It’s 7 a.m. at a beach at Lake Las Vegas, and the mermaids are singing.
Farasha Deneen, who goes by the name Mermaid Farasha, hums the melody from the film The Little Mermaid, as she moves her arms above her head, ballerina-like. She’s sitting on the white sand beach of a golf course next to two other local mermaids, Rachel Novak and Madison Machen, her purple and turquoise tail partially submerged in the water.
“Wish I could be …” she sings, and the red-tailed mermaid sitting next to her, Novak, joins in. “... part of your world!” They giggle. A couple of golfers on the path above stop to watch for a moment.
The trio certainly makes for an unusual sight: crowns, flowing hair, shimmery seashell tops, and, of course, their tails — scaly and lifelike in vibrant reds, blues, purples.
They chat about mermaid things: their favorite tail designers (Machen reveals she used to work as a designer for Fin Fun); their experience teaching mermaid classes (Deneen, the owner of Desert Siren Entertainment, ran a mermaid swim school at the Westgate); and Novak, aka Miss Mermaid Nevada, shares about her experience working as a freediving instructor and as an underwater stunt performer in the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Three mermaids. Three vastly different backgrounds. Yet, flowing in the undercurrent of their conversation is a love of swimming, the ocean, and magical make-believe.
Oh, and fish puns. Mermaids, it would seem, love a good pun. It’s not uncommon for mers to greet one another with “shell-o” and punctuate conversations with “FINtastic!” and “Shell yeah!” Mermaids purchase their tails from “mertailors,” and many adopt “mersonas.” Deneen’s mersona, for example, is a little bit Disney and a little bit siren. “You never know if I’m going to smile at you or take you under,” she says, with a laugh.
Deneen, like other merfolk, understands that her passion for mythical sea creatures can be difficult for non-mers to understand.
But this may soon change, because mermaiding (yes, it’s a verb) is growing in popularity, even in landlocked states such as Nevada. “You may not know it,” reads a headline for a 2019 CNN article, “but mermaids are ‘part of your world.’”
Every week across the U.S., merfolk meet up at beaches and community pools to swim and splash and engage in a hobby that’s part sport, part art, and part cosplay. But mermaiding is about more than just putting on a tail and posing for Instagram photos. Mermaiding is a passion, it’s a lifestyle, and, if you’re lucky, mermaiding is also a career.
IN LAS VEGAS, mermaids are nearly synonymous with the Silverton Casino. The Silverton has been putting on mermaid shows in their aquarium since 2005 and runs the Mermaid School at Silverton Aquarium, where children and adults can put on a tail and swim right alongside the fish, sharks, and stingrays.
“Mermaids are really popular right now,” says Kristin Janise, aquatics safety manager at the Silverton Aquarium. So much so that the aquarium recently added mermaid performances and mermaid classes to the schedule to keep up with the demand. Janise speculates that this could be because of the hype surrounding Disney’s May release of The Little Mermaid, though social media may play a role, too.
People don’t only want to see mermaids; they also want to be them. That’s the case with seven-year-old Connor Hetrick, from Bullhead City, Arizona. He’s at the aquarium to take part in his first official mermaid swim class. According to his mom, Connor’s love for everything mer started a couple of years ago, when Connor put on a tail for the first time at his local pool. He’s been a fan of mermaids ever since.
The other children in the class have similar stories — 12-year-old Abigail Zynda, from Lake Havasu City, Arizona, for example, has been coming to see the mermaids perform at the Silverton since she was a baby. When she was just three, she took one look at the mermaids somersaulting with the stingrays, turned to her mom and told her, “I want to be a mermaid when I grow up.”
She might be able to. Las Vegas has long been home to professions for the eternally young: circus performer, medieval jouster, professional video gamer. Mermaid.
Many of Las Vegas’ professional merpeople come from a performance background. Novak, worked as a circus performer, for example, and Deneen is a trained belly dancer. Mermaids earn a living performing at children’s birthday parties, conventions, musical festivals, and Renaissance Faires.
Deneen has spent the past 10 years working as a freelance mermaid, hauling a giant seashell with her to gigs that have included everything from the Electric Daisy Carnival to Pirate Fest and even the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). She explains this from her perch at the Mermaid Restaurant & Lounge in the Silverton.
She isn’t “in tail” (as the mermaids call it) at the moment, but wears instead a long, turquoise dress and a jeweled seashell necklace. Beside her sits the Silverton’s 117,000-gallon tropical aquarium, where the Silverton mermaids perform daily — blowing kisses to excited kids and doing backflips for the crowds that gather on the other side of the glass.
“People think being a mermaid is glamorous, and that there’s nothing to it other than posing, but it’s not as easy as it looks,” Deneen says. She gestures to the bar’s silver mermaid statue, propped up against a tank of live jellyfish floating like pale pink ghosts behind her.
“You’re creating a fantasy for people … that requires constant fine tuning.”
Janise, the safety manager, also wishes more people understood how physically and mentally challenging it can be to work as a professional mermaid. The Silverton mermaids must hold their breath for long stretches and be able to breathe through hoses called “hookah lines.”
