I saw these two cuties while walking around Colonia Juárez, and asked if they would be so kind as to pose for a foreigner's perennial photo montage of Mexico City. They don't make them like they used to.
Bye bye cabaret
Readers of my book FirstStop in the New World may remember the chapter about the Savoy, the last cabaret in Mexico City, with its live orchestra, plump dancing girls, a mariachi who sang to piped-in music, and the Euterpean talents of Claudia Tate, who had been the star of soft porn comedies in the 1970s. The Savoy is still here. But sadly, the floor show is gone (except for the warbling mariachi). It has become a table-dance and fichera joint, where you can cut the rug to live salsa with one of the women on the premises for a modest fee, and perhaps negotiate other services for proportionately higher honorariums.
Fan club
Photo by Caroline Kim
Recently, I went to a lackluster Sunday afternoon of lucha libre at the Arena Coliseo. The wrestlers, however acrobatic, only seemed to be going through the motions. Indeed, more energy was expended between fights by these two guys, who claimed to be students from the Autonomous National University, and who certainly knew the "Goya" cheer chanted by fans of the Pumas, the UNAM football team. After the luchas, I ran into them on the street. They claimed to have been at a baseball game before the wrestling matches, and were on their way to look for a cantina from which to see a football game on TV. Here, the three of us practice cheering.
Fun for the whole family
I tend to have words for every occasion, but the other night, when my friend Richard Verdoni, who comes from the family that runs the Hermanos Atayde Circus, invited me to see the show, it left me speechless.
It had been literally decades since I'd last seen a circus. Writers are not supposed to use clichés, so forgive me for the following: I felt like a child again. My mouth gaped through many of the acts, particulary the tightrope walker.
As a boy my favorite story was Toby Tyler, about a child who runs away to join the circus. Does the fact that to be Toby's story was my dream say too much about the kind of family in which I grew up? Or do all kids dream about running away and joining the circus?
Click here for more information about the Hermanos Atayde Circus, which is playing throughout the summer. If you go, you can see this tiger doing the moonwalk to the tune of "Billie Jean."
A good one-dollar cigar
Sometimes an old man waits on customers behind the counter at Hermanos Petrides, a cigar store on Calle Uruguay between the Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas and Calle Bolívar. He has a weathered countenance and an extremely patient manner toward the uninformed customer. He is almost old enough to remember the era when Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president to Woodrow Wilson, summed up the U.S.'s woes and said, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."
The old man's sons most frequently take care of the customers these days, with equal grace. I don't smoke, but this is where I steer people from the U.S. who want to buy legitimate Cuban cigars. I also suggest -- as the old man suggested to me, when I was buying Cubans for friends in New York -- that they try Mexican cigars from San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz. They only cost a dollar or two, and my cigar-smoking friends tell me they are as good as stogies that generally cost five or ten times as much.