It's not the heat, it's the morbidity

By SANDRA THOMPSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 5, 2000

Summer. It's still here. It will still be here in a month. Unless we're really lucky it will still be here in two months. Back-to-school ads have been running for weeks, and school starts next week, but don't let that fool you. It's still four weeks and a couple of days till the official end of summer in places other than here, Labor Day and another month after that.

Florida is like no other place during the summer -- it's hot, we know that, that's why the parking spaces in the shade are always taken and the driver's seats in our cars wear T-shirts. And, lucky us, it's been getting hotter. For the past few decades, the temperature has been creeping up. And now Tampa has been designated as the place in Florida with the most heat waves, whatever that means. Like, how can we tell?

Even worse, during the long, hot summer here there is nothing -- nothing -- going on. Movies are all geared to the 12-year-olds and under (The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Pokemon The Movie 2000, Disney's The Kid), and the calendars in the newspapers are reduced to such events as senior crocheting. Unless you're into music by groups like Car Bomb Driver or Slobberbone, the cultural life of the city pretty much shuts down before Memorial Day. The season at the Performing Arts Center has long since peaked. Art gallery openings slow to a near halt. The two universities offer nothing but courses, their dance programs and lectures and art events moribund untilfall. And forget anything happening outdoors. We may be Floridians, but we're not crazy.

Elsewhere in the country people stay on the beach until sundown. They're having picnics and clam roasts. They're at outdoor concerts, jazz festivals, comedy festivals, theater-in-the-round, Shakespeare-in-the-Park. In cities, they're eating and drinking at sidewalk cafes. On the ocean, at the lakeside, at the river, they're having lunch or dinner at open-air waterside restaurants. From the Fourth of July until Labor Day, people are outside every free minute.

Here, you will see no one outside, even your next-door neighbors, until mid October. Here, there's the mall, but who wants to buy anything when wearing more than a tank top and shorts seems like cruel and unusual punishment?

In the north summer equals fun.

Here, we try to pretend summer equals winter.

On a winter day in the north, you can brew a pot of tea or hot chocolate and settle in with a good book, knowing from the view outside -- gray clouds, dirty snow, trees that look dead -- that you are perfectly justified in doing so. Here, you can do the same thing -- until you look out the window. Outside, it's a perfectly gorgeous day. The sun is blazing. The trees are green. The sky is blue. And you, you malcontent, are curled up on your couch? You have to get out -- even if you almost pass out from the heat before you reach your driveway. And even if there's no place to go.

That part of it doesn't make sense. Sure, we schedule outdoor festivals in cooler seasons, but why does everything else shut down? We have air conditioning. Everywhere.

Two years ago I went to Seattle in July. There was a heat wave, 95 degrees, so hot the concrete on the expressway buckled. That night we found out a little-known secret about the great city of Seattle: no air conditioning. At a pricey French restaurant called the best in town, the maitre d', who was sweating like a pig , offered us his tiny clip-on fan.

Other cities use the summer as an opportunity for a different kind of cultural season, sometimes with newer talents, sometimes with retrospectives of work we haven't seen in some time. There's no reason we can't do the same.

There are signs the hunger is there: Witness the long lines at the Tampa Theater for Sunshine, a three-hour film spanning a hundred years of political oppression of Hungarian Jews. It's an important subject, of course, but not a great film and certainly not a crowd pleaser, but if you were looking for intelligent life that weekend, it was the only game in town.

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