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Edited #61:
In her great column on Miz Parker, Ann wrote, “I would lay money that there aren’t a lot of antebellum mansions on magnolia-lined boulevards dotted with statutes of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Winter Haven, Fla.”
Actually, there are, or at least were, hundreds of memories of the Old South in Winter Haven, but like Miz Parker, they are all phony.
Winter Haven was the home of Cypress Gardens, a 60 year old, now all-but-deserted tourist trap where supposed Southern Maidens sat in Scarlet O’Hara dresses and wide brimmed hats on sweeping lawns of false front antebellum Southern plantation mansions.... watching water ski shows especially designed to look amazing to the Yankee dollar-spenders.
What the logical connections were between Southern maidens and water ski shows no one really ever understood, but who understands Miz Parker’s logic either?
In the 1950s and 1960s, Cypress Gardens was the tourist hot spot in Central Florida. Then a little project called Disney World came along, soon to be joined by Sea World and Universal Studios and soon Cypress Gardens was consigned to the backwaters of tourism attractions, sort of the same place Miz Parker’s newspapers now occupy in the world of journalism.
The phony Southern motif was always that, phony. The girls were simply local townies, Fourth Runner-Up in the Miss Phosphate or Miss Northwest Wauchula contests, etc, wearing a half pound of Avon face paint, trained to smile.... and say nothing.
Such advice to be sober and silent might be sage in 2009 for Miz Parker, but perhaps I ask too much.
Miz Parker’s confusion with the displays of a tourist trap and the reality of the real Winter Haven is really not unexpected. She confuses the false promises of Obamaism with the cold light of reality, denied medical care and a bankrupt treasury too.