“I heard him say that he doesn’t like zarzuela,” I told them. I didn’t like it that much myself. The one I saw was a sort of Spanish operetta without subtitles or program notes. I had no idea what was going on.
“He won’t even be able to ruin that program,” said Brockman. “I’m sure you’re aware, Carolyn, being connected by marriage with the university, that state budget cuts are hurting spending on education. I’m told the music department took a severe hit.”
“Scientific research funding too,” I agreed. Jason had been complaining, although a lot of his funding comes from outside sources, thank goodness. Otherwise, I’d never hear the end of the blow to science dealt by short-sighted state legislators and a penny-pinching Republican governor.
“Let’s hope the music critic from the
Times
is still sick,” said Frank Escobar. “I’d just as soon not have this production reviewed.”
“Yes, I was very upset when I initially heard there’d be no review of the Friday night performance, but it turned out to be a blessing that the critic is the first reported flu case in the city,” Brockman agreed.
I murmured my excuses, having spotted Vladik with a group of university people. He’d only managed to finish half the guacamole. I accepted another margarita from a passing waiter and joined the new circle. My husband was trying to convince Vladik that the administration wasn’t singling him out for unwarranted budget cuts.
“President hate me,” said Vladik stubbornly.
I thought he looked rather sickly, but then who wouldn’t after eating a half-vat of guacamole. I helped myself to some in the interest of his health.
“Vice president for Academic Affairs hate me,” he persisted. “Music chairman hate me. All jealous of Vladik. My
Macbeth
make them give money. They see many Hispanics come. Many applaud loud and shout, ‘Bravo’.”
I personally thought that if the upper administration had been in attendance—I hadn’t seen any—that they’d take away his budget entirely.
Melanie Collins, who is married to a geology professor, said, “I thought it was wonderful. My first opera, and I was absolutely enthralled. I think the university is treating you dreadfully, Vladik. It’s shameful.” She laid a sympathetic hand on his arm and smiled at him like a girl with a teenage crush.
“You would say that,” snapped her newly arrived husband, who, instead of a tuxedo, was wearing dusty khakis and heavy hiking boots.
“Why Brandon, I thought you were still on a field trip,” said his wife. “Couldn’t you have changed your clothes before you came to the party?”
“And give you time to trot off with this Russian puke? You think I don’t know you’ve been sleeping with him?” Brandon Collins turned on Vladik and snarled, “I ought to break your scrawny neck, you communist son of a bitch.” He actually put his hand on a pointed hammer that was holstered on his heavy leather belt—some geological tool, no doubt, but it did look dangerous.
Those of us in the circle were, needless to say, both embarrassed and alarmed at this turn of events. The opera’s artistic director, who had turned a sickly shade of green, said, “Vladik sick. Very sick.” He thrust the guacamole bowl into my hands and stumbled away before Professor Collins could smack his head as if it were a rock of scientific interest.
“Some lover you picked,” Collins said to his pink-faced wife. “He didn’t even have the guts to stay and fight for you, did he?”
“It might have been the guacamole,” I murmured, “or even the margaritas.”
The simplest recipe for a margarita, according to the authors of The El Paso Chile Company’s Texas Border Cookbook is 3 ounces gold tequila, 3 ounces orange liqueur, and 3 ounces lime juice shaken with ice and poured into a cold glass, the rim of which has been coated with salt. But what of the tequila? It first became popular in the United States when Mexican Revolutionaries and their American counterparts across the border favored the drink. However, tequila did not gain a wider distribution in our country until the Second World War, when European liquors became hard to get. It has gained steadily in popularity since then.
In Mexico it dates back into Indian history before the Spanish Conquest when pulque was distilled from the agave cactus and drunk at religious ceremonies by priests and nobles, who were working themselves up to the high point of the event when a person or persons were sacrificed on the altars. The lower classes were not allowed to drink it unless they were to be sacrificial victims. Then presumably their fears were muted by drunkenness.
