T A B L E_T A L K

Travelers remember the strangest museums they've encountered in Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Insider's guide to Amsterdam
By David Downie
The best places to eat, stay and play
(03/23/98)

Festival time in Kathmandu
By Jeff Greenwald
A prayer, a pickpocket and a Penis sadhu
(03/20/98)

The last of the great white hunters
By Don Meredith
Bunny Allen's Africa tales, from pouncing leopards to Ava Gardner
(03/19/98)

Mr. Lincoln's Neighborhood
By Jan Morris
Discovering a ghostly genius in Springfield
(03/18/98)

The new Dublin
By David Moore
Cappuccinos, computers and quaffing with stars
(03/17/98)

__BOOGIE OR BUST .|. PAGE 2 OF 2____________

Certainly, the turnstiles are clicking. Last year, spring break brought in $99 million, according to the South Padre Island Convention and Visitor's Bureau. March is the second busiest time of the year, with 115,000 people flooding the small barrier reef island of 2,100 residents, situated on the Gulf of Mexico.

While it may be an economic bonanza, playing host to so many crazed students has its drawbacks -- as the residents of Fort Lauderdale can attest. In the mid-'80s, this city was the place to be -- as long as you didn't live there. "There are these police, there's drinking, there's belly flops, horrible toilets all over the place, in the morning stale beer and vomit all over the sidewalk," says Jim Naugle, the city's mayor, who was first elected in 1985, the height of the city's designation as Spring Break Central. "It was a huge public works project just picking up the garbage and emptying the toilets. Local residents just completely avoided the area." The city, he says, was paralyzed.

So in 1986, the city commission passed an open-container ordinance, preventing people from walking down the sidewalk with a beer in hand. The move wiped out spring break -- they simply stopped coming. The city had no business plan to replace the revenue, and for several years there were bankruptcies and foreclosures -- "lean years," as the mayor puts it. Fort Lauderdale was in the process of transforming itself from a spring break hot zone to a family/foreign tourist destination. (Even the site where MTV held one of its spring break specials was torn down to make room for luxury condominiums.) It was a gamble, but the mayor says it worked: The city now boasts 6 million visitors each year, of whom only 10,000 are college students, as compared to 1985's 3 million visitors, 450,000 of them college students.

But not everyone in every sun city thinks kicking out the drunken bums is such a great idea. Lake Havasu has long been a spring break destination for students from California, Nevada and Arizona, with the mania peaking in 1995, when MTV chose it for its annual music-laced, half-naked, microphone-screaming descent upon spring break. Steven Lopez, a local promoter, remembers those as the good old days. He says the city clamped down so much by setting up alcohol checkpoints, and were so unwilling to accommodate MTV when it wanted to return in 1996, that the party went elsewhere. "So what if they had to mop up the floors and do triple duty on the bathrooms -- they were making good money." After this season in Havasu, where he does beer promotions at bars, Lopez says he's taking his business elsewhere -- like Mexico, where he says the city fathers are more accommodating.

"If [cities] don't want these people, they have to have a plan to replace them. What about the hoteliers, what about the T-shirt shops?" says Rob Cieslicki, owner and president of Sunchase Tours, which has led about 18,000 college students on vacations over the last five years. "If you have nothing to replace it with, suck it up, let the kids come down, maybe even join them."

When Lake Havasu lost out on MTV that year, Panama City Beach won out. When local producer Jim Broaddus got the call from the V.P. in charge production at MTV, asking if the city could host the MTV spring break show, he says it was like a dream come true. Years earlier, Broaddus and a local D.J. had headed up to MTV's headquarters in snowy New York City attired in flip-flops and shorts, surfboard under arm, to explain why Panama City was the best place to be during spring break. Broaddus is now revered around town as the BMOC, "the man who brought MTV to Panama City Beach." Since then, Panama City Beach has been the hot spot for spring breakers -- and, according to him, they've behaved. "The students get the message that there are limits and if you act up you will have to pay the price," he says. "They're smart, they know how far they can go with their partying. These are bright young people, they are not hell-raisers. These are well-mannered kids at home and they come down here. These are pretty smart people, they're college kids."

In an age of corporate-sponsored pleasures, it may not be surprising that MTV has come to play an increasingly vital role in determining spring break hot spots. Although a spokesman for MTV downplayed its impact, residents of Panama City Beach say the station put them on the map as a national spring break hot spot. Ever since its 1986 debut, MTV's spring break programming, all jiggle shots of step-aerobicized girls in dental-floss bathing suits and pumped-up dudes, has helped shape college students' view of spring break fever. MTV has 68 million subscribers, with the average viewer college-age or slightly older. As evidence of its popularity, this year, for the first time, MTV is broadcasting from five different locations -- Negril, South Padre, Panama City Beach, Cancun and Oahu, Hawaii -- and is scheduled to air its programming March 20-22 and then again on April 11-12. "I remember watching MTV, seeing how many people were partying, seeing the good-looking girls in the bikinis and the guys partying with them," says Blackwood, the Texas student. "I wouldn't go to a place just for MTV, but you see the party is there and you go where the party is."

To handle the surging spring break crowds, Mike Odom, deputy chief of the Panama City Beach Police Department, has added eight men to the force, bought several all-terrain vehicles to ride along the shoulders of roads during traffic jams, dispatched four-wheel drives to patrol the beaches and placed his officers on 12-hour shifts. And to brace for the students' sometimes less-than-exemplary behavior, Odom's office has initiated a process called "Spring Break Court," modeled on Key West's innovative way of dealing with spring breakers. When students are arrested for a misdemeanor, like drinking or disorderly conduct, they have to appear in court the next morning at 8 a.m. If they agree to enter a "pre-trial intervention," charges won't be filed. The "intervention" consists of a day's work of picking up litter along the roads -- often created by their fellow spring breakers -- and the ink will never touch their records. Odom says the city wanted to reduce the number of students who ended up going home with criminal records after committing minor offenses. Last year alone, there were 3,200 of them.

Despite the requisite wild behavior and arrests, spring break has become a lot more mellow over the years, says Stanton, the general manager of Charlie's Paradise. In the mid-'80s, he says, it was common to see someone ordering 20 shots of alcohol, along with other "Animal House"-ish behavior. Stanton attributes the new moderation to the corporate-sponsored activities that give students less time to drink. For example, Southwestern Bell has a booth where students can take a computer-generated photo -- one of those classic cheesy shots of girls sitting on guys' shoulders -- and then send it home to friends and family members via e-mail. "What we're trying to do is take something that has always been popular and let it evolve from what was considered a dark event," he says.

Rob Cieslicki of Sunchase agrees that today's spring breakers wreak considerably less havoc than their predecessors. "I've been doing this for 18 years and I've seen the damage stuff go way down. How this happened, I don't know." In the '80s, in Fort Lauderdale's heyday, the students used to rip the urinals off the walls, destroy the ceilings in lobbies, throw furniture around and hide shrimp in every conceivable spot in the hotel room right before checking out, so it was days before anyone knew. If anything, Cieslicki says, today's spring breakers are more like demanding yuppies: They want luxury beachfront condominiums with plush towels for $100, and if they don't get it, they threaten lawsuits. "Spoiled is the word that comes to mind," he says.

Whether the students are more spoiled or not, less reckless or not, spring break remains what it has always been: the last chance to escape from the routine, a final lurid break from societal expectations. "I think there's a feeling that this is the last time we can do something like this. That whole thing of college being so short, and that you're not going to be able to do this after you graduate," Kate says. "It's a pervasive feeling of making an ass out of yourself and having it still be acceptable."
SALON | March 24, 1998

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL