The wife of one of our workers gave us three fresh cheeses!
This was our supper – excellent flor de Junio beans, avocado, fresh salsa, fresh tortillas, and fresh, artisan cheese. Good, good food in Mexico.
Supper
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Tractor Tires
Here’s my friend Josefina and her helper – early morning sweepers.
This morning, bright and early, we drove our new red tractor to the llantero, tire guy, about 3/4 of a mile from here. Since we’re going to use it starting tomorrow (already!) we had to get the tires filled – get this – with water. Water. I didn’t have a clue.
We backed the tractor out of our garage, and started up the street to the carretera, the highway that’s in the process of being reconstructed. On the gravelly, dusty highway, we made our tractorly way to the tire repair guy, Pancho. He repairs and fills all kinds of tires, and is an pleasant guy. We got to his shop and sat there for awhile as he began.
A woman we know passed by, carrying sacks full of plastic bottles to recycle. She used to come to our house every couple of weeks to pick up the bottles we save for her, but she hadn’t come lately, and we had several fertilizer sacks full of bottles. They had been there so long the sacks had begun to deteriorate.
As it so often happens, and as it turned out, she is the aunt of a neighbor woman. In these small ranchos, nearly everyone has relatives in the surrounding ones. We often see her trundling by on the highway, carrying bags of plastic bottles to sell to the recyclers.
There’s a very small hardware store very to close to the tire repair place, and we walked over there to get a couple of things for the tractor. We needed a new what’s-it-called, thingy to drop through the holes to hook the disc to the tractor. when we received our tractor, the holes weren’t properly aligned to do the hook-up,
and we needed to either enlarge the holes or get a smaller thing to drop in there. And one of the nipples for greasing had broken off, so we bought a new one of those. The hardware store had all sorts of things to keep me looking, as do many hardware stores: nest boxes for parakeets, fish hooks in two sizes, rope, and fiddly little things necessary to keep your house running well.
Next to the hole-in-the-wall hardware store was a restaurant that serves seafood, and we had resolved to spend our hour-and-a-half there to have some breakfast. There was one thing on the menu – shrimp cocktail. We ordered a large one to split between us, and it was excellent! I watched as the owner prepared it for us. In the kind of tall glasses with large bases you’d expect, he started with about a half-cup of water (shrimp water?) he dipped out of a plastic bowl. Then he added the shrimp, and as I watched he chopped up onion, then tomatoes, and then avocados. He poured a red liquid over the top (probably Kermato or Clamato, maybe with some sweetener added). And then, voila! he brought them to the table and opened a cardboard box of Saltines, called Saladitas here. It was excellent, and a wonderful breakfast. It cost less than six dollars for the two of us.
The tire man finished filling the tires with water, and we headed for home on the dusty, bumpy highway. Once there, we parked the tractor behind the house and started filling the big water tank in the back of our pickup so we can dump water in the bottom of a narrow ditch our workers have been cleaning. It’s been so hot and dry that it required pick-axes to break the surface of the ground in the dry ditch.
And then, the señora showed up to get the bottles, so we helped to re-bag them in newer plastic sacks. This is the first time I’ve seen 100-lb bags that are a green color. They deteriorate rapidly in the sun. Farmers use these sacks by the hundreds and thousands, so it’s a wonderful thing that they are clearly biodegradable. This woman is a widow, and supports herself by picking up bottles along the highway. She walks several miles every day.
We had six or seven sacks to fill with the plastic bottles. We have a few bottles that we buy ourselves because we purchase Coke-a-Cola to serve to visitors (that’s about all they care for), and I pick up bottles whenever possible while we’re working.
Music – More Gigs For Our Big Little Band!
Recently we’ve been hired to play more Catholic masses, and more parties. If you’re curious, here we are paid about the same in pesos as we were in dollars in the US. A dollar is worth around 17 pesos right now. We don’t do it for the money. We do play out of devotion to what we were born for – music.
