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Cinco de Mayo Festival This Sunday on the National Mall — Why You Should Go

April 28th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life - (2 Comments)

Alfonso and Karla at a prior Cinco de Mayo Festival in Washington, D.C. Photo Courtesy of Gary Jean Photoworks

My Daughter Z Dances with J at Last Year's Cinco de Mayo Festival in Washington, D.C. Photo by Iris Bennett

On Sunday, May 1st, the Maru Montero Dance Company will be dancing on the National Mall as part of the Cinco de Mayo festival (for more details, see http://marumontero.com/cinco.htm.) They will mostly be at the Sylvan Stage, which is on the South Side of the Mall, just east of the Washington Monument, near 15th Street NW and Independence Avenue. Following a noon parade, they’ll be dancing from about 12:30-1:00 and again from about 3:30 to 4:30. You should go. This is why:

The Kids: My daughters will be dancing with Maru’s other Mini- and Micro-Monteros. At Thursday night’s practice, Maru ran the kids through the dances again and again, drilling steps they half knew until, by the end of practice, the kids were sweaty and scared. I’m not especially worried. I went through this last year, and I know that the magic will happen—that along with the make up and fancy flowers in their hair, the flowing skirts and bright white shirts, the energy from the audience and the thrill of being out on the huge stage in front of live Mariachis, these children’s slumping, half-attentive bodies will suddenly produce the steps they’ve been practicing all year. And even if they don’t, these little children—most, but not all, with Latino heritage—will be up there on stage stomping their feet and swirling their skirts, celebrating Mexico, performing the steps all Mexican children learn in school, and it will be lovely (at least to their parents).

The Dancing: A former lead dancer with the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, Maru doesn’t usually dance with her troupe, but her passion and experience shine through her choreography and direction. Simultaneously warm and forbidding, she envisions the dances and then creates them out of the dancers. The traditional dances come from different regions of Mexico, and each has its own costume and music (the adult troupe will be performing some dances from Argentina as well). In many of them, a 1-2-3 beat, referred to as “zapateado de tres,” serves as a base for all kinds of intricate steps—kicking a toe back, a heel forward, swishing the ball of the foot and then clicking the heel, moving to one or the other side, crossing and re-crossing a foot behind or in front of a leg and then back—that are performed at lightning speed and to very precise counts so that everyone’s feet fly and then stop at precisely the same time. Along with these intricate, demanding steps, the women do skirt work with big double skirts that they hold out, arms slightly curved so that the skirts hide their elbows and form a graceful flowing line, and twirl with the same kind of minute and precisely timed variations as the steps. The men mostly hold their arms straight behind their backs as anchors for their steps. When a group performs, the dancers become a kaleidoscope of color and movement, creating an amazing and celebratory energy whose power, like other folk dances, comes in part from the history of the steps having been performed all over Mexico for many, many years and in part from the efforts of the people on stage.

The Dancers, among them Karla and Alfonso: Karla grew up in Tijuana. While she learned ballet folklorico in school, as do all Mexican children, for many years she focused on ballet, modern, and jazz dancing. When she first came to the D.C. area, she taught salsa and mambo. It was only when her studio partner moved to New York seven years ago that she joined Maru Montero’s company and seriously began to dance folklorico. She told me she practices the steps while waiting for the metro, with her earphones on, and other commuters look at her as if she is crazy. The dances exist within her as she goes through her day as a pre-school teacher in a Montessori program, helping children pick out activities, cleaning hands, passing out lunches, and comforting hurt feelings on the playground. She told me that sometimes it is too much to carry within her along with work, her daughter, a move out to Woodbridge and back again to D.C.. At times she has quit, saying she would never go back. And yet she has always come back. On stage she is stunning, all smoldering passion and searing eyes.

