The Other Island I Lost

It’s often said that “you can’t go home again”, but as I recently found home isn’t the only place that may vanish when you’re not looking. The news hit me like a a shot to the gut. I was simply surfing the internet, using Google to check up on people and places long gone from my life; taking a break from worrying about my future to see how my past is holding up. And while pondering a trip back to Florida, which I last saw in my rear view mirror on my way out of the Navy and into law school, I looked up an old friend and learned the unthinkable. According to the Disney website: “By September 28, 2008, all of the nightclubs on Pleasure Island will close. It will be last call for the last time at 8 Trax, The Adventurer's Club, Mannequins™ Dance Palace, BET Sound-Stage™ Club, Motion and The Comedy Warehouse.” Nearly twenty years after it opened, the world’s greatest nightclub shut its doors. And just like that, I found out that not only had I lost the greatest place I had ever known, I had missed a real chance to say goodbye.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s a nightclub. But you’re wrong. Pleasure Island was far more than just a nightclub. It was the king of the nightclub universe in the nightclub era. You can keep your Studio 54s, your Hammerjacks and your Viper Rooms, I’ll take P.I. The island was the street party that we all imagined when we trekked down to our local nighttime entertainment districts. There were clubs for everyone, a DJ in a booth high above the street, live music, bars everywhere, professional dancers and every night for fifteen of those twenty years, a new year’s midnight countdown complete with confetti and singing Auld Lang Syne with people you hardly knew. It was a place which seemed to finally have achieved the Disney moniker of “The Happiest Place on Earth” - and mostly devoid of the commercialism (overpriced food, cheap souvenirs and ill-behaved children) that seemed to plague the rest of the Disney empire. More importantly, it was the first and only place I ever felt like I fit in.

The thing to do at Pleasure Island was to dance. It seems like a simple thing, especially when dance clubs have now become as common and commoditized as coffee shops. But I had never seen, nor have I seen since, a place so devoid of pretense as the Island was. It was a massive, nightly, large-scale version of the reckless abandon which you usually only see for brief moments during wedding receptions and bar-mitzvahs. Strangers danced with and around one another as though it really was New Years Eve. In the literally hundreds of times that I spent my evening there, I never once saw a fight. People danced in the clubs and danced in the street. People sang along with the bands and the songs. People took pictures they’d share as the highlight of their vacations. People kissed at midnight. People did things that they just don’t do anymore.

But as important as it was to the world at-large, P.I. was ever so much more important to me. When I first stepped foot on the Island, I was less than a year removed from living at home and graduating high school, and my social awkwardness was so painful to observe that I often had a hard time trying to convince any of my friends to take me out with them. At 5’8” and 135 lbs, my clothes fit me like a blind store clerk had tried to dress an undersized mannequin, and that was saying nothing of the horrifyingly bad fashion sense that growing up unpopular in a small town in Colorado had given me. I liked dancing, but the one time I had tried to it in public (at a school dance) I had gotten hit so hard that I literally slid 4 or 5 feet on my face. Needless to say, I was a little gun-shy. But at the Island, everyone danced like I did and like I wanted to. There was dance culture of respect there which not only allowed everyone a chance to shine in their own way, but also celebrated it.

The characters that I met and became friends with on the Island are indelibly printed on my memories. They were amazing dancers and larger-than-life personalities. There was Carl, the greatest street dancer I’ve ever seen - who famously “retired” from street dancing once he got a professional gig. Then Guyton, the other white guy in the crew, with whom I never really got along - because I think we were far too much alike for comfort - but who put an edge into his dancing that I always tried to emulate. Then Dave, short and insanely acrobatic, making up moves as he went along and the only dancer who I ever thought had as much energy as I did - and with a seemingly insatiable and indiscriminate appetite for meeting girls. And finally Herman, the clown prince of street dance. A guy who taught me about dancing and about life; a guy who taught me the secret of knee pads under my jeans and the delicate art of dance-floor clowning; a guy who taught me that it’s not the baddest moves that make you the memorable dancer, but rather the ability to unashamedly and loudly be yourself. I’ve danced, and lived, that way ever since.

I had two extended stays in Orlando, and two amazing runs at the Island. During those times, I was frequently there four or five nights a week dancing for four of five hours at a go, sometimes even bringing a change of clothes to school with me so that I could change in the parking lot without having to go home. And no matter how many nights I reprised my experience, I was never able to keep from actually running from my car to the front entrance with excitement, and I never got tired of that feeling of peace and joy that would wash over me as soon as I stepped onto those street bricks and into the world’s greatest party. In the years that followed, I visited less and less frequently, and each time, the Island was a little less like I remembered it, and there were fewer and fewer familiar faces. And finally, I stopped going altogether - confident that the Island would always be there and that I’d find my way back.

But, as it’s want to do, time marched on. The Island stopped celebrating New Years every night. There were no longer dance revues on the outdoor stages. Old clubs were replaced with more modern venues and people seemed more content to eat, drink, shop and stand around rather than to join in on the fun. And ultimately, the good folks at Disney chose to shut down the iconic clubs and turn Pleasure Island into another Disney-themed and ultimately forgettable shopping and eating venue. Thanks, Fat America - you turned the happiest place on earth into another tribute to your apparently unflagging appetite for consumption and the avoidance of anything even remotely physically taxing.

In the end, time and progress will take many of the places from us that shaped who we are and what we’ve become. Losing Pleasure Island was a poignant reminder of two important lessons. First, to take the time to revisit the important people and places from your past. They won’t always be there, and they often provide an otherwise unavailable perspective on how far you have (or haven’t) come. Memory lane is a great place to spend some free time and there’s nothing quite like a actual visit. Second, to take the time to remember and record the memories of those places and times in your life. Because, the only timeless thing we really have are those thoughtful recollections, colored by our own perspective and the only way they truly survive is in the words we write.

And though it's a little late and I couldn’t say it in person: goodbye, Pleasure Island. Thanks for the memories.