We played for a fiesta last Sunday – a big birthday party held in a nearby ex-fertilizer vendor’s warehouse. We received mixed reviews. A man who worked for 25 years in Nevada and Montana loved it. Two tables of women sat and listened to every single song, hardly talking. An older man asked for “Mexican music! Don’t you play Mexican music?” When Chon announced “This next song is pura Mexicana! I wrote it myself, and I’m Mexican.” The guy and his wife got up and left after the song.
The menu was puro Mexicano – carnitas and sopa. (Dessert came later). When a pig is butchered and cooked in an enormous copper kettle it’s called carnitas. Sopa here (sounds a bit like soup, doesn’t it?) is what you might call Mexican rice. The recipes vary, but it is almost always red rice. Some recipes have more ingredients, like diced carrots and peas. It’s always good.
We played different styles of music. We played cumbias (check out cumbia rhythm: it’s one of the most infectiousand non-boring rhythms I’ve heard, ever). We played baladas, slow songs. We played rock ‘n roll. We played rock. We played original songs (very popular). We played songs in Spanish and English. We played until after 11 p.m., and we had been hired until 9 p.m. It’s typical that Chon plays better and better, and sings better and better the later it gets. (Look up the word “duende”). He’s an astonishingly good singer, guitarist and composer.
WOMEN helped us load up our equipment! Women! They stayed on and on, chatting, until nearly everyone had left. They loaded our heavy equipment into our big truck, and then loaded us with food to take home. Most of these parties are well armed with to-go plates and containers and aluminum foil. We had food for a week! There was at least two pounds of carnitas which I prudently packaged and froze.
Although the fiesta was less than 5 miles away we arrived home very late indeed. We had to call it a success.
And here’s a truth about local Mexican audiences: in general, they’re surprised by us as a band. The first thing they notice, other than we’re only two people, is that we don’t play banda. They love banda. They expect banda, that ubiquitous mix of Spanish lyrics, simple, repetitious melodies, and what I would call a tuba band. Instead, they get something more like a rock band. We have big equipment, enough to produce sound for large crowds. We have a large truck to carry equipment – you should see the stares when we show up.
If you are a musician, or have some knowledge of what you see on a stage, you may wonder how we do it. Among the pieces of electronic equipment we carry are two drum machines, programmed by us. We would love to have a live drummer, but it’s just not likely to happen. I’m a classically trained singer and keyboard player, the person you might see singing on a stage with a chorus and orchestra, or in an orchestra pit accompanying a musical comedy, and I use two synthesizers. On one synthesizer I play bass with the left hand, and lead parts like introductions, and accompaniment parts like strings and piano sounds as well.
Chon is a very, very, very good guitarist, with many years of experience playing in a bar and touring band from Chicago. He has extensive training and on-hands experience in sound engineering. He also has impressive skills as a composer. He has written literally hundreds and hundreds of songs for church services and live performances of all styles. I love it sometimes when we’re recording or practicing and I tell him that I think what I’m playing on the keyboards sounds boring, and he thinks for a couple of seconds (literally) and then says “Try this.” And sings me a riff or a melody or a rhythm. He has stunning ideas!
A Short Cow Tale
I lived many years on a big sheep ranch in the mid-western part of the US. An average of a thousand ewes each gave birth to one, two or three lambs each year. Did you know that female sheep have friends? They stay friendly with their daughters and sisters for their whole lives. And did you know that in a herd of a thousand mama sheep baby lambs who fall asleep and wake up to find the herd some distance away can find their mothers? They can.
This morning we walked down early to the wheat fields. It was cool, and just lovely. To get where we were going we passed the house of a retired man and his wife, recently returned to Mexico. He has created a nice little homestead at his house that was empty for years. He has a nice pickup, a small corn field, a small corral, a cow and several dogs (more and more seem to show up). I noticed the cow right away last winter, and I noticed again after she had a baby. I wondered briefly where she had come from. I found out today, and nobody had to tell me.
A good-sized mixed herd of cattle was moving out to graze in the recently-shorn wheat field next to the tidy little homestead and as we walked I saw a large two-year old heifer separate itself from the herd , and stop to stare towards the cow, visible in her corral under a shade. The heifer mooed softly, and the cow stared back, and began to twitch her tail and walk back and forth in the corral like a caged animal. She bellowed and bellowed and the heifer bawled and bawled, then ran rapidly to the fence that divided them. It stayed there, as near to the cow as it could, and then, long after the herd had walked a good distance, she reluctantly turned and walked very slowly along the fence line, stopping every now and then to look back.
