Scene change for second act: Gainesville's Michael Presley Bobbitt settles in Cedar Key

CEDAR KEY — A funny thing happened to Michael Presley Bobbitt after Gainesville’s most celebrated playwright pulled up stakes and decamped to Cedar Key.

Well, several funny things, actually. Not to mention a harrowing moment or two along the way.

For instance…

+ Bobbitt no sooner unpacked than he was seduced by Cedar Key’s clam farming culture. In short order, and with very little experience, he leased several acres of prime sea bottom, bought a boat, hired a crew and began the hard, drenching work of first sinking and then raising up from the water heavy bags filled with thousands of clams.

“I sank my boat three times,” he recalled. “Around here if you sink your boat three times they don’t let you forget it.”

+ Bobbitt next donned a red velvet pirate’s coat, proclaimed himself “The Clambassador,” and became a one-man lobbyist/cheerleader/master of ceremonies for Cedar Key and its $45 million aquaculture industry.

Which is why he collaborated with some of his Gainesville filmmaking buddies to produce a partially tongue-in-cheek documentary “The Rise Of The Clambassador.” It went on to win top honors at the prestigious International Ocean Film Festival, in San Francisco.

“When we heard about it we decided we had to send Michael there to get the award,” recalled Tom Miller, a co-producer of the Mirador Studios film. “He went in full Clambassador regalia, with a giant clam hat on his head.”

+ Learning that swimming from nearby Otsena Otie to Cedar Key was once a rite of passage for local teenage boys, Bobbitt conceived of and launched the annual Cedar Key Shark Swim. In just its second year, the 0.42-mile charity swim has already raised several thousand dollars for the island’s tiny school.

+ He bought a 139-year old island home in considerable disrepair and painstakingly restored it. And as if that wasn’t enough Island Guy Cred, Bobbitt stumbled upon and restored the burned-out hulk of a houseboat with a shady history.

If you fancy the island life you “should totally get an old houseboat that used to be a crystal meth lab and fix it up…” Bobbitt muses.

+ When Hurricane Idalia zeroed in on Cedar Key — destroying a hotel and several houses and flooding much of the town — Bobbitt not only refused to evacuate but ventured out and videoed the worst of the storm on his phone. His night of derring-do landed Bobbitt prime time attention on news stations and publications around the world.

No sooner had the winds died down than Bobbitt trundled The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore onto his thrice-sunken boat to show him how much damage Idalia had done to Cedar Key’s clamming grounds.

“We’ve got thousands of bags of dead claims filling up prime aquaculture real estate,” he told Cantore while brandishing a mud-encrusted bag. The result was a Weather Channel special report called “Cedar Key Strong.”

+ Oh, and not to forget that Bobbitt originally came to town to write a novel about a nuclear war that wipes out much of humanity but leaves Cedar Key isolated and struggling to survive.

If all of the above sounds like an awful lot of adventure packed into just a few short years, Bobbitt has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

“I can’t bear the thought of five minutes of quiet time,” says the man who wrote nine plays in Gainesville, two of which debuted off Broadway.

A serendipitous life

No question the Polk County native and self-professed “Florida Man” (one of his plays bears that title) has led what you might call a serendipitous life.

A commercial property appraiser by profession — a day job that continues to keep in on the road a lot — Bobbitt has a fairly straightforward explanation for blundering into play writing. “I did it to impress a girl,” he said.

His first play was a drama about a father who kills himself to help his son in the afterlife. “It wasn’t very good,” he acknowledges. “After that I thought I’d better learn how to write, and my next play, ‘Trailer Park Elegy,’ took off.”

Bobbitt hit his stride with “Sunset Village,” a send-up of the decadent lifestyles of seniors who inhabit a community that sounds suspiciously like that sprawling retirement haven south of Ocala. He followed that up with “Florida Man,” and “Return to Sunset Village.” His plays continue to earn him royalties from theaters around Florida and as far away as Maine.

“I’ve always wanted to write a novel but I was never a good enough writer to pull it off,” he said.

But play crafting turns out to be pretty good basic training for a budding novelist. “The key to writing a novel is to create compelling characters, and in the theater if you can’t create compelling characters nobody is going to care.”

But why Cedar Key?

Long story short, Bobbitt’s marriage to a Gainesville actor ended. In need of a fresh start, he began to wax nostalgic for an island that (he waxes poetic) “exists in the narrow crease between the Heavens and the Earth.”

If that description seems a bit flowery, Bobbitt also calls Cedar Key “the anti-Siesta Key” for its blue collar, anti-high rise, we’re-not-a-tourist-trap roots.

Years earlier, “when I was getting my pilot’s license I used to practice takeoffs and landings” on Cedar Key’s notoriously short airstrip. “I’ve had a soft spot for the town ever since.”

“I was born in a small town, and in Gainesville I may as well have been living in New York City,” Bobbitt reflects. “I wanted to get back to a place where people live in real community with each other. If you’re sick here, somebody brings you soup.”

A love for Cedar Key

As it happens, one of Bobbitt’s plays is titled “Cedar Key” and it’s about the ne’er do well son of a clamming family who tries to save the town from a looming hurricane.

Whether Bobbitt identified with the hapless protagonist of his play when he ventured out to record Idalia’s fury for all the world to see is anybody’s guess.

“Michael just has a way of making the most bizarre, interesting and compelling performances part of his life,” says longtime collaborator Tom Miller. “He ends up being on stage even when he’s not on a stage. He’s nuts in some of the best ways.”

'A straight shooter'

So what do the somewhat insular folks of Cedar Key think of Bobbitt barging in and making himself to home in such, um, abrupt and dramatic fashion?

“As goofy as he is, he’s a straight shooter so he fits right in here,” says Mayor Heath Davis.

Davis, himself a clam farmer, helped show Bobbitt the ropes of his new profession. “When Michael was in the water with us, I said we don’t need another clam farmer, we need somebody who can go out and better market and sell them for us.”

In short order, Bobbitt was lobbying the legislature on behalf of Cedar Key aquaculture and using his Clambassador persona to tell Cedar Key’s story to anybody who would listen.

And as apocalyptic as “Godspeed Cedar Key” may sound at first blush, Bobbitt’s soon to be published novel is also a rich accounting of three centuries of Cedar Key’s history and its people.

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“It’s not another end of the world book, it’s a despite the end of the world book,” he said. “It’s a huge story about this little island and its people told really small.”

Still, isn’t saddling Cedar Key with radiation poisoning and all manner of related horrors going just a little too far for a guy who, relatively speaking, just blew into town?

"People are always gonna write stories, whether you like them or not,” says Davis. “If somebody’s going to write our story I’m glad it’s Michael. There are a lot of good stories here.”

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Cedar Key is setting for Michael Presley Bobbitt's newest adventure