Welcome to another Day of the Dead celebration at UMAR Huatulco. Read on if you dare!
I've become so slack at this blog that the last entry was almost DotD 2013.
Here I am wearing almost the identical outfit as last year.
A student asked to take my picture with some new model Ipad thing. I doubted it would work. We weren't near any street lamps. But who knew? She seemed to think it was worth a shot. Maybe the latest electronic toys had infrared features. Not too much would surprise me. But I was astounded when she pulled out a beautiful glossy photo quality picture and handed it to me. Unbelievable! Pad things now have flawless polaroids??!! Then I looked again. It had all been a diabolical setup from the start. There I was in the picture wearing the same cape but I had on last year's rubber bat tie that had turned into sticky goop during the heat waves and a different shirt. Her friend had taken it last year. Brilliant gag. I was completely taken in.
This was a Friday night and my energy was a tad low after a long week. Alright, I was feeling lazy. Instead of snapping pictures, I passed it over to a couple of students and asked them to circulate with it and surprise me later with the results. They did a great job, especially for night shots.
Here I am, posing with my two photographers, Yesenia and Fatima. I'm in a lot more shots this year because of them but there's no need to upload them all. I look pretty much the same in all of them. Scary.
I'm told the two young ladies above performed a charming dance that night but I missed it. I remember seeing them nearby while I was talking to somebody. The taller one froze when she saw me, very surreptitiously nudged her sister and then they both moved cautiously and discreetly behind their mother. I didn't blame them a bit. Santa Claus is still real to pre-schoolers so why should they take any chances when they see someone looking exactly like Vlad the Impaler.
Other children are more comfortable with the dark side.
That's enough of Vlad. What a picture hog! The place was packed with groovy dead people.
Fearless Fatima next to some scary guy with a spider on his head. No idea who he was but Pablo was nowhere to be seen that night and he usually loves this sort of thing.
I particularly like the picture above. I was reading up on Ed and Lorraine Warren, the charlatans behind "The Amityville Horror" and more recently, "The Conjuring". I read all these articles on how they blatantly lied about everything and learned some stuff about what they were passing off as evidence. That white dot on the right, which is probably a piece of dust or pollen, would have been called photographic proof of a ghost by the Warrens. Perfect for our Day of the Dead celebration where we know that ghosts are really quite friendly.
We all had such a great time. There was traditional dancing, thematic movies and some of the best live music I've heard in a long time. I didn't always get to enjoy all the entertainment from start to finish as everyone was in social spirits but there was one short film made by UMAR students that caught everyone's attention, an effective little horror movie filmed and produced right here at UMAR. People screamed for real. I've already asked for permission to show it as an opener for an upcoming Cinemapocolipsis presentation and I've been given the green light.