Who knew? Cows have families too.
Made A Move!
With skilled help (thank you, E!), I’ve moved up, and Galileo’s life in Mexico picks up close to where you, gentle readers, left off. And it IS close, even if some time appears to have lapsed. Really, really heavy events have occurred – events like a death in the family, growth in the agriculture department including a big purchase, unlovely guests, and growth in different parts of our musical lives. OK, gotta go and find some wonderful photos to illuminate my scribbles! Ta!
Preview: before sunrise this morning in the wheat fields!
GALILEO IN CALIFORNIA – POSADAS 2014
I see my one (ONE!) lonely post from last year and I think “I know, I’ll write about my Internet connection in Mexico!” But try as I might, I can’t make it funny or interesting. So just know this, Dear Reader, that I have a bad one. I swear it got much worse this year, although it didn’t seem possible. Like – No Uploading, Ever bad.
The first time I put on my headpiece each year is just seems so BIG!
Galileo is in SoCal for our annual Posadas Dinner Party gig at La Golondrina in the old, historic part of Los Angeles, and instead of writing about farming in Mexico or other exciting details of our busy life (you think I’m kidding, don’t you?), I’m going to give you a glimpse into the life of us two professional musicians.
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| This is the sculpture at the Tijuana border. I think it’s imposing but ugly. |
I am seated at a desk in a hotel room – the same hotel we have stayed in for several years now. It’s not glamorous. Many of you would not choose to stay here. But it’s clean (enough) and safe (enough), has internet (see above – this is why some of my friends and family only hear from me in December!) and we’re used to it. Enough about the hotel. We’re notorious penny-pinchers. We travel a full day to get here each year, leaving Central Mexico and the central time zone early in the morning, arriving at the border still in the morning in a new time zone, getting across said border, renting a car in San Diego and driving to the Los Angeles area and haggling over the price of the hotel. (Bet most of you didn’t realize you could do that). We usually have one or two days to get acclimated.
| I got to see my friend Chris. Flannel twins. |
Practice: maybe you thought that practicing is for beginners. Practice is for all musicians, all the time.
All through the year we practice, learn, and rehearse. For us that involves setting up equipment, as we don’t usually practice with acoustic instruments. Since Chon is a composer, we learn new songs throughout the year, to archive them, or to prepare them (arrange and organize) for live performances. Some weeks we have to put our farming schedule first, and put off practicing, but we always return to it as soon as we can.
And Chon is thinking throughout the year about our December gig. We do two to four gigs during the year, and they include my birthday party (June) and Chon’s birthday party (December), New Year’s Eve, and other dates, like Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day. These gigs often include repertoire we plan to use at the Posadas parties.
The Posadas dinner parties are held in a restaurant that can accommodate several hundred people. We have played nearly every night of each December 16-24 since 1987. Really. The show is pretty much the same each season. In fact, the manager prints us out the very same show order every year. This year they wrote in an extra group of dances by the folkloric dancers, which might not seem really important, but it turned out to be. And it was a different dance group than the one that we’ve seen every year for many years.
Many of the families that attend have made this a family tradition for longer than we’ve been hosting the show. Really! So we see children and grandchildren of those families one night of the year every year. And after so many years, you get a feeling of what to expect each night. Since it is a family-oriented show, you may not have a realistic picture of how the evenings might go. Although there are many small families with charming, wide-eyed children, there are often large families and some pretty wild behavior. Take last night for example.
While we were setting up, an ex-student arrived to chat with us. Thanks for coming, Jose!! Planning to stay, he and his friends instead had to leave, there being no room in the inn, ha ha (posadas joke). It was sold out.
Our student friend Jose stopped by while we were setting up!
