“Bum Farto The Musical” comes back to Key West’s San Carlos Theater in October. I admit I gleefully laughed, stomped my feet and clapped my hands the last time it was here. What a hoot! Such a perfect example of our Keys culture!

What’s not to love about a show billed as bringing to life “one of Key West’s most infamous and colorful characters. Bum Farto, the fire chief who mysteriously vanished in 1976, is re-imagined as a charismatic anti-hero in this wildly entertaining musical. With a story spilling over with Key West’s eccentric charm, director Pamela Stephenson Connolly crafts a tale as quirky and captivating as the island itself. … This show brings the island’s freewheeling spirit to life. You can’t help but be drawn into the madness, laughing along as Bum Farto’s escapades unfold into hilarious drama.”

Until, that is, we think about the real rogue under the rouge. The man was the fire chief, for heaven’s sake. That’s a position of public trust. He was dealing drugs, cutting deals and covering up stuff with nary a care.

And what do we do? We chuckle. Hey, that’s part of the Key West Mystique, we tell off-island folks. That’s who we are. A libertarian, often libertine, island of frequent misfits and characters, pirates and mermaids, all jostling together to see who can create the tallest tales of after-hours parties, murky doings and, well, casual corruption.

Our heroes are troubled, misogynistic, mean-spirited drunks like Ernest Hemingway. He lived on the island for eight years when he was in his 30s. From 1931 to 1939, Hemingway caroused, fished and wrote a couple novels. Eighty-five years later, we’ve sandpapered off the rough edges and turned him into a rotund, white-bearded, huggable island version of Santa Claus with a red neckerchief. I wonder sometimes how many fans of Key West’s icon ever read his books.

We love our characters. Crack open to any page of a Key West-flavored novel and roll along. Heck, I do it all the time. I love the tales woven by the likes of Tom Corcoran and Carl Hiaasen. Add in the larger-than-life exploits of authors like Tennessee Williams and his pals, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Carson McCullers. Leaven the Key West Mystique with Jimmy Buffett, Shel Silverstein, Thomas McGuane and Hunter S. Thompson, and there’s enough fodder to last lifetimes — and that’s long before we start listing local characters who still walk our streets.

There’s a catch, though, to our celebrations of the larger-than-life, and a darker underbelly to our willful blindness to corruption like Bum Farto’s.

We start to believe our fabulist tales are the makings of real life in Key West, that we, too, can bend the rules a bit here and there, because, after all, what’s the harm. It’s Key West. Our imagination of what we can get away with becomes untethered from logic.

Keys culture | Sometimes we believe our brand is real

I alluded to this phenomenon in November 2023 when the first audits of the Monroe County Tourist Development Council hit the headlines.

“I am neither surprised at the audit’s results nor am I inclined without evidence to the contrary to believe that this TDC debacle was some malicious, intentional defrauding of the public trust for private gain.

“Instead, the results were inevitable. This happens too often with small-grown-too-large organizations with little to no active oversight, with the same players calling on their friends’ companies as vendors and with virtually unlimited funds.”

That saga has only gotten worse over the past nine months, culminating with indictments of Andy Newman, the TDC’s public relations vendor of choice. Now we add in the grand jury indictments against former Monroe County County Administrator Roman Gastesi charging him with covering up information about the debacles with Trauma Star, our emergency medical airlift service.

All of us have clay feet. None of us are exempt from the temptation to go along to get along. None of us are so righteous that we don’t occasionally cut a friend a break. That’s what humans do. I sure do.

But when the island too long celebrates coloring outside the lines, when all we do is chuckle at Bum Farto’s corruption, we feed a powerful you-do-you-I’ll-do-me culture that can morph into I’ll-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want — because, hey, it’s Key West. And that’s plain sad.