout. The main retail area of Market Street is off-limits because of friction between teens and merchants and because it is the domain of tourists, but a teen cluster can usually be found camped out near the theater and the ice-cream parlor on the immediate downtown margin. Slightly more secluded spots can be found by Lakeside Park and behind Town Hall. For a truly clandestine rendezvous, there are always the wetlands, off-limits to adults. Regardless, the town’s security force—county sheriff’s patrols supplemented by hired off-duty cops—can follow with ease the telltale trail of cigarette butts. With one voice, teens spoke of their desire for a skate park, at minimal cost—a half-pipe and some rails at least. But the specter of attracting outsiders—“kids with baggy pants”—was too much for most adults to bear. Town Hall’s solution was to create another layer of management, this time composed of teens themselves. Members of Town Teens were handpicked to organize activities and negotiate with their peers’ concerns.

  In the spring, some teens were up in arms over rumors about Town Hall’s possession of photographs of kids smoking pot, allegedly snapped by surveillance cameras. Belief in the existence of these cameras—while unproven—was persistent. There was talk of illegality on both sides. Some parents held meetings to push for community curfews, and there was much strategizing about how to get youth off the streets. “Everyone is in your business here” is a common grievance of young people, who, next to the criminally institutionalized, have fewer rights than almost any other group in society and who are thrown back on a desperate quest for private autonomy as a result. In a small town like Celebration, with its ethos of intimate community bonding, the sense of surveillance is acute, especially for those who already have one foot outside the White Vinyl Fence (the town’s much-commented-on polymerized boundary fence) and are counting the days until graduation.

  A milder version of this complaint circulated among single women in town, extra-conscious of scrutiny, although more than one insisted to me, “I give them nothing to talk about anyway.” Traditionally, it is the mixed blessing of life in small towns to sacrifice confidentiality on the altar of community, and yet what was this complaint but the flip side of the town’s much vaunted “sense of community,” where it is your civic duty to know other people’s business? After all, surely only the deluded would move to Celebration if they were truly seeking privacy. Promotional literature had promised an alternative to the Lonelyville of suburbia (especially for women). Here you would get to know everyone faster than almost any other place on the face of the earth.

  For teenagers, there was little to be done. Parental concern about their waywardness has been a constant since the early days of the republic, and in every conceivable form of settlement, rural and urban alike. Li
ke Columbia in the 1960s, which bore the imprint of Rouse’s Christian devotion to the nuclear family, Celebration was planned with young families in mind, and arguably worked best for those nesters. It is primarily a place for rearing, where a typical compliment paid to a fellow citizen is that he or she is “totally into their kids.” In general, Celebration families are outsize, many with four children, and therefore well above average for thirty- and forty-something American parents at the end of the century.3 For single women with children, the town is considered “a safe place” to move to, where the community might easily function as a coparent. Many parents told me that they knew of ten, even twenty, houses where their children could sleep over without generating anxiety in either parental home. “It takes a village,” in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s adage, to raise a child, and certainly, in an earlier time, before the cult of domesticity in the nineteenth century established the Currier and Ives stereotype of the woman as guardian of hearth and home, it could be said that many children were raised as much by communities as by families. For a town that is often glibly touted as utopian, there are no truly alternative approaches to child-rearing (househusbands notwithstanding), and certainly none on the scale of the utopian communities of earlier centuries, which radically rearranged the functions of the nuclear family along communal lines. Yet, for all its showcasing of the single family Dream Home, the inter-family fabric of Celebration has a fluidity that is easy to see, in the streets, the parks, the block parties, the holiday events, and other social gatherings. I have no doubt that some part of this resilience owed to the school’s emphasis on group activity and emotional cooperation, which circulates, through students, into the social lifeblood of the town as a whole. It is no small irony that the only genuinely utopian feature of the town—its noncomformist version of schooling—was widely seen as a troubling, even disastrous, experiment.

  MR. MOMS

  If Celebration is, in part, a postmodern town, it is not because its architects sprang from the postmodernist movement or because its developer has tried to recreate the feel of days gone by. More important is that many residents believe they have taken a step out of the frenzied pace and sequence of modernity by choosing to move there. Figures from an informal AT&T phone survey of the first pioneer pool showed up to 40 percent of residents working, in some fashion, from their homes. My own, no less informal, estimate would be about one-quarter less, a figure that nonetheless reflects the real impact of telecommuting. But I also found that a sizable number of Celebrationites had taken the opportunity to scale back their workloads, along with, perhaps, their career ambitions in order to downshift from high-powered jobs. For many, their lucrative stock investments in the bull market of the 1990s had cushioned this switch from a formal workplace. Celebration provided an ideal haven for what I would call the “affluent downshifter,” weary of the corporate rat race and generationally attuned to the spiritual value of alternatives.4 So many middle-aged men were in semi-retirement that residents like Ray Chiaramonte, who hailed from a Chicago-Tampa working-class background and who commuted sixty miles daily to his own workplace, expressed worries about the effect on their children of growing up in a town where “the American work ethic was not pronounced.” While their own parents, of whatever class, may have felt bound to a rigid career path where early retirement was an anomaly, these late boomers operate in an economic environment where there are no fixed expectations about the shape of a working career. When flexibility rules in the workplace, it is a boon to those who can afford to benefit from the loosening of custom, and a cruel regime if you have no guarantees about the source of your next paycheck. Celebrationites mostly fit into the first category, although many assume that if they fall on hard times they will have a caring community on their doorstep to soften, if not fully absorb, the blows.