When I saw the thin blonde woman walk in, with her extremely high heels and faux leather pants, I knew how it would be. The year before, her large family group had brought confetti-filled egg shells, and throughout the evening had thrown the eggs and hard candies around, one even denting the finish of a guitar onstage. They tend to drink a lot of Margaritas. Who knows – maybe this is their one night of the year to really cut loose! And so they did. There were 25 kids, seated at long tables facing each other on the dance floor, (right in front of us) leaving little room for the marionette show and the dancers. The kids threw confetti eggs at each other, and playfully ground confetti into each others’ hair. Their parents could be seen and heard admonishing the kids, to little avail, although the kids really seemed playful and excited, and not hurtful.
We began the evening on time, with some jazzy Christmas carols on the piano. While I played, Chon was fixing the sound to be even better. After the jazzy carols we played and sang Christmas carols in English and Spanish, and then the dancers came to the now-tiny dance floor, a few minutes late. The leader/organizer of the dancers had asked us to let him know when there were two carols left before they began. We told him, but they weren’t quite ready. Christmas carols are not long! They are certainly not as long as a three-minute pop song. We sang two more, and then the dancers entered the crowded dance area and presented some short Aztec dances. They have beautiful costumes and headdresses, rattles, and fire! in a fire pot.
Then we played two dance numbers for the audience, one in Spanish and one in English. The kids continued bombarding each other with confetti. Confetti on a polished wood floor seems to make it more slippery but no waiter or waitress bearing large trays of food fell.
Then the Bob Baker marionettes show was presented by the talented puppet master, Eric. I love the show, and have not tired of it in all these years. There are clowns, a skating bear, a couple in Mexican folkwear, a tall couple in ballroom dance wear, a tall pink cat with maribou and high heels, little boys, a big yellow chicken that lays an egg on stage. I find it delightful. The kids edged closer and closer to the center, making it difficult for Eric to navigate.
The music used for the marionettes is “classic” humorous songs all adults recognize, a Spike Jones number, and even light classical music like Leroy Anderson. Eric has the music on his iPod/iPhone and it’s easy to hook it up to our sound system, but difficult to equalize so that it sounds good through the big speakers. Chon does that well. Recently Eric and Chon have discussed making new recordings of the music so it doesn’t take so much adjusting.
After the marionette show we did a Posadas Procession, a shortened version of the Mexican tradition of singing groups of people visiting neighboring houses before Christmas. The kids “help” with this, processing around the restaurant, with the dancers carrying a large Nativity scene. Joseph and Mary seek shelter and the story ends happily. We play live music for this. With so many kids it was difficult to walk around.
We followed the procession with more dance music, and then played very brief music for each kid to swing at the piñata (there were two of them, as there were so many kids – the twenty-five seated on the dance floor were joined by others who magically showed up when we announced the piñata.
Throughout the evening the dance floor was occasionally taken over by men wearing Mexican gabanes holding glasses – of – beer? It looked like that. They are the ones who like it when we play rock music. And we do. See how eclectic it is?
The dancers returned for a dance from the Mexican state of Michoacan, the above-mentioned change in our tried-and-true order of events, and at this point we began to get complaints. They came to me, and not to the manager, so it was a little weird. No, it was odd, and I wasn’t sure what to say.
One woman, loudly, said into my ear as I was singing, “The Baldwins are leaving! We were waiting for the Mothers and Sons dance, but we have to go!” As soon as I could, I told her that would be the very next thing. The Michoacan dance dragged on. Aside: the dance from Michoacan is a famous one called Los Viejitos, The Little Old Men, and it’s comical. Or it’s supposed to be. Dancers with masks depicting old men with long pink faces, dance like young men, and fall down, and get up and dance some more, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. To be really good it must have physical humor. It seems mystifying to most of us gringos, however, as it was last night to the audience. I must be missing something. The blonde woman also came to the stage to comment about the Mothers and Sons Dance, and I told her that the program was the same, and it WAS, it really WAS, except for that one little insertion of the Old Men Dance. The blonde woman hissed at me, “NO, it’s NOT”. They know the order of the show!
Anyway, it ground to an end, and we were relieved to announce the Mothers and Sons dance. We have often thought about changing the music we play for this, but perhaps we should put that idea out of our heads. Then the Fathers and Daughters danced, and we followed this with the Hokey Pokey, (yes, we really play the Hokey Pokey), La Macarena, and then a melange of mostly original holiday rock music, which has really great energy, and many kids and parents were dancing, including the blonde woman, who at one point put one high-heeled foot up on a table so that her pants slid down in the back and we got a really clear view of a body part usually covered up, and later made some dance moves not usually made on family restaurants.
