Mermaiding magic offers a playful escape

In a suburban Maryland swimming pool, amid scuba divers practicing with oxygen tanks and young children wearing floaties while holding paddle boards, more than a dozen technicolored mermaid tails glittered through the surface in the nine-foot deep end.

The tails - fabric and silicone, purple and gold, some dotted with sequins or lined with seashells - swaddled the lower bodies of the swimmers, adorned with seashell crowns and necklaces, bright blue wigs and colorful streams of tinsel flowing through their hair.

“Go,” Margaret Emerick shouted, after the mermaids - most of them members of the Metro MerFolk Facebook group - undulated over to pool’s back wall and assembled in a line.

They then swam in pairs from one end of the Merritt Clubs swimming pool in Eldersburg to the other while a photographer filmed underwater, their fluttering tails creating what looked like an underwater kaleidoscope.

Amid an era of escalating stress in which live-action role-playing and other forms of cosplay are a popular escape, “mermaiding” is spreading through the Washington region - its lure attracting merfolk who are either looking for a unique form of exercise, a deep sense of community or something to take them out of their everyday human lives.

“Living here is fast; everything is fast. There’s traffic. There’s so many people, and it feels so suffocating sometimes,” said Montara Hewgill, a Gaithersburg resident who does supply-chain work for a company that makes space equipment. “But, to escape into something magical, anything as far from this reality as you can, feels really nice, even if it’s just for a couple of hours.”

Although there is no official census, the mermaids of the Washington area estimate that they have the second-highest population in the country, behind Florida. In 2023, their community was featured heavily in the Netflix docuseries “MerPeople,” which focused on several aspiring mermaids’ volatile journeys to earn admittance into elite pods, such as the Circus Siren Pod in Laurel, Maryland.

The Metro MerFolk group, which was founded in 2017 and now has nearly 1,000 members, includes women, men and nonbinary people who enjoy getting together to swim as “a pod” at pools across the D.C. region.

Colleen McCartney, a.k.a. the Celtic Siren, created the Facebook group after being wonderstruck by a pod of mermaid performers at a fantasy convention. She decided to shimmy into a tail and see what it was like. Soon, once she located some pools willing to let swimmers wear tails, she started hosting weekly meetups with a friend.

A few months later, McCartney, who runs a marketing agency, founded a convention known as MerMagic Con for the budding community of mermaids to keep the momentum going.

“It was just creating space for people to have fun,” McCartney said. “There’s also a lot of people who needed a place to feel accepted, whether they were neurodivergent or they were the alphabet mafia, the LGBTQIA - finding a place that you can let your guard down and actually get in touch with your inner child and play. That’s not a space that exists very often.”

The group quickly became a refuge from the stressors of work and other aspects of everyday life for dancers, swimmers, government workers, military spouses and parents. For a few hours a week, they could slip on their “mersona,” take some “shellfies” with friends and let their creativity flow just for the sake of the enjoyment of playing.

But some are also professional mermaids. For example, Hewgill runs the Sugar Sirens pod, whose 13 members perform at Renaissance festivals and events across the mid-Atlantic.

Those in the community suspect that the D.C. region’s pressure-cooker environment and number of residents with enough disposable income to spend on tails that can cost several thousand dollars contribute to the popularity of mermaiding so far from the ocean.

Leigh Targaryen, a member of the Circus Siren Pod who lives in Elkton, Maryland, and works as a dance costume designer and dance teacher, said the allure is intangible.

“There’s no other way to describe it other than euphoric,” said Targaryen, who legally changed her last name about 15 years ago to that of the “Game of Thrones” royal family and also goes by SeaLeigh the Blue Dragon Mer (age: 878).

For professional mermaids such as Targaryen and Hewgill, who goes by Mermaid Montara, the meetups provide a welcome reprieve from the physically and financially taxing life of a professional mermaid.

At meetups, they’re not worrying about evading hypothermia in enormous fish tanks full of frigid water that stings their eyes. They’re also not stressing over making the next payment for their specialized insurance covering dangerous performance-oriented jobs, which can range from about $350 to $600 a year. Or, navigating a difficult economy in which event hosts are becoming hesitant to spring for “luxury” features such as mermaid performers, Hewgill said.

At the meetups, all they have to do is play, she said.

“Playing - it keeps the magic alive. It keeps us young. It’s one of the things that makes life worth living,” Hewgill said.

And for nonprofessional mermaids such as Emerick, it’s just a chance to shed any artifice used to get through the real world and transform - through costume, fins, makeup, hair and nails - into something that feels more authentic.

“It’s one place that I feel comfortable in my own - would you say skin, or in my own scales?” said Emerick, an organizer for Metro MerFolk who described her occupation as a technical writer for the federal government, without providing specifics. “You can don that persona that you, maybe in your everyday life, do not feel as comfortable doing, whether you want to be more of a sultry siren or if you want to be a bubbly mermaid. You get to explore those different things.”

At the Merritt Clubs pool in Eldersburg, Emerick called out to the group.

“Hey, everyone, we’re going to take a ‘shellfie’ really quick,” she said as she sidled onto the pool deck in her tail and lifted herself onto her knees.

Mermaids gathered behind her and smiled for the photo before breaking back into smaller groups, doing flips underwater, helping one another unfasten corsets decorated with images of octopus tentacles and swimming, hand in hand underwater, toward the shallow end.

As the sunlight danced on the pool’s rippling surface and off their brightly colored scales, they shimmered.