Dl, 11/17

Feb gl

1400 words

Shell Shocked

A family outing to North Fort Myers'-and perhaps the world's-largest factory of fun.

There is palpable angst at our table in Captain Fishbone's restaurant at the World's Largest Shell Factory. We've come here to do something, something we can only do on Sunday nights, and we're afraid to do it. So, as we drink our Cokes and Budweiser from plastic cups and breathe in smoke from fellow diners' tobacco, we stew instead of smile as we watch the show.

There is a man named Bambam up on the green, Astroturf-covered stage. We know it's his real name because of the rule posted on the wall: No fictitious names. He has gray muttonchops and wears a brown, stovepipe hat covered in pins that chronicle his travels, something out of Dr. Seuss. He sings some classic, Johnny Cash-y song, and he sings it well, ignoring the karaoke TelePrompTer before him.

Already, unfortunately, I have signed my name on the dry-erase board stage-side and perused what is called "the Bible," a thick black binder that lists hundreds of songs so diverse in style and era it is impossible for anyone to say, "Well, they just don't have any songs I know." There is Andy Williams and the Bangles, Patti Page's "Mockingbird Hill" and Peggy Lee's "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." We could choose Barbra Streisand or AC/DC or Britney Spears or the Go-Gos or Sammie Davis Jr. There are seven pages of Elvis Presley choices, four pages of Frankie.

"You go first," I tell my wife, Carol, the most repressed performer in the group.

"Maybe later," she says. "After the food comes."

One by one, singers take the stage and we move closer to my spot on the board. A little boy in black cowboy hat sings "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell. An older gentleman croons "New York, New York," flat as club soda left out overnight, but with bravado and volume just the same.

"Come on, Haley," I urge my 12-year-old daughter. She shakes her head.

"No way, Dad. This is, like, a regular thing for them. They're good!"

I look around the table at my entourage. We range in age from 10 to 48, and I think it is safe to assume that each one of us, in private, has picked up a comb or can of deodorant or blow-dryer or Barbie doll and stood before a mirror and pretended to be whomever it was whose lyrics streamed from our speakers . the heat of the lights on stage, the fans screaming and writhing and crying in the darkness before us. Thank you, thank you very much. .

"What are we so scared about?" Carol asks. "What's wrong with us?"

Our friend Cindyrefills my plastic cup with Budweiser. "Here," she says. "Maybe this will help." Though I'm a beer snob and will usually choose water over Budweiser or any similar-tasting American-brewed kin, I drink heartily.

"Kevin?" I say to my other friend at the table, motioning to the stage.

"I don't sing," he replies curtly. "I just . don't."

The food comes. I forgo my bland fried oysters and cold French fries and begin swiping my daughter's fried potato skins, which appear to be the best item on the menu, with real, grated cheddar cheese and actual pieces of torn bacon atop large hunks of russet potatoes with crispy skins intact. I'm also thinking I should have ordered a cocktail . something stronger . perhaps a pink gin, which is gin and a squirt of bitters over ice. It's a drink I learned about in a Graham Greene novel, something the British expats numbed themselves with in the steamy, Southern-Hemisphere countries they had conquered.

Knowing my name is next on the list and hoping to be overlooked, I feign interest in the patrons around us. At the table next to us, an overweight, bushy-bearded man stands up and leans across the table to take the coleslaw his son doesn't want.

At the bar, our first Elvis sighting of the evening. With hair too black to be real on this older man-he wears black pants and a scarlet shirt with billowing long sleeves that end in tight-fitting cuffs . and what I call a "full Cleveland," which means white belt and matching white shoes. It is evening and dark in the tin-roofed, open-air restaurant, but he wears big, impenetrable dark glasses. He leans against the bar as if he owns this place, watching the stage, sipping some cocktail, his collection of gold jewelry illuminated by the neon beer signs.

Suddenly, I'm pulled back to the stage by a voice singing, "Satin sheets to lie on . Satin pillows to cry on." Like Bambam and the little cowboy, this grandmotherly woman does not need the monitor. It is easy to spot karaoke regulars by the grip they have on the microphone. Newbies hold it loosely between fingers and thumb, as if it's hot or something naughty or gross. The experienced crooners grasp it tightly-an embrace?-as a runner grips a baton in a relay race.

I walk over, rub my name off the list, and return to our table.

"Come on, weenies," I say. "Let's go see the shells."

I am pleased to announce, in these days when Old Florida attractions are dying or have shut down altogether (Waltzing Waters, Cypress Gardens, Weeki Watchee), one of the Gulfshore's few surviving, pre-Disney tourist traps in North Fort Myers is alive and well and huge. It rambles on and on, changing in motif from undersea adventure to Christmasland to a room fashioned to look like an underground cave, and when I bump into a three-foot-tall, cartoonish mouse made of resin ($450), I am not surprised. World's Largest Shell Factory is part Stuckey's, part Wall Drug of South Dakota, part Wal-Mart, part fine jewelry store, part kiddie carnival.

I walk past bins and bins of shells separated like produce in a store . shark eyes and Florida ceriths, baby conchs and queen helmets, junonias and cones. Also, hundreds of objects made from shells: Shell elephants, shell monkeys, shell fish, shell mobiles, shell toilet-brush holders. My wife does her best to steer me away from a $75, clear, Lucite toilet seat that is filled with artistically arranged scallop and coquina shells. (Imagine the way grapes float, suspended in Jell-O.)

We find baby sharks pickled in bottles, ranging in price from $15 to $125. A sign mysteriously says, "Sharks in a bottle cannot be taken on airplanes."

At the entrance to the Holiday Palace Christmas section, I'm greeted by a $2,800 life-size Santa in white faux-fur coat and, nearby, a sprawling miniature village complete with Krispy Kreme and drive-in movie theater with screen that really shows movies. I find some nifty hand-blown, glass coconut-tree ornaments for under five dollars, and buy one for my Aunt Deannie in Colorado. Passing jewelry and T-shirts and beach towels, I finally wander into a section called "Glasmuseum" and find some tasteful Victor Alexander vases for around $400.

And then, drawn by a mysterious smell of something organic and wet and sweet, I continue northward into the building, where I stumble upon a large glass case filled with sand hermit crabs whose shells have been painted in groovy colors. Collectively, they look like something Peter Max might have created had he lived here in the subtropics and dabbled in live art.

I look up and notice I'm in the arcade now, and I see our kids playing skeeball and air hockey. To their right, a pit populated by live, baby alligators.

I step up to the pit, the size of a single-car garage, and look at them; round, glassy eyes return the stare. With their tiny, rice-size teeth, I've always thought baby alligators look like cute cartoon characters-there's good reason so many Northerners used to buy them and take them home as petsand for some reason, I imagine a chorus line of these guys, upright on hind legs and singing on stage. Their long snouts snapping like a hand puppet's mouth, they belt out the lyrics to Elton John's "Crocodile Rock." And even Bambam is impressed.

Ad Hudler is a Fort Myers novelist, whose latest book is Southern Living. He can be reached through his Web site at www.adhudler.com