Aside about the Hokey Pokey and La Macarena: these are musical numbers that we have considered changing over the years, usually at the request of the dancers who are sick of it – not much challenge there for a dancer, you must admit. But we will probably NEVER change them, because you now see what happens when you Change Things. And the other night when we began La Macarena, a thirty-something woman who used to be a teenager at the show said to her sister, with a lit-up face, “Oh, this is my favorite!”
And then it was over. We tore down equipment, packed it up and stowed it, and headed to the Valley. We sat and watched an episode of Anger Management and went to sleep.
Our schedule every day of the show – you may think that a three-hour show is just that – three hours. But now you know – there’s practice and planning all year. There is instrument repair and wires repair. There is tuning. We leave to go to the three-hour gig at 4 p.m. We set up for 45 minutes to an hour. We eat. That’s a lucky part, because the food at La Golondrina is really good, and it’s better every year. We play the show. We tear down, and we get back to our non-luxurious hotel aound 11 p.m. When you have that sort of wire-tired feeling you can’t go right to sleep, so you sleep late. Then there is usually enough time to get breakfast or lunch and get ready to go again. It’s great work if you can get it.
There are plenty of notes and photos about our Siembra 2013.
We planted our fields May 28 and June 6, having purchased fertilizer granules to go with the seed. Many fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides come to Mexico from the US, and receive a lot of suspicious attention from the farmers that purchase them, including fears that Monsanto and other companies might be selling “plaga” of all sorts right along with their seeds to get the farmers to buy something to control them with.
Mechin brought other workers when there was too much fertilizing/weed spraying for one person, and that worked very well. He and another worker both decided that they would not drink until the local fiesta, and as far as we could tell, they stuck to their decision, thus saving themselves a lot of money and foolishness that often accompanies drunkenness. (I’m not on a soapbox, just stating the observable facts.)
Mechin worked for us nearly all season.
The seeds sprouted, the plants appeared and grew.
So did the insect predators. See the holes near the roots of these young sorghum plants?
Insect predation.
I think those are deadly attacks from gallina ciega the hideous underground herbivorous predator. The adults are as big around as a finger. and can live about 3 years.
Gallina ciega, horrible creature, ugly name “blind chicken”
Proud farmer
Even prouder farmer
We worried, as dry-land farmers do, about not having enough rain. But looking back in memory and through my notes, the worry wasn’t necessary in 2013 (OK, perhaps it’s debatable whether worry is necessary or not). At any rate, we got frequent gentle rains, with few really heavy storms. But there was plenty of thunder and lightning, usually in the evening and night, and rains all the way to harvest time. It was difficult for some local farmers to get into the fields, and it took quite a while for the maize and corn to dry sufficiently for harvesting.
End of harvest 2013
Starting Over (well, sort of)
I recently (yesterday!) regained access to this blog. Thank you, google forum! That’s a pretty good excuse not to have written anything for a long time, I’d say, since I just couldn’t get IN!
The first thing I did was to moderate some comments (I got some comments!) and to peruse some of the old entries. I had thought after not seeing it for a while that I just might not like it. But I do. I still do.
So I have some catching up to do, and this is a start.
Reasons I didn’t blog:
1. I really did not notice that I didn’t have access to the blog. Because????
2. There was really nothing going on for a while; no practicing/performing. No farming. Lots of reading (I guess I could blog about reading, but – nah.)
3. We got really busy with farming, and I was waaay too busy to write about it. Really. Busy every single day.
4. We got busy with music, with hours and days of practicing.
5. We were taking care of la señora, who got a horrible infection.
And that’s the year, condensed.
So, my dear readers, guess what I’ll be writing about very soon!!
La Siembra, practicing, performing, caring for an old, old lady, losing and re-evaluating having a blog.
Can you see where this is going? I hope it won’t be boring.
