Po'Pay Review

Folks are asking how the Po'Pay Speaks performances are going.  When you're neck-deep in it it's hard to tell.  I mean, I'm a bit fried, it's consuming and amazing at the same time, but it's hard to tell what people are thinking. 

The Santa Fe New Mexican posted a review so I thought I'd share some bits of another's viewpoint of the show:

• "Mirabal has created a poetic and thought-provoking show with co-writers Stephen Parks and Nelson Zink."
• "He [me] is dressed in cargo pants, high-top sneakers, and a Doors t-shirt."  [heehee]
• "The monologue is part history lesson and part drama, but it is not a diatribe."
• "Mirabal is an engaging performer who combines song, dance, prayer, and humor into a script that jumps around in time. A hallucinatory episode describing an encounter with Jim Morrison of The Doors may tip a little heavily into Taos hippie mythology, but as Mirabal points out, 'The seekers helped keep things alive.'" [Yep, it's true.]

There's lots more and you can read the full review here.

Or. . . 

Better yet, you can come see it in person.  Performances will be held from August 16 - September 4 at the Lodge at Santa Fe. For more information, please contact Danette Lovato at 505.242.8355 or purchase tickets here.

Love,

Mirabal

Hotel Rooms & The Tribe of the Road

Here I am once more living in another hotel room. . . If I know I'm staying more than three days I try to find the one room that's furthest away from the lobby and furthest away from any kind of foot traffic and elevator freaks.  However, since Santa Fe doesn't have but one elevator in the whole county at least I'm free from that noise.

A few funny and wild recollections of being on the road & staying in hotel rooms:

• I once totally forgot where I was.  It freaked me out.  I jumped out of my bed and slammed into the wall thinking that was the way out. 
• I was once awoken by my band mate in the hall 'cause I forgot my room number.  I knew which floor I was supposed to be on, but didn't know my own room number - just too burnt out.
• Another time my key worked in a room that was already occupied (usually I'm walking into hotels when everyone is asleep.) So, I walked into this room that smelled like grandma perfume and sweat. Ugh.  To make it worse a hairy man sat up in bed and scared the shit out of both of us.
• Tables turned another time, however, when a girl was pounding on my door accompanied by a hairy football-playing-looking-monster and she yelled, "Open the #$%^ing door Tommy!"  I stepped out and scared the shit out of them. Hahaha

It's all pretty hairy, really.

But I do have some tips for the next time you find yourself in a random hotel somewhere.

1. Don't ever use a black light to see what you're actually sleeping on.  You'll regret it.
2. Don't ever unplug the ice maker. 
3. I don't recommend jumping from the balcony into the swimming pool in L.A.either.
4. I definitely wouldn't skateboard naked in an empty parking garage in Florida.  I most definitely would not let your skateboard lead your naked self into the hotel lobby. 

Hotels are the most lonely of places and you'll meet some of the most lonely people as well. However, we hotel-goers are our own tribe and the bags under our eyes give us away; another suit and tie burnt out beyond belief, another dirty rock star with Prada glasses and, of course, the lost pizza deliver guy.

New York has small dark rooms.  In Florida everything smells like a moldy washcloth.  New Orleans has sleazy, slimy rooms.  L.A has small towels and large cockroaches that want to sell you your own shoes in the morning.

This life is not for everyone.  It is for the road warriors that find solace in their own crazy livelihood.  We move from hotel to hotel and we all miss home in ways that are much too strange to even deal with at times. But you're so used to being alone that dealing with any more people other than the hotel staff kinda gets you edged and, after a week or so at home, you feel the urge to travel once again.  Sad.

The food is stale and we all crave the weird and unusual.  There are few things that scare us.  However, the things that scare us are much more friendly in the real world than in ours; R.V. people, kids, striped shirts and khakis.  Unkempt hair, shoeless, wrinkled clothes, tattoos, piercings, and eye makeup basically sum up the tribal gear of my surrogate tribe.

This week at home in Taos we will start a ceremony that will end on the first week of October.  It's about reconnecting to the source and then into the harvest time. I miss my brothers and sisters dressed in their best and getting the horses ready, singing songs of the lake, praying, dancing, eating. I miss my people. I miss them every time I drive off into the wild blue. I pray for them with every show as they pray for me with every song.

I met a girl when I was 18 years old on the road doing summer stock in Oklahoma.  Her name was Fran and she was an amazing dancer from Virginia.  "Mirabal, you're a beautiful loser!" she said as she threw a cassette at me from her red Firebird.  Then she drove off.  I have no idea what she meant but she was a traveler like me and she carried her own ketchup behind her seat.  She said her family owned a hotel in Martensville, Virginia on some highway on the Appalachian Trail.  Maybe I will find it someday. Haha, I hope not!

Here's the song "Beautiful Loser" from the cassette:

Happy Trails.

Love, Mirabal

Po'Pay Returns. . .

. . . Or was he ever really gone?  

In Pueblo culture, we believe there are certain people who don't actually die, they just kind of evolve into something else.

What if Po'Pay has been here the whole time?  During the World Wars? During the Great Depression?  "Living for the past 331 years in a cornfield north of Taos, analyzing life, traveling the world and spending time with the likes of Wovoka the Paiute prophet, Jim Morrison, Kit Carson, Georgia O’Keeffe and Mabel Dodge Luhan." (Santa Fe Reporter)

It's hard to believe the show has started.

It's too late to turn back now, eh? (Heehee.)