Later Mezcal wine or brandy was distilled from the agave, and finally tequila, which was produced from huge cactus plantations, where the sap is harvested and then distilled—in early days in rawhide containers—latterly in barrels of oak and even plastic. The distilleries are mostly in the state of Jalisco, and the processes are closely kept secrets. An interesting footnote is that women are not welcome in the distilleries. They are still considered “unclean” and “bad luck.”
Carolyn Blue, “Have Fork, Will Travel,”
Charleston, Southern Messenger.
4
“Our Cultural Establishment Has Suffered A Great Loss”
Carolyn
J
ason and I
were ensconced comfortably in the padded lounges on our patio, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday papers. Last month we discovered that we could have the Sunday
New York Times
delivered right to our door, so Jason was reading that while I browsed through the
El Paso Times
before going into the kitchen to fix brunch—
eggs ranchero
. Sometimes we have mimosas with them, but after the margaritas last night, I didn’t feel like drinking alcohol. The truth is, I’d been sick during the night, a rare event for me, and I didn’t think I’d had
that
many cocktails.
Ah well, I felt fine in the morning, and it was such a beautiful day. Blue skies, sunshine, temperatures in the 60s. El Paso can be quite lovely in the winter—at least when there’s no inversion layer to trap toxic air in the river valley. Today the air was so clear that the city below us and the mountains across the border in Juarez stood out in sharp delineation. A house with a view. I felt extremely contented and picked up the newspaper again.
There was no review of the opera—I’d looked—but there was an article on the editorial page, of all things. “Listen to this, Jason.” And I read him the editorial, which was titled “Insult Shrouded in Beauty.”
“For those of us attending an opera for the first time, the Opera at the Pass production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Abraham Chavez Theater was an eye-opener in more ways than one. We were an audience dressed in seldom-used finery, El Paso being a casual sort of town. Having spent as much on tickets as a big-name rock star might command, we were prepared to be bored by a stuffy, classical experience or, for the more optimistic, amazed by the talents of the composer and singers. We were certainly amazed.
“Ms. Ojeda-Solano and Mr. Wang Zhijian, from Chile and China respectively, are possessed of voices both beautiful and loud. They rocked the auditorium without the aid of microphones—eat your heart out, Ricky Martin. Local singers and instrumentalists from the university and the city distinguished themselves as well. And the music was melodic, sometimes even foot tapping. My wife came away humming one of the arias. For those of us who suffered through Macbeth in school and then promptly forgot the whole thing, translations in English and Spanish, projected above the curtain, kept us apprised of what was happening on stage.
“On the basis of what I have said so far, you might think that El Paso has come of age, has joined the mainstream, culturally speaking. Not so. Instead of spending our expensive evening watching tragedy evolve among Scottish kings and thanes, Artistic Director Vladislav Gubenko served up his own inappropriate revision of the story. El Paso was treated to a distasteful and demeaning tale of murderous drug dealers. Perhaps Mr. Gubenko thinks that we are incapable of appreciating anything more uplifting. Perhaps Opera at the Pass needs a director with more respect for the local audience.
“Although our proximity to Mexico certainly gives us a front-row seat for the violent activities of the drug cartels, we do not need to be entertained with the spectacle of contemporary lawlessness when better things are available. If we want the drug culture dramatized for us, we can go to the movies. Many of us may be cultural Philistines, Mr. Gubenko, but we are not all drug dealers, and we bought enough tickets to sell out the theater. Your made-for-El Paso version of Verdi’s and Shakespeare’s classic tale is an insult to the city.”
“What do you think of that?” I asked my husband.
“I think Vladik’s going to be upset. He was pretty proud of that staging.”
“I know, but did you like it?”
“Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were excellent,” said Jason. “Never heard of either of them, but we were lucky to get voices like that, and I kind of liked the trio of witches, but the drug-dealer theme was over the top. I can’t say it worked for me. Still, I doubt that Vladik meant to insult anyone.”
He leaned over to rustle through sections of the
New York Times,
probably looking for the sports pages, or possibly the travel section. Personally, I like the wedding section. It’s so different from wedding descriptions in my youth. The New York paper offers us strange brides and grooms, too old to have stayed single so long, and avant-garde weddings. It’s very entertaining. Still, I wish Jason wouldn’t drop the paper on the cement. By the time I get to it, I often find ants scurrying over the news item I want to read.