Alfonso grew up in Tamaulipas, Mexico, a border state where horrific mass graves have recently been found. Alfonso first learned Ballet Folklorico in the courtyard of his middle school with his entire class. But the dance teacher invited him to practice with his troupe, because he thought he had promise. When, months later, Alfonso told his parents he’d started dancing because he needed their permission to go to Mexico City to perform, he learned for the first time that his father, too, had been a dancer, and had even had his own studio before he’d gotten married and had kids. By 9th grade, Alfonso was dancing all over Tamaulipas, and then all over Mexico in a group called Mextli. He had his own dance group in Mexico for a few years and then moved to the United States. He works as a handyman, doing remodeling, construction, and gardening. He has been with Maru Montero’s group since 1998, when he moved to Washington, D.C. He said he told his wife, who doesn’t dance, that he would quit dancing after 25 years, which gives him two more years of dancing to go. His lightness, grace, and precision come from these years of holding onto the dance even when the many pressures of adult life—marriage, a child, work, money, time—would have made quitting the easier path to take.

These dancers, and others who will be on the stage with them, have committed themselves to the dance because they love it. They, and their dances, have something to offer all of us who are humbled and inspired by the drive of the human spirit to create meaning through art, and to offer that meaning to others. That is why you should go.

Spring Break

April 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Travel - (1 Comments)

I’ve always lived in rainy places. I love the rain. I love living in the rain forest of Washington, D.C., the spring-time high water in the rivers and creeks, the way that after spring’s blossoms, the leaves burst forth and expand until they grow so large they pull the branches outward and sunlight flickers through dense green all summer long. I even love the heavy, humid summer days.

The desert is so foreign to me, and so dramatic. Since my father-in-law lives in the tri-cities area of Washington state, east of the Cascades, where there is very little rain, we visit it every year or so. I usually don’t like to drive much, but I love the road trips out of the tri-cities area and into the high desert, the vast dry scrub ringed by mountains and cut by squares of bright green crops growing in irrigated fields.

Even better, this area is a desert with rivers running through it—the Columbia, the Yakima, and the Snake. Just outside the cities is the only free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River, running through striped cliffs before it hits its first dam. We visited the free-flowing part of the river a few years ago, but none of my kids match the height limit for the boat that took us there, so this year we contented ourselves with dammed water’s controlled flow. Still, the rivers are magnificent. We rode on the Columbia on a paddle boat, drove across and back across it over beautifully spanned bridges, and watched the geese and ducks paddle along it from a river-front play ground. We also visited a dam on the Snake River and counted a few salmon going upstream in the fish ladder—although the professional counters promised us they would soon be coming through in larger numbers, my girls thrilled at the occasionally glimpse of a large shiny fish belly or side through the muddy swirling water pressing against the glass windows of the viewing area.

We also left the riverside communities and drove into down-town Pasco, which is largely Mexican-American. We literally had to cross to the other side of the tracks—in fact, we had to wait for 15 minutes for a long, empty cargo train to cross directly in front of our car. The kids counted ninety-something cars; my husband and I checked out the detailed grafitti. Downtown Pasco is something of a ghost-downtown, with too many empty sidewalks and shuttered store fronts. Our regular favorite Mexican restaurant there was closed, so we drove slowly along the few blocks, looking for someplace to eat lunch. We saw a taqueria and stopped. Although the bathroom outside of the restaurant proper almost put us off, we were so hungry we went in—and had the best tacos we’ve had in ages. The meat was so perfectly seasoned, the sauces so fine, the tortillas so thin and light. My husband is half Mexican and really nothing makes us happier than finding a good, authentic Mexican restaurant. If you’re ever in Pasco, go.

Best of all, our family got to spend a week together, all day, every day.

Oh, and the dogs did fine too. They stayed in the house. Our friend and professional dog walker, who knows about Cholula’s problems and is happy to walk her with hot-dog treats in his pocket to attract her energy when other dogs appear on the horizon, came twice a day, and my father gave them a couple of extra walks during the week. Both dogs and house were in fine condition when we returned. And the dogs were so satisfyingly thrilled to see us when we returned—or maybe, if our dogs are our mirror, it was just that we were happy to be back home. In any case, there was much leaping and racing.