I truly hope to see you there, it's been a long time preparing, writing, memorizing, rehearsing, embodying - a lot of -ings there.  

To read more about the show click here and here.  

Performances will be held from August 16 - September 4 at the Lodge at Santa Fe.  For more information, please contact Danette Lovato at 505.242.8355 or purchase tickets here.

Some Things I've Learned From Growing Corn

• Patience!
• Seeing the world as a child and an adult at the same time. Seeing corn through innocence; like a child, but a damn smart one.
• Corn requires support at its roots.  As it grows and reaches knee height you need to build up dirt support around it so it doesn't fall over.  We all need support as we reach towards the heavens.
• Fearlessness.
• Corn Maidens love to play rough, especially with boys.
• Corn can only be beaten down by wind, rain, and the elements, for so long before it bends.  Be careful who you let beat you down.
• Despite the elements and the eventual bend or break, after a bit of intimacy, corn will stand straight up again.
• Corn needs balance too:  Sun, heat, rain, food, water.  Balance is key.  Too much of any one thing will kill it.
• Corn is an overachiever.  Next to the other plants in the garden, corn extends to the greatest heights just by being itself.
• Weeds will try to take corn over, tangle it up.  A bit like negative thoughts and negative people.
• Planting corn is meant for community.  Even from thousands of miles away help can come for your crop when you ask for it.
• If you're sad or sick, the corn maidens take away what ails you.
• My life doesn't quite work without corn.  Even if for some reason I lose a crop it still, in death, teaches me in a profound way.

What does growing corn mean to you? What "grows corn" in your life?

Water, Ice Cream Earth, and Po'Pay

Po'Pay Speaks:  "Today there is treachery once more, what we honored the most is destroying us, perhaps we don't honor it like we should, never in my life did I think I would say BAD FOOD.  Today food is killing us..."

Can you imagine not being able to swim at your favorite swimming hole, take a bath or shower, or even quench your thirst?

Watering a corn field is weird - it teaches you patience.  Too much water and it takes the earth from root structure; not enough water and it becomes a useless endeavor which can sometimes take days.  Water teaches you how to be clever with it, teaches you about flow and gravity, teaches you about how your soil is reacting to the unexpected source.  You can ruin a field by watering too much as the flood takes away the top-soil and leaves you with clay and gravel so that you have to restart the process of collecting soil that still holds nutrients.

Recently I received the gifts of a corn harvest from Ecuador - massive corn grown on the ancient terrace fields of Cusco where the top soil is about 10 feet deep with barely any rocks or gravel.  Whereas, in Taos, there's more clay than sand or good earth - which I call Ice Cream Earth (so good you can eat it.)  We often say, "Don't put two big rocks near each other or they will make a thousand baby rocks by next year."  In fact, we are millionaires in our fields full of rocks and gravel.  I imagine an Inca farmer would think, "how the hell is this guy growing anything on rocks?"

My middle field is so infested with rocks that it looks more like a highway project than a corn field.  My Grandma Crucita was happy that I got that land and said that, as a young girl, she picked so many rocks out of the field that she dreamed of rocks for years after that.  Wanna torture a kid?  Make them pick rocks from a field, ugh.

In Kenya I hope I never see this kind of drought.

When we're in a drought as we are now; when there's a lack of water and many other people are fighting to get just a little more, these places become hard as adobe bricks and your skin bakes to deep brown.  The words "savage tan" have another meaning altogether.

Corn maidens dying in the heat.

You can see the poor corn maidens shriveling up before your eyes in the heat of the midday sun.  You can feel their pain and if they could walk away they would lift up their roots and say, "Later. Call me when you have some fresh juice to savor." You train them so that they survive on the most minuscule amount of H20 and hopefully make it to the late July/August ceremonial monsoons.  (Yeah, we actually have monsoons.)

You water and it barely travels from plant to plant.  Little ants laugh at you as the parched crispy earth sucks as much of it as it can to maintain itself. Places where the water doesn't reach turn slight brown at the fold up to pale-gray and you can lose a patch in less than a week.

"Water can make you cry," the old timers say, and it was because they didn't have a local super-supermarket to buy fresh produce in an instant.  If you lost your fields it was because you weren't clever enough; no excuses there's enough road maps to follow.  If you're at the field early, or late at night, you might see the growth because that's when the corn maidens stretch and reach the most.  The majority of people only see them in the daylight hours when they huddle up for another day in hell.

I heard some Pueblo boys say they're not planting this year because there's no water. Bullshit talk!  The grandpas would make you pick up rocks for a week with that kind of talk.  Corn root is fragile and not deep so the right amount and cultivation of the root base is needed.  But the corn maidens also need the heat, it's the balance that is the key.

Po'Pay Speaks: "A long time ago corn and us sat down face to face and struck a bargain and said what we would do for each other, plant seed then corn maidens will start to sprout, then they become tall and straight with long green arms, then the ears form those are their babies, and they become women, mothers, corn mothers, we bring her into our homes and she feeds our children's children's children." 

The name for ice cream in Tiwa is Bpaw-Tsem - "water cold." That's it - nothing more to be said.

Water.

If you don't know it, learn it.  If you learn it, you can survive in any condition of life; business, personal, corporate - 'cause it's the basis to all creative notions and actions.

Po'Pay Speaks: "You want your tomorrow, you must dream it, I taught you that, but you forgot.  I told you not what to do, but how to do it, and you forgot that too. If you have nothing it's because you dream nothing."