Monthly Archives: February 2024

San Miguel de Allende, The Week in SMA

Just some of the stuff going on this week in San Miguel

What the heck is going on?

We hear that a lot now that there is no longer a weekly newspaper in San Miguel de Allende. (Not that the newspaper was all that informative. But it was better than nothing.)

The other thing we hear is “I didn’t know that was happening? How did I miss it?”

Easy. Stuff to do is all over the place. Sometimes in your Facebook feed. Sometimes in your e-mail. Sometimes on websites dedicated to local stuff. Sometimes by word of mouth. Sometimes by a poster pegged to a local bulletin board.

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San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized, Writings

Lessons learned: Thriller author Chris Pavone finds that everything is material for his next novel

For a writer of well-received international mystery thrillers, Chris Pavone can sound hilariously parochial. As a dutiful househusband in Luxembourg — the exact location of which he had to look up on a map — Pavone struggled with the oven dials because they were written in German. (He’d studied French in preparation for the move.)

A day trip to Germany to buy a clothes dryer for their apartment was a bust. (“We were unprepared for how much German there’d be in Germany …”).

No matter. After a month of working with a clothesline in the guest bedroom, Pavone discovered that the washing machine was also a dryer. He found out as he was translating the two-dozen settings on the machine. One of them said “Dry.” (What? Not “trocken”?)

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photography, San Miguel de Allende

Egrets over regrets, every time

Nesting season has begun for the egrets, in the public laundry park just above Parque Juarez, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

But, with their watering and feeding habitat in Pressa Allende bone dry, I wonder what impact that will have on the annual trek to the trees in El Chorro?

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photography, San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized, Writings

Only in San Miguel de Allende could your massage help feed hungry abuelos: 35 years of So Others May Eat

Near the entrance to The Spa Wellness Center is a framed photograph lightly faded of around 80 abuelas in shawls, aprons and long dresses and a handful of bewiskered abuelos grouped on the steps of a Parroquia de San Miguel Arcangel courtyard. Some hold canes and walking sticks. Many have woven shopping bags.

At the bottom of the picture is the bold caption:

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Reviews, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

For author and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, writing is a lot like poking the tiger with a stick

In 2003, I walked out of a San Diego theater struggling to explain the movie I had just seen. This was bad news in a way because I’m pretty sure that I’d been assigned to review it for the newspaper.

Maybe not. Reviewing movies was not my full-time gig with the paper. But I knew I had to write about it.

“It’s like … It’s like.” I stopped. Closed my eyes. Inhaled.

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Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

The charm of Molly Ringwald had the hearts of writing fans thumping Author! Author!

Cheer up all you ink-stained wretches of a dying breed, Molly Ringwald finds editing sexy.

Well, to be specific, she finds standing over the shoulder of her husband, the writer-editor Panio Gianopoulos, and watching him edit is very sexy.  Well, close enough. Maybe not enough to bring back editing in the Artificial Intelligence Age, but comforting just the same.

Somebody out there likes us!

Come to think of it, Molly Ringwald is pretty easy to like, too.

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Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

So much to do this week in San Miguel de Allende, my head is about to burst

Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle will be performed this week in San Miguel (See information below.)

Ah, that special time of the year when you ask yourself, “Why can’t I be in two places at once? Or three?” That time is now.

This is the time when people with money from the north pour across the border unchallenged and settle in for one month or several and begin to madly buy up tickets to a vast number of events – all of which we only see a hint of the rest of the year.

But few and far between though they might have been, you could reasonably trust that an empty seat could be claimed moments before a performance would begin.

You know the Season is here because – even though arts and cultural events have multiplied like sex-crazed rabbits – you will frequently hear that dreaded phrase, “Sorry. Completely sold out,” from a voice that actually sounds quite chuffed and hardly sorry at all.

Facebook, in a marvelous act of undercounting, posts a message to me on Monday morning: “Reminder: You have five events coming up this week.” It didn’t even get the right five.

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photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

How to look at flowers: A bird’s eye view of Candelaria

Today, I realized that I’ve been looking at the flowers all wrong.

The ones that have filled the wood aisles of Parque Juarez for the annual Candelaria Festival. Nearly every pathway is filled with flowers, succulents, cacti, saplings, herbs, seeds, soils, exotics, and verdant things indescribable by a casual traveler like me.

This isn’t my first Candelaria, bucko.

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San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized

Send in the clowns

Clowns were dancing up the street again today.

I didn’t make the same mistake twice.

Just because clowns are dancing, it doesn’t mean there is a party going on.

I learned this lesson the hard way on a recent weekend.

The recent procession that passed in front of my house from Parroquia San Antonio de Padua was a funeral. Not a celebration.

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