CELEBRATION -- The official brochure marketing Celebration's Market Street shopping and dining district features the words "taste, charm & style" -- attributes the Disney-conceived community considers its hallmark.
But a story in the August issue of Playboy, a magazine that evokes just the opposite qualities in the minds of many in this upscale family community of about 7,000, parodies the 9-year-old west Osceola County town, its values and its people.
Celebration residents are not amused.
"Anybody who makes fun of Celebration doesn't live there," said Tom Reid, 41, a mortgage banker and father of four, as he sipped Bacardi Razz-and-soda on the patio of Celebration Town Tavern. "Yeah, it's a little bit make-believe, but the people here are genuine. For my children, this is paradise."
The story, "Jubilation," turns Walt Disney Co. into "Contash Corp.," Mickey Mouse into "Gulpy Gator," and creates an alligator so large that it leaps into a boat on the imaginary "Lake Allagash" and devours a 3-year-old boy. Later, a hurricane all but destroys Jubilation.
"Jubilation" includes an illustration of identical rows of houses punctuated by palm trees and a fountain in the middle. Children love to play in the real downtown Celebration fountain.
The article pokes fun at the usual Celebration targets: mandatory neutral-color curtains facing the street, parking restrictions, high home prices and the whole Stepford Wives-Pleasantville-The Truman Show atmosphere some perceive. The author is prize-winning novelist and University of Southern California Professor T. Coraghessan Boyle, who wrote The Road to Wellville, which was made into a 1994 movie starring Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick.
Residents are used to outsiders taking potshots. Still, Mike Turner, 66, past president of the Celebrators, a group of retirees and semi-retirees with more than 200 members, is sure Boyle is off base. Like most people interviewed last week in Celebration, Turner hasn't read the story.
"To me there's nothing wrong with saying you can't paint your house with polka dots and you can't have an old jalopy automobile on your front lawn and take the engine out and leave it there," said Turner, a retired New York City fire captain who loves being able to walk to the bank, post office and small Gooding's supermarket in downtown Celebration. "The restrictions are not that bad. Nobody's ever told me what color curtains I can have."
Disney lottery recalled
In the story, the main character, divorcé Jackson Peters Reilly, says he's been living in Jubilation for nearly two years. The fictional Reilly is one of 6,000 people who stands in line for ages in the blazing Florida heat -- "the sun peeled the skin off the tip of my nose and baked through the soles of my shoes" -- to get a good lottery number for the initial round of sales. Disney actually sponsored a lottery in late 1995 to determine who would get a chance to buy the first homes, which were occupied in June 1996.
After Reilly pays a gay couple $10,000 to trade his No. 4,971 for their No. 222, he soon finds himself on the wraparound porch of his $450,000 "Casual Contempo" model in "a
prêt-à-porter community set down in the middle of the vacation wonderland itself."
Horror creeps over Reilly when he sees his rule-breaking neighbors' red curtains -- "like in a whorehouse" -- and magenta race car.
"If everybody didn't subscribe to the letter as far as the Declaration of Covenants, Deeds and Restrictions was concerned -- what was going to happen to our property values?" Reilly asks.
Andrea Finger, a Celebration Co. spokeswoman, took the satire in stride. Celebration is used to being profiled -- negatively and positively -- in publications as diverse as Car & Driver, London's The Independent, The New York Times magazine and the Polish Polityca.
"Nothing surprises us anymore," Finger said.
Perhaps few in Celebration have read Boyle's story because no stores in town carry Playboy. The only place that sells magazines, Gooding's, offers a wide variety of publications from PC World to Southern Living, but nothing racy.
"You can't even buy condoms in Celebration," observed Stephen Perakes, 18, a Gooding's clerk.
Clean image over 'trashy'
Several people said they like the squeaky-clean image that others disparage. Marbel Freay Locarno, 38, said Disney bashers don't appreciate the sense of family values she said the community encourages.
"With Playboy, everything is so trashy, and this is so wholesome and nice," said Locarno, a mother of two girls and a psychotherapist who moved to Celebration this month from Hackensack, N.J.
Coincidentally, a part of "Jubilation" turned out to be truer than the author probably realized. Some tourists were standing Thursday on the lakeside promenade feeding a pair of 4-foot alligators in Town Center Lake, a centerpiece of downtown, when a boy told a deputy sheriff what was happening. Before the alligators knew it, two state-authorized trappers from St. Cloud showed up in their pickup and whisked the hapless beasts away to become a handbag-and-shoe set and probably somebody's dinner.
Trapper Mike Atkins, 29, whose upper arm bears a green alligator tattoo, explained that once the gators learn to expect snacks, they lose their fear of humans and become dangerous. No Celebration gators have had the bad manners to bite anyone, but it could happen, said trapper Robert Collins, 62, whose leathery face attests to his 27 years outdoors in the profession.
Even Collins thought the Playboy satire, which he hadn't read, went a little hard on Celebration.
"I think it's a pretty nice place myself," Collins said as he °°°°°° a Winston dangerously close to the filter.
Osceola County School Board member Jay Wheeler, who courted Celebration residents in his campaign last year, read "Jubilation" after a neighbor called it to his attention.
Wheeler said he imagines that Boyle visited Celebration and Walt Disney World for a weekend and bunked at the Celebration Hotel -- now closed to the public for about a month to make room for the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers while they practice at Disney's Wide World of Sports.
'Reality' can be created
It's unclear, however, whether Boyle has set foot in Celebration. An assistant to Boyle's New York agent said he often reads up on a topic and then concocts his own fictional "reality" from the facts. Boyle would not consent to an interview.
Wheeler, who doesn't live in Celebration though his daughter attends school there, said he found the Boyle piece entertaining and not mean-spirited.
"I don't think it is damaging in any way," Wheeler said. "If anything, it raises the already high profile of Celebration, and Celebration property values will spiral up."
David Harris, 34, a magician who has lived in Celebration for two years, said some people just like to knock others off a pedestal.
"I don't have any problem with anybody making fun of it," said Harris, the father of a 4-year-old son. "The best in the world are made fun of. It's all sour grapes. It's Mayberry with a Disney touch. It's as nice as it seems."
Susan Jacobson can be reached at
sjacobson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-931-5946.
By: Susan Jacobson
July 20, 2003
Source:
Orlando Sentinel 
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