Travel

April 20th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Travel - (0 Comments)

My father recently told me about a time he was in San Antonio for work and went to some botanical gardens on the edge of town to relax between meetings. He wasn’t paying attention to the time and the gardens closed and he had to scale a wall to get out and then jog two miles before he could find a
Cab. He barely made it to his 7:00 meeting. I so admire this about
My father–although it was exasperating when I was a child. He has the energy and the will to squeeze in visits to beautiful places wherever he goes, even when it is completely impractical to do so. It’s very sweet slugabed. Well, I’ve been out of town for the past six days, across the country from Washington dc, and we did our best to follow that spirit of travel, as much as we could with three children and my 85 year old father in law in tow. I’m writing this on my iPhone and who knows what the auto spell check has been inserting onto this post, so more when I get back, probably more than you ever thought you wanted to know about Kennewick and pasco, Washington.

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Moments with Cholula

April 13th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Natural Dog Training - (1 Comments)

Cholula and Pundit and I are on our regular walk around the block. Cholula’s ears are out to the side, she’s sniffing alongside Pundit, shoulders and tail relaxed. Her leash is loose. And then we hit the bottom corner of the block, about half way through our walk. THE DOG is out. THE DOG is a little white Scottie, the spitting image of the Scottie in Angus and the Ducks, one of my favorite books when I was a child. It lives in a house on a corner lot, and sometimes it is out in its side yard, which has a fence around it, and sometimes it is out in its front yard, where there is no visible barrier between it and us other than that the yard is five feet or so up from the sidewalk. During the winter, THE DOG was out less during our walks, but now that spring has come, it is often running up and down one of its two yards and barking. Although we are across the street from THE DOG, Cholula goes wild. But this time, she’s giving me her energy, so she is going wild towards me—jumping on me, pushing against my hand, compulsively biting at the food I’m offering, whinnying as I ask her to speak. And with her energy coming at me instead of THE DOG, I can see exactly what my dog trainer Kevin Behan was talking about when he interpreted Cholula’s problems for me—she is experiencing THE DOG as an intense pressure in her head—one that she would do almost anything to release. Attacking THE DOG would provide release, but since I have her energy, she’s trying to release it as she works with me, shaking her head back and forth, whining and snapping her jaw as she eats, shaking her head some more. After a minute, we move on, away from THE DOG, and within half a short block, she’s back to her relaxed self, ears on the side, sniffing alongside Pundit.

Cholula sleeps on a couch in our TV room. I know Kevin doesn’t recommend this, but we don’t have an obvious place for a dog bed on the second floor, where we all sleep, and this couch is fully depreciated anyway, so we let her sleep there. She doesn’t get on any of the other furniture anymore. (She has a dog bed on the first floor she also uses). When she first came to live with us, as soon as anyone sat on the couch with her, she would jump down. If we tried to keep her up there, she would pant, lick lips, huff and puff until we let her off—and if a person was sitting on the couch when she came into the room, she’d lie on the floor until it was clear. As she’s lived with us longer, sometimes, if she was there first, she will stay on the couch if one of us sits next to her, as long as we don’t make too much of it—but until recently, she would never have gotten on the couch if one of us was sitting there when she came into the room. But several times, recently, when I’ve been sitting on the couch writing on the computer, she’s sidled up to the couch, stepped up right next to me without asking for permission, and leant into me as she settles down. She only does this when I’m writing—if I’m checking emails or web surfing, she stays on the floor.

When we have friends over for dinner, Cholula invariably walks around and sniffs everyone, and then goes to her dog bed in the corner of the dining room and falls into a deep sleep. Pundit used to like dinner parties, but now he prefers to wait outside—Cholula could easily go outside with him or upstairs to her couch, but at every party, she chooses to sleep soundly in the midst of the commotion.

Cholula won’t play with any dog toys. But she has adopted two ju-ju pets my girls got for Christmas—toys that look like hamsters and whir and cluck. While she hunts for such animals in our back yard, she treats these ju-ju pets more like babies—carrying them around gently in her mouth, sometimes by their tails, from resting place to resting place and nestling against them as she sleeps. Sometimes she’ll sidle up to me with one of them in her mouth, wagging her tail, and if I grab it out of her mouth and run to the other end of the house, she’ll chase me, push with all her energy for her toy, and then, once she’s taken it from me, circle around me asking me to do it again.