“It’s not easy,” she says. “Swimming with a tail, breathing underwater … there’s a lot going on.”
Mermaids at the Silverton go through a rigorous vetting process before they’re hired. Getting your foot (tail?) in the door requires scuba certification. Those asked to audition must put on a tail and “swim from the top to the bottom” of the 15-foot-deep aquarium. Once at the bottom of the tank, they must “try to look comfortable. Like they belong there,” Janise says. Looking comfortable underwater is harder than many might think. First, there’s the water temperature — the tank is kept at 77 degrees. Then there’s the fish — the aquarium houses more than 2,000 aquatic animals and more than 100 species of fish. And, of course, there’s the tail itself.
Trying to move through the water with your feet bound together can feel unnatural. It’s why many U.S. pools turn away anyone looking to swim with a tail — the safety risk isn’t worth it.
“It can be very dangerous very fast,” says Morgana Alba, owner of Circus Siren Pod, founder of MerMagic Con, and star of the Netflix documentary series MerPeople. “People think it’s just putting on a tail and being pretty, and it’s not.”
“Those tails are not just something that you can put on and go swimming …” says Circus Siren Pod performer Del-Vaunté Scott, who goes by the name Merman Del. “A tail can weigh 40 to 50 pounds. You have to learn how to get out of your tail quickly.”
The Silverton requires that divers in full scuba gear swim in the water during performances and swim classes to ensure that everyone — both humans and fish alike — stay safe.
BACK AT MERMAID School, Hetrick is sitting on a yoga mat on the platform above the aquarium, waiting for class to begin. He flaps his tail in excitement.
“Wow, you’re a mermaid!” someone says, and Connor is quick to correct them: “I’m a merman!” The parents standing nearby laugh.
Although women outnumber men in the mermaid community — for both professional mermaid performers and the hobbyists who enjoy cosplaying as mermaids in their free time — the community is more diverse than an outsider might imagine.
The mermaids and mermen Alba recruits come from a wide range of backgrounds. One of her mermaids is in a wheelchair, for example. Another is deaf. “I’ve made representation part of the mission of my company,” Alba says.
Scott is male and says, “I’m African American … I’m gay as well.” Like many merfolk, he speaks highly of the accepting and inclusive nature of the mer community. “Many of the mers I’ve met have identified in the LGBTQ community.”
Scott compares being a mermaid with being a nudist, drawing similarities between the two subcultures. There’s something freeing about shedding convention and swimming outside society norms. Mermaiding, like nudism, offers an “opportunity to practice vulnerability.”
“You can’t hide behind clothes,” he explains. “You don’t know if that person is a doctor or has a Gucci purse.”
This space of vulnerability allows merfolk to be themselves. “We’re in our tails, and we’re having all these really interesting and deep conversations,” Scott says, adding their common status as weirdos “creates a safe space.”
Many mermaids believe the community’s inclusive nature is anchored in mermaid history. “There were mermaid myths from all different countries,” Deneen says. “And they were not all red-headed.”
While the word “mermaid” comes from the Old English words “mere” (lake or sea) and “maid” (young woman), the image of a mermaid as white and female is relatively new. African folklore, for example, tells of a gender-fluid merperson named Mami Wata, who would appear to humans as alternately both male and female.
In The Very Short, Entirely True History of Mermaids, author Sarah Laskow writes that mermaids have appeared in folklore for thousands of years in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the first illustrations of a merperson dates back more than 2,700 years and was found in what is now Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.
ALTHOUGH THE MERMAIDING community may embrace inclusivity, it still has room for improvement, says Mermaid Chè Monique, founder of The Society of Fat Mermaids. She champions the idea that anyone can (and should) be a mermaid, regardless of shape and size. She serves on discussion panels, such as “Fat Mermaids Make Waves,” and regularly talks to tail retailers about size inclusivity.
“I always wanted to be a mermaid, but I thought I was too fat and too old,” she says. Now she puts herself out there to show others that you don’t have to look a certain way to have fun swimming in a tail. “People don’t know they can do something until they see someone who looks like them doing it.”
Machen also wishes more people knew that “anyone can be a mermaid ... I think a lot of people think mermaids have to be women, have to be thin, and have to fit into this idealistic image,” she says. “I’m a plus-size mermaid, with short hair and glasses. I definitely don’t into fit the image of what most people think a mermaid looks like. Most mermaids don’t fit into that image.”
IT'S 10:30 A.M. at the Silverton, and mermaid Megan Karg is doing back flips for the crowd. A little girl presses her hands to the aquarium, and the mermaid spots her and swims over, placing her hands on the glass so that they line up with the little girls’. They study one another for a moment, before the mermaid grins and blows a kiss.
Alba subscribes to the theory that mermaiding is so appealing as a subculture because it combines the fantasy of cosplay with childlike wonder. “Mermaiding creates this whole new space for play as adults,” she says.
Silverton mermaid performer and Mermaid School instructor Sierra Gomez has another theory. She pauses, tilts her head and says, “I remember reading that only 5 percent of the ocean has been explored. There’s so much we don’t know … Who’s to say that mermaids aren’t real?”
Then she smiles. “Everyone loves a mystery.”