The Show Tampa

“Oh, yes, it’s beautiful!” declares Hodges, a snowbird retiree from Memphis, Tenn. who prefers the moniker Prince Mongo. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

And it’s his own personal protest.

Upset at complaints by neighbors over a wood deck that prompted county officials to cite him for a code violation, he transformed a $300,000 beachside home into a wildly provocative property that stands out as much as he does.

Prince Mongo, who eagerly tells you he is 333 and from the planet Zambodia, joins the colorful cast of other Central Florida characters who used their homes as a canvas for protest, to the point of becoming neighborhood nuisances.

The late Grover Walker painted his Winter Park home a wild red, white and blue, with massive slogans and a giant American flag flying upside-down on a 90-foot flagpole. The family hosted concerts and rallies, with loudspeakers, sirens and military surplus spotlights to protest a psychiatric diagnosis that barred him from receiving veterans benefits. Seminole County’s “junkman,” Alan Wayne Davis, went to prison rather than removingantique aircraft parts and a giant sculpture of a human buttocks from his yard near Altamonte Springs.