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Orlando spends tax money, for example, to have workers pick cigarettes out of tree planters, but the Florida Symphony Orchestra, one of Orlando's major cultural adornments, almost folded four months ago for lack of community support. Orlando faces all the pressing burdens of a boomtown, from lengthening traffic lines on its highways to pollution in its lakes, but the region will not raise taxes to deal with them. (Orange County has lowered its property-tax rate almost annually since 1969.) In the post-Disney real estate explosion, bureaucrats, farmers and tire salesmen have become instant millionaires, but so little money has been spent on the overcrowded regional school system that some classes have been taught in gym storage rooms. About 15,000 people pack the Orlando Arena for every game of the Orlando Magic, the two-year-old National Basketball Association team; but residents and civic leaders in Orange and Osceola counties complain that the area lacks a sense of community responsibility. "It's a lot easier to pull for the hometown team than to volunteer at a hospital," says Linda Chapin, chairman of Orange County. Says her counterpart in Osceola, Jim Swan: "It's hard to govern when you have no clear idea what kind of place a place wants to be."
If Orlando does not know what it wants to be, it knows at least how it wants to behave: cheerfully, at all cost. Boosterism is almost a civic duty, with a Disneyesque tinge. The city's pitch for a National League baseball team included a promise to build not just a concrete mega-ballpark but an old-time, intimate "field." Orlando hopes to embrace mass transit, but an old- fashioned trolley line is getting priority over a modern elevated rail system. Orlando basketball games are not games but "theatrical productions," in the words of Magic manager Pat Williams. He spent more than a year searching for the fabric and color of the team's uniform. "Disney sets the tone for everything in Orlando," he says.
Before Disney World, Orlando's attractions were the Tupperware Museum and Gatorland, where visitors could watch alligators lunging for chicken carcasses. Gatorland is still there, but now there are Sea World and Reptile World, Wet 'n Wild and the Mystery Fun House, Xanadu and Cypress Gardens. In Orlando, restaurants, hotels, shops and golf courses all want to be theme parks, or at least themes. A store selling Christmas trinkets is called Christmas World. There are Bargain World, Flea World, Bedroom Land and Waterbedroom Land. At the Medieval Times restaurant, patrons can eat roas meat with their hands and watch knights in armor joust on horseback. At the Arabian Nights, sheiks steal gossamer-clad princesses during dinner shows. Orange County's most famous golf course, the Grand Cypress resort, has reconstructed the layout of the hallowed Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. The Florida Peabody Hotel copies a ritual of the original Peabody in Memphis: every day at the appointed hour, mallard ducks waddle off the elevator to wade in the lobby's marble fountain.
Orlando's residential subdivisions have the same dreamed-in feel: strung along narrow county roads, many are pastel agglomerations of arbitrary architecture, all behind secure walls. "When you drive around Orlando," says John Rothchild, author of Up for Grabs, a cultural anthropology of Florida, "it's not clear where Disney World begins and ends."