“Weren’t you going to fix eggs ranchero this morning?” Jason asked hopefully.
I glanced at my watch and got up. “Ten minutes,” I promised and went into the kitchen. Eggs ranchero aren’t hard to make, and they are delicious. To think I’d never tasted them before we moved here. Obviously I was getting acclimated, which is not all that easy for a lifelong Midwesterner transplanted to the border. I turned the radio to KTEP, National Public Radio in El Paso, or so I thought, and poured vegetable oil into a large frying pan. Instead of classical music, I got a news bulletin:
“We interrupt our programming for this local news item just in. Vladislav Gubenko, artistic director of Opera at the Pass and Professor of Music at the university, was found dead in his condo at Casitas del Paso this morning by a neighbor walking her dog. Retired El Paso Police Lieutenant Luz Vallejo discovered the opera director in his bedroom after following an unpleasant trail from her front yard through the open front door of his house.
“A preliminary statement from the coroner indicates that Gubenko may have aspirated his own vomit during a violent attack of stomach flu. Sergeant Arthur Guevara of Crimes Against Persons suggested that the deceased overindulged in alcohol the night before, as there was a distinctive odor of tequila at the scene.
“Gubenko’s innovative staging of Verdi’s
Macbeth
received its second and final performance last night at the Abraham Chavez Theater. Dr. Peter Brockman, president of Opera at the Pass said, during a telephone interview, “In the death of Professor Gubenko, our cultural establishment has suffered a great loss.” I was so shocked that I broke the yolk of the third egg into the frying pan and had to scrape it out of the oil I had used to soften the tortillas.
Carolyn’s Easy Eggs Ranchero
As a Middle Westerner, I always thought of breakfast as hot oatmeal on cold winter mornings, cold cereal with milk and fresh fruit in season, eggs and bacon occasionally, never spicy sausage (I didn’t know there was such a thing), and an occasional venture into the exotic—cinnamon toast. Then I moved to Tex-Mex land and discovered that breakfast can be spicy enough to turn your ears pink and clear your sinuses. I highly recommend, for instance, huevos rancheros. For brunch, you might even add margaritas or mimosas.
•
Assemble vegetable oil, 6-inch corn tortillas, eggs, Pace Medium Picante Sauce or similar product, a wedge of longhorn cheddar cheese, and cilantro sprigs (optional).
•
Warm a thin layer of oil in a frying pan large enough to hold four fried eggs.
•
Soften the tortillas one by one by dipping on each side in the oil. Lay the tortillas flat in a shallow grilling or roasting pan.
•
While frying the eggs over easy in the remaining oil, grate the cheese. Then place one egg on each tortilla, while frying more eggs if necessary.
•
Spread hot sauce over each egg and almost to the edge of any uncovered part of the tortilla.
•
Sprinkle grated cheese liberally over the salsa.
•
Place the pan under the broiler until the cheese melts.
•
Lift each tortilla carefully onto a plate—one or two per plate—garnish with cilantro sprigs, and serve hot.
In 1947 David E. Pace set up a business in the back room of a San Antonio liquor store, where he whipped up his picante sauce and other Tex-Mex delectables, which he spent the afternoon selling around town from the back of a truck. From this folksy beginning, Pace Foods became the top producer of Mexican salsas. Campbell Soup paid $1.115 billion for the business in 1994. Those of us who occasionally want to make easy guacamole, chile con queso, or eggs ranchero at home, love Pace Picante Sauce.
Carolyn Blue, “Have Fork, Will Travel,”
Milwaukee Daily News.
5
Adela Distraught
Carolyn
M
y huevos rancheros
were very tasty. With the sun high in the sky and the temperature hovering at 70, we raised the green and white striped umbrella on the patio table and ate there, discussing the news report I’d heard on the radio. Jason had liked Vladik, mostly because of their mutual interest in opera, but also because Vladik had as little patience with long academic committee meetings as my husband. Therefore, Jason was understandably upset to hear of Vladik’s death.