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A group of Soviet and Alaskan businessmen, in the meantime, have come to town proposing to build what they are calling Perestroyka Palace, a park for disco, diplomacy and dealmaking. Plans call for an $18 million palace modeled after St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, linked symbolically to an Alaska mining- and trading-company post by a bridge over a man-made reproduction of the Bering Strait.
Another developer has picked Orlando for a project on an even higher plane: a 480-acre theme park called Vedaland, scheduled to open in 1993. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the saffron-robed Indian guru who brought transcendental meditation to the world (and to the Beatles), has teamed up with magician Doug Henning to produce a spiritual equivalent of gourmet TV dinners, a high-tech, fakery-filled playground, ostensibly to help put man in harmony with nature. The 38 attractions will include a building that appears to levitate above a pond, a chariot ride inside the "molecular structure" of a rose and a journey over a fabricated rainbow. Naturally, there are unbelievers. Says Orlando Sentinel columnist Robert Morris: "Somehow I just can't picture Buster and Betty Lunchbucket of Racine, Wis., along with all the little Lunchbuckets, lining up to get in touch with their inner selves."
Orlando has also spawned a number of homegrown financial visionaries, like Glenn Turner, whose name is to financial pyramids what Ivan Boesky's is to insider trading. Before his "dare to be great" marketing schemes earned him a seven-year jail sentence for fraud in 1987, Turner had built a $3.5 million Cinderella-like castle near Orlando and set his theme song to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club anthem ("Now's the time to say goodbye to all our poverty. M-A-K . . . I-N-G . . . M-O-N-E-Y"). While Turner sits in prison, one of his disciples, best-selling author Givens, is prospering in Orlando. Givens bought a lakefront spread outside the city and decorated his driveway with a white Rolls-Royce, a white BMW convertible, a white stretch Lincoln limo and a white Excalibur convertible. Givens married the former Miss Sexy Orlando, and is getting rich through his books (along with Wealth Without Risk, there is the newly released Financial Self-Defense) and financial-advice club by spreading something akin to the Disney spirit. "Life should be lived like a movie" is one of his favorite mottoes.
Beyond wealth without risk, what else should a 21st century American mecca offer its pilgrims? How about eternal life? Social worker Jerry Schall, 46, claims to have discovered the Fountain of Youth near Orlando, and five years ago rented billboard space in his hometown of Philadelphia to advertise its existence. (Schall claims that the miraculous rill is somewhere in the woods, a 35-minute drive from Disney World.) He says he was "disillusioned" with the apathetic response he received, but who needs the Fountain of Youth when Disney's own powers of rejuvenation are well known? "The place makes me feel like I'm living all over again, like I have a second wife," says Louis Schein, a septuagenarian visitor to the theme park. He illustrated the point by opening his umbrella and beginning a little shuffle to the tune of Singin' in the Rain.