Nudes and Concheros
March 6, San Miguel de Allende
Back for a month, my third year (not counting the 70’s) and there is still so much that ‘s
new !
Every year I see the conchero dancers in the jardin and think I don’t need to see them
again and then I do. One
night I walk up from the photo shows at the Bellas Artes (art openings in San Miguel happen
as often as the clock strikes the hour-and represent a wide wide range of
genre and quality). Writing or reading all day in my atelier (so named by someone else as it overlooks the streets of Paris), I walk to the jardin in the
evening for a break where there’s ALWAYS
something happening. Bellas Artes, one of my favorite places
in San Miguel
“constructed in 1755-65 as the
cloister area of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception (Las Monjas) . It's
been called the most ambitiously landscaped cloister in all Mexico,
lush as a jungle with 20-foot high bamboo plants and towering poinsettias
covered with so many red blooms in season you think they'll topple over . . ”
where a man
offers me a seat and our
conversation leads to the fact one of the photo shows opening tonite is his:
about 60 nudes, mostly older expat residents of San Miguel, balding men with white chest hair and a variety
of peni (peni?) and women of a like age with bikini cuts.
The models are also all there in the flesh jammed into the narrow passages between
the full sized nudes.
In the jardin, the concheros are out en mass beating on their big steel congas filling the jardin
with that universal bass beat- it could be in Golden Gate Park except for the concheros. I’d seen it all before and wasn’t going to take a photo but then
I walked by the perfect
frame –the dancers under the tower of the Parroquia, San Miguel beautiful baroque confection of a church. Some young
Mexicans from DF ask me to be in
their group photo- huh? My favorite photo is one of my Mexican contemporaries in
full Azteca dress dancing her
heart out, a perfect symbol for International Women’s Day.
No comments:
Post a Comment