Finally, pictured below, what a little girl and her father can get up to with Cholula when I’m out –

Princess Cholula

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DC Blossoms

April 11th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Flowers | D.C. Life - (2 Comments)

Every year, thousands trek to the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool to see Washington, D.C.’s cherry blossoms. I love the lush canopy of pink-white blossoms, the rough, gnarled, almost black trunks that spawn blossoming tendrils that dangle over the reflecting pool. I love the way the trees look like little clouds ringing the entire reflecting pool, the way they frame and reframe the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial as you walk among them. I even love the way that tourists and D.C. natives crowd that walk during cherry blossom season—go down there for even half an hour and in addition to English, you will hear Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, and a host of other languages; you will see kids running, people in wheelchairs, big dogs and little dogs, anxious elder tour groups and boisterous adolescents on school trips, families and lovers and colleagues in suits and loosened ties.

But really, you don’t have to go down there to catch the magic of early spring in D.C. The trees do not discriminate—they blossom all over the city, exuberantly thrusting forth their plumage by housing projects, crappy looking public schools, liquor stores, and bus stops. Often, during these fleeting weeks of glory, it is cold and gray, and the residents walk about hunched under jackets and hats they’d like to discard and complain about the weather. But the weather is necessary to the magic—once it really gets warm, as it did today, the blossoms surrender to the canopy of green that will blanket D.C. all summer. I tried to capture something of how irrepressible these urban trees are during my bike commute last week, when the blossoms were just past their peak. I took a photo of a magnolia tree (I think) busting forth its blossoms against Mt. Pleasant’s 7-11, where Central American men wait around each day without much to occupy them, and then as I headed generally south east through the city, stopped my bike and took a picture whenever a tree grabbed my attention. The last of these photos I took was at 4th street NW and New York Avenue, where a grafitti-bedecked trailer could not suppress the blossoming of the little trees behind it. Here are my favorites, including one of the actual cherry blossom trees at the reflecting pool, which I biked over to on the same day during lunch.

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More Unconventional Advice from My Dog Trainer Kevin Behan

April 4th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (6 Comments)

Two other pieces of unconventional advice my dog trainer Kevin Behan (www.naturaldogtraining.com) gave me when I asked him in November to give me a training program to change Cholula’s dog aggression were (1) don’t give her too much exercise, and (2) avoid other dogs.

The first one shocked me. I’ve always worked to give my dogs a lot of exercise, and I’ve always credited those efforts as being key to why my dogs Ubi (who died a few years ago, still beautiful and unbelievably limber at age 18) and Pundit (still chasing balls at almost 13, in spite of arthritis) were always so calm in the house and so healthy to good old dog ages. Both of those dogs came into my life as very high energy puppies and stayed high energy, happy, and nondestructive-to-the-house dogs with almost always at least an hour of hard exercise a day until they became quite old. And yet here was Kevin telling me I was giving my stressed-out, young adult dog—who is unpredictably aggressive to other dogs and who has dug the stuffing out of the one couch she is allowed on as well as deep holes in the yard—too much exercise. Before I talked to him, I thought the more exercise I could give her, the better. But his concept is that whenever she is out and about, all of the smells, sights, sounds, unpredictable dog encounters, and perhaps even the actual physical movement itself is charging her up internally, adding to her central problem, as Kevin sees it, that she bottles that energy up inside herself, represses it hour after hour until it unpredictably comes out as unhinged aggression in those overloaded moments when a dog on a leash approaching us triggers the release of all that inhibition she’s spent her life practicing.

His second piece of advice (avoid other dogs) was something of a relief to me because I’d already had enough bad experiences with Cholula around other dogs to grow wary of walking her too close to them. Not only did Cholula attack a little dog outside of our front yard (I wrote about this on this site before), but another time on a walk, her prong collar opened when she lunged at a chow mix and she ferociously raced into the street after it. Fortunately, the chow’s owner heroically caught Cholula, lifted her 70 pounds into the air, and threw her back at me, at which point Cholula returned. After these two incidents, even though I know it’s counter productive for me to get stressed out about other dogs out on the sidewalk when I’m with Cholula, I inevitably do. However, I often