Sad Days for Mermaids of the Sequined Sort

Barbara Wynns has never stopped thinking about the days she spent in an enormous water tank here, somersaulting and backflipping in a sequined tail fin while sucking air from a rubber hose. It was the late 1960's, when young women from as far away as Tokyo auditioned for the privilege of being a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs, doing shows for half a million people a year.

These days, the mermaids at this aging water park are locals who are tired of waitressing and retail jobs, and their celebrity does not extend much past Hernando County, all scrub pine and suburban sprawl on Florida's west coast. Attendance at Weeki Wachee has dwindled, and the park has a long list of problems, not least an excess of algae in the mermaid tank.

"It's sad," said Mrs. Wynns, 54 and dainty, who quells her nostalgia by filling her home with hundreds of mermaid figurines and passes out business cards with a tiny portrait of her mermaid self, circa 1968. "To me, this 27-acre park is a universe that I love more than breathing. But not everybody gets it anymore."