Navidad – Going To Mexico
Our recent annual Posadas Parties gig in downtown Los Angeles ended quietly on December 24th. As we were setting up several employees asked if the evening would end earlier than the other nights, and Yes, we said. We used less equipment and smaller speakers, and shortened the times between events, so that we ended about 9:15 instead of at 10 p.m.
 Some of our equipment waiting to be stored up two flights of stairs – ah, the life of a musician! |
We trudged up and down stairs and put away our equipment in the storage room. We said our goodbyes to the dancers, the puppeteer and the employees, and drove to our motel for our last night.
In the morning we packed up our equipment and clothing, and went to a local pawn shop to purchase a drum machine we had spotted similar to the one we like to use for recording. We then drove to a cousin’s house near Covina where we enjoyed a wonderful meal with ham as a main dish (thank you, Sylvia!. In spite of all the excellent meats available in Mexico, ham and turkey are two things that just are not of the same quality. I am not embarrassed to say that I had several many servings of ham. I had an extremely enjoyable conversation with Sylvia and her lovely daughter while the daughter made guacamole as Christmas gifts for her friends. They were so attentive I probably talked way too much. I do miss having women friends to talk to, and I probably totally dominated the table talk.
As the afternoon wore on I began to cast glances at the clock and fret a little about leaving on time. Our car was due back at the rental agency in San Diego at 9 p.m., and I hazarded a guess that it would be perhaps a three-hour drive. We left about 6:45 after our goodbyes. While I kept driving at a steady pace for about three hours, Chon napped off and on.
We were on an unfamiliar freeway, and it just didn’t feel like exactly the right direction. When I began seeing signs for San Diego, but not for the airport, I called my sister, who was on the receiving end of a snow-and-ice storm in Arkansas. She speedily looked for directions to the airport (she is really, really good at using the computer), and told me if I saw highway 163 I should take it. As her words came through the phone we were just arriving at the off-ramp, and we zoomed onto it. Her directions were perfect and in a short time we were near the airport; we gassed up the car, checked it in and re-packed our things.
I may not have mentioned that one part of our luggage was a large box (The Box) with digital recording equipment we had purchased in Los Angeles. Chon packed it with clothing for additional protection. It had carrying handles, but it was quite heavy and rather awkward. In addition I was carrying a bag we bought at a thrift shop because it had wheels for ease of movement.
Although we had taken the Volaris shuttle from the Tijuana airport to the San Diego airport, we weren’t exactly sure how to catch it back to the Tijuana airport. Although I was fairly sure of the location, I hadn’t really thought about the lateness of our return, and wondered if it would come. An extremely rude taxi driver tried to convince us that my directions were wrong. We showed up, though, at the Amtrak station, and I got directions for the shuttle stop right outside the door. It would arrive, the attendant told us, at 11 p.m. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 1:10 a.m., and we were beginning to feel pinched for time. That is to say, this is when both of us were feeling that pinch; I had felt concerned since, say, about 5 p.m. There was one other person besides us at the shuttle stop, a young man who told us HIS flight was leaving at 11:45.
 Our luggage under street lights outside the Metro Station in San Diego, CA. See The Box |
We looked at each other wordlessly. IF the shuttle arrived at the scheduled time, and IF it took zero minutes to officially cross the border, it still would just not be possible for him to make his flight because of the 20-or-so-minute drive to the border. He suspected it, and we knew it. He asked if we would like to share a taxi. There was one parked a half-block away, and before Chon went to ask if it was available, I asked him to make sure the driver wasn’t a complete A. He wasn’t, and it was available. He wanted $50 to drive us to the border, and the other passenger offered to pay half. That made OUR taxi ride cheaper than taking the shuttle! We got a strong young guy to help carry The Box, and HE got at least a chance to make his flight.
We raced to the border, the cab driver probably in a hurry to harvest more work on this busy Christmas night. The cabbie had lied, however, when he told us that it wasn’t far for us to walk to cross the border; “less than a block”, he said. We tumbled out of the cab, unloaded our gear and began to walk on the new pedestrian path across the border. My bag, the one with wheels, would begin to rock wildly if I walked speedily or held the handle too high, so I brought up the rear.
