Mexico #5

We camped out in the shade by the fountain and pool with a formerly cold now tepid nearly extinct Coke. Our hotel namesake, Doris Albino, liked to have herself painted numerous times and hung on the lobby walls. From a distance, not bad, but as you get closer she has the thick dark unibrow, and a telltale wing moustache that
goes below the bottom lip. If you could afford to be painted why not slip the guy an extra 50 pesos with instructions not to be so accurate. Or you could have used a heavy duty weed whacker right before the sitting and hoped the session didn't extend past 5 pm.
Our "entertainment" especially when free usually ranges from disappointing to disgusting. The 20 Merida Yucatan dancers thrilled us. We arrived at the Plaza Grande at 8 pm, an hour early, to find all the bleachers filled and two rows of folding chairs on the sides. After discarding the collapsing chair, we set up camp in the third row. The wooden snake, fan, toy hawker worked the crowd as did the peanut (free sample) and pancake vendors. Grandpa made a fool of himself dancing the senile, senior, stumble step with his two grandchildren in front of the crowd to the renderings of Jose Jose belting out ballads of the '40's, the 1840's. My thought: it's time for a beggar to work on us. On cue, Grandpa's mother tried to hustle our humanity without success, but the hump and blind eyes were compelling. We appeared to be only among a handful of tourists in a voracious crowd of a few thousand. All the locals had an ice cream bar in one hand, café in the other, and peanuts in their laps, a pretty (in the large sense) portly crowd. At 9 pm Jose Jose crooned his last canned notes from the 10' high speakers and the crowd began rhythmically clapping. Out came 10 beautiful senoritas in white dresses with colorful floral designs, white dancing shoes, and all dolled up in make up and high black hair dos. Each dragged along a guy, probably gay, all in white with fedora and open toed sandals. They kept our attention for an hour, not easy when we are accustomed to a commercial every 7 minutes 3 seconds. The two best dances used a Maypole with streamers and a Coke tray with a beer bottle in the middle and 4 glasses filled with water. Twenty dancers grabbed a streamer from the Maypole in the middle and danced intricate patterns in and out, and after making a ravel of the streamers around the pole, they reversed and came out with straight streamers to the pole. Another song started and they wove a different design again reversing to straight streamers. They did this 5 times without a mistake definitely not for the dim witted intellect or my dancing inability. The tray with beer bottle and 4 filled glasses balanced on their heads started slowly and progressed to a frenzied whirling dervish. One guy spun so fast the water sprayed from the glasses, but he kept the round cake pan like tray balanced and on top of his head. Earlier trips are available in the book, Four Keys Overseas at Amazon books.

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