  Since dual-income families are the norm in Celebration, and the physical plan makes it easier for couples to share the duties of work and child-rearing, the town boasts more than its share of “house-husbands.” Some of the more prominent Mr. Moms have indeed given up their high-profile jobs with large corporations. Mild-mannered, forty-something Paul Collins kept house on Longmeadow after his career as a CFO, most recently in charge of Pepsi’s Florida division. He resigned after realizing he “wasn’t ever going to enjoy being a middle manager for a large corporation” if it simply involved “getting paperwork shuffled at me and then pushing it on down the line.” Just as important was his philosophical discomfort at being in a position that required him to eliminate jobs. Transitioning (a favorite word in Celebration) to the home had brought him “spiritual relief” from corporate routines, and he feels his work in the home is embedded in community rituals that are more personally satisfying. The role reversal has not been easy, since he feels his wife, Valerie, an executive with Darden Restaurants, still presumes an overriding responsibility for the children. Nor, he confesses, does he feel comfortable enough to participate “as the only male parent in the playgroup.” Collins says he has come to realize that the efficiency of modernization is not necessarily desirable or progressive, at least not if it entails the erosion of the personable, social relationships he has encountered in Celebration. “After my family moved to suburbs,” he explains, “I couldn’t understand why my father still went to the local garage to buy his tires, rather than get them much cheaper at the big chain store. I finally realized it had something to do with the fact that the proprietor still called him Mr. Collins.”

  Marc Miller, who is Collins’s sometime golfing partner—“half of what we talk about is how to cope with executive wives”—had no qualms about being the only male at the playgroup. Big-boned, blond, and boisterous, and sporting the only adult male earring in town aside from my own, he too had left the world of corporate finance, and employers like Arthur Andersen, Montgomery Ward, and Speedo, to look after the toddlers. After a year of homemaking in a nearby suburban development, where he had “to drive twenty minutes for a carton of milk,” he suffered a mild case of “lost personal identity” and took a part-time teaching position. “It’s important,” he reported, “to allocate yourself some money to make you feel good about yourself.” Feeding off the bright bonhomie shared by two men discussing housework, Miller coyly explained to me that it is difficult to get “positive reinforcement” for his efforts from his wife, a Disney VP of merchandising who is “more interested in the four or five things I haven’t done than in those I have.” If he had begun his house-minding career while in Celebration, things would have been a little easier.

  Recently, he had begun to set his sights on graduate school and some kind of a career in academia. As a friendly caveat, I drew his attention to the local newspaper, currently running a series of Doonesbury cartoons about the desperate plight of low-wage adjunct professors in the rapidly downsizing academy. Confronted with the bad edge of the economy, where labor contracts can sour or dissolve overnight, Miller’s buoyant mood subsided. Designing New Urbanist towns to ease the job of child-rearing was a step in the direction of stability. This was just as well, since the prospect of job stability out there, even in the formerly secure, tenured precincts of the academy, was disappearing fast.

  THE COMMUNITY SOFTWARE

  At a Community Update town meeting in mid-February, organized by the Osceola Chamber of Commerce, Brent Herrington warmed up the early-morning crowd in his signature cheerleading style. “Wake up, Celebration, this is the only community in America with a special deed restriction that requires all residents to be perky.” No one could ever be sure of the exact degree of sincerity in Brent’s voice when he addressed townsfolk in this manner. Savvy and accomplished in his thinking about his own profession, he had not yet found the common touch, nor had he mastered the slick repartee of a corporate master of ceremonies. Many found his performances a mite sophomoric, especially the happy talk that filled the pages of his Town Hall newsletter, regularly punctuated with gag makers: Wow! It Was a Blast! or Pretty Cool! On this occasion, however, he had deftl
y tapped the rich vein of what passes for gallows humor in Celebration. Upbeat community spirit was so much a mandate of residency that townsfolk had developed their own cute jokes about the culture of boosterism. Many residents felt a little patronized by the pressure to be involved, especially the more educated professionals. Compulsory good cheer was too closely associated with the world of the theme parks, and Celebrationites, in general, wanted their community to be recognized as real and distinct from the fantasy of undiluted happiness in nearby Disney World. People got divorced, lost their jobs, fell sick, and died in Celebration, and, occasionally, all hell broke loose.

 

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