We sweated our way along the well-lit, smooth sidewalk that led to a small brilliantly lit room where a sleepy-eyed female border agent asked us where we were coming from, and going to. Chon told her that the three of us were a band, and we were making a regular border crossing to play at a party. She waved us past her with a bored smile.
And then we walked, and walked. And walked some more. The sidewalk became a bridge. With many switchbacks. Chon and the young guy made several changes of sides of The Box because their hands hurt. Several times we passed a middle-aged gringo (and he passed us), and one of those times he asked us, panting, if we wanted to share a taxi. Yes, we did. As we finally arrived, panting, at the taxi parking area, we beckoned to him to hurry so he could ride with us. The taxi driver quoted a $20 price (yes, $5 apiece) and amazingly, loaded The Box and some other luggage into the truck and tied the trunk lid down. The four of us piled in, and passed around our smaller bags so that we could fit.
We started off for the airport, and every time we drove across a pot-hole the trunk lid would bang and the gringo with us would mutter “bad shocks”. We made it to the airport in record time, and the young guy and Chon picked up The Box again and carried it to the luggage scanner. We made it through that first hurdle and I had my visa checked. The young guy began to slink away, and Chon called him back to haul The Box to our check-in line, where he promptly and efficiently disappeared. Who could blame him? He DID make his flight, though.
And WE pushed The Box through the lines to the check-in, where we paid for the extra weight. Then we headed with our backpacks to the security check, where we were told that we could not carry our (brand-new, extra-heavy-duty, expensive) instrument cords in our carry-on luggage. (What???? No electrical cables in carry-on? That is not something I have seen listed as being prohibited by the airlines.) I waited while Chon ran back to the check-in counter where the airline workers told him to leave his backpack with them. As this was simply not an option (great NEW backpack designed for computer, with a fine drum machine inside), he talked them into leaving only the cables with them, and returned cum backpack to the security check-in, and then, finally, we were through, and the rest was easy.
The Volaris flight took off and arrived on time (congratulations, Volaris!), and when we arrived I had my first opportunity (??) to help carry The Box. After only a few seconds I was so relieved that I hadn’t been the one drafted to lug it all the way across the immigration trails!
A friend picked us up at the airport, and as we headed for the highway to take us home, there were hundreds and hundreds of urracas, boat-tailed grackles, in enormous parvadas , flocks, flying overhead.
We got home about 40 minutes later, unloaded our things and went to sleep for four hours.
YES, WE ARE WORKING MUSICIANS
The other day we were in a large music store that sells instruments and music equipment, and the clerk politely listened to Chon describing how we had just arrived from Mexico, and then listened more while he described what we would be doing a few hours later, until the clerk’s eyes suddenly lit up in comprehension, and he exclaimed in astonishment, “Oh – then you are actually Working Musicians!”
Yes, we are. And last night, the third night of a ten-night gig, was one of those nights when things went right for us against the odds, with some magical moments from the other elements of the show, and some surprisingly cursed performances from others.
“We are Galileo, and we will be your musical hosts for the evening.”
| Audience participation can be stunning! |
This gig is a dinner show, and sometimes the results depend on the audience. Well, OK, the audience ALWAYS plays a big part. Aloof teenagers, timorous children, angry adults with obvious issues – that’s just a fragment of the population, and the holiday season seems to aggravate the best and the worst in each person. Last night the audience numbered eighteen, instead of an average of three hundred. So we made adjustments to our schedule and started late on purpose, since we didn’t have many people to handle. We played dance numbers, and sung seasonal songs for about a half hour, all the while noticing that not a single member of the dance troupe, normally numbering ten or twelve, had stopped by to wave hello. However, as our last “cue” song was happening, I could see the great feathered headdresses of the dancers approaching.
We are the MC’s for the show, and I introduced the dancers with a great deal of energy, and they headed to the stage, which in this case is the dance floor, at a slightly lower level than the stage where we are situated. Chon busied himself with the audio equipment, enigineering changes to the sound as I watched three dancers prepare to dance. Normally there are six to eight dancers.
The first set of dances is “Aztec Ceremonial Dances”, and of the FOUR dancers present, one played (blew) the conch shell. He was not in costume, and remained out of sight. One dancer, arguably the best, had been elected to play a very large (bigger and taller than a child) drum. The two other dancers were the couple who is the moving force of the dance troupe, an experienced middle-aged couple. Are you counting? Two dancers instead of six or eight. The woman is charming and talented. Her husband is rather tongue-tied and shy, and, well, just not a “born” dancer. That is to say, he dances. In a professional dance troupe. With a lesser sense of rhythm, the movements and steps of the Mexican dances are extremely challenging and intricate. But our dancer bravely rose to the challenge
I was watching, amused, to see what would come of this extremely diminished dance group, when Chon glanced up from what he was doing, and with a dreadful scowl, his eyebrows shot up in shock as he saw the dancers. The woman encouraged her partner through the steps of the various dances, until the final presentation, the Fire Dance, when a single dancer (and not usually THIS man!) dances around a burning flame in a stone mortar, at times bringing his feet and legs extremely close to the flame, and for the finale, holding the burning flames high above his head, moving them from hand to hand, then returning the flames to the mortar, and eventually extinguishing them with a bare foot. This he did, valiantly struggling along, until he dropped the flame on the floor, quickly recovered it and returned it to the mortar, and then it just, sort of, went out. And that was the finale of the dance. The beautiful, lithe, slender dancer who was beating the rhythm on the drum, also just – stopped. What else?
We quickly began to applaud, and the audience joined us entusiastically. Yay!
Later in the show, the dance group, scheduled to present a group of regional dances from Mexico, returned, this time with the conch player (to us, the New Guy). So there were the four of them on the dance floor. For some technical reason they chose to use a slower, training recording of one of the extremely fast whirling polkas from northern Mexico, and the “new guy” to us, the one who had blown the conch shell, just danced the polka at the speed he was accustomed to – that is, at a much faster speed. His partner did not – she valiantly attempted to dance to the tempo of the recording, and to assist her partner to hold back, as well. The steps were right. They just couldn’t really dance it together…
And as for US, well, one of our speakers was blown, and we could not replace it. So Chon used a monitor (a speaker that performers use to hear themselves in the all the amplified sound swirling about),in place of the broken speaker, which made the bass sound normal. I play a bass part for all the songs we perform, with my left hand, on a keyboard. The sound is a “real” bass sound, that I normally like. The night before, it came out of the speaker as a cross between an extremely loud belch and a rattle. At first, hesitant to produce such a sound, I played rather gingerly, but as the night wore on, I became more accustomed to it, and realizing that the audience probably really wasn’t noticing, gave it more energy and volume. Using the monitor was a relief because the sound was good – normal, but accompanied by the worry of the possibility of blowing another speaker.
The world-famous Bob Baker Marionettes are part of the show, as well, and do a twenty-minute set. They are charming, OLD puppets, with fading feathers, maribou, felt hats, and chiffon, and the puppet-master is young and very, very good. He can make a marionette look like it’s tap-dancing. Or doing a provocative (not TOO provocative – it’s a family show!) Santa Baby routine. Or juggle. Or fly.
Normally, there are twenty or thirty children sitting on the dance floor to see the puppets. Last night? There was one. He was about eight years old. His little sister, maybe five years old, was terrified, and spent most of the presentation tearfully huddled in her father’s arms at a nearby table. Soooo, I went to sit with the boy to get a great view of the routine. Then several other adults decided to join us, too, so there were six of us. Having been charmed by Bob Baker’s marionettes as a spell-bound child seeing Hansel and Gretel, I am a serious FAN of the marionette show, and the set was wonderful. All of us were laughing and nudging each other at clever details. I hadn’t known that the big pink cat does funny things with her handkerchief! My face was aching from smiling so much. The lone boy was a perfect audience member as well, and was charmed and thrilled by the up-close-and-personal marionettes.
And later on, when we had a traditional-styled posadas procession around the area, the adults took part, as well, in the part of the show usually done by youngsters. And the piñata, you ask? Waiters and waitresses joined in, as well as the paying audience.
I had a wonderful time. And as I chatted with the audience after the show, I could tell they did, too.