The other day, a neighbor complained that he could never have a good time on New Year’s because he’s allergic to alcohol. His complaint reminded me of Winter Park.

Back in the early seventies, I lived in a little town called Winter Park, surrounded by the theme parks, shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, and oceans of asphalt parking that is Orlando. Winter Park suffered serious siege mentality even way back then. I don’t know what it’s like today. It may have imploded by now, but probably not. Such places have a kind of immortality.

Real estate cost five or six figures per square foot, and most of it was owned by people with very large bucks, people who might be called Patrons. Winter Park believed in Art Above All and was therefore a mecca, or an oasis in the cultural desert, for both real artists and wannabes, all of them under forty, if not under thirty.

Nowadays, we live in the larger culture of bulimia. Hedonistic indulgence is followed by the finger-down-the-throat of an obsession with fitness. Our abortuaries are our vomitories, and the contraception mentality is simply conventional, prudent behavior. Tolerance is our creed now, but back then, it was still hip to thumb one’s nose at convention. The “artists” of Winter Park were an elite group of nose-thumbers. Inhibition was outlawed, a circumstance that much inhibited the law-abiders, deconstruction being what it is.

There were houses owned by patrons and occupied rent-free by artists. I never lived in one of those houses, but I was an occasional guest. At night, often bored with themselves and each other, they would row out in boats on the lakes behind the houses and go skinny-dipping. I couldn’t swim, so I was exempt from public nudity.

I never became one of the in-crowd of artists in Winter Park. One reason was that I couldn’t go skinny-dipping. As a child, I grieved over my inability to swim; it was a rite of passage I never could achieve. But since then, I’ve thought that there’s more than one way to be saved from drowning. Of course, the ability to swim is one way, but the abstinence required of non-swimmers works too. We can’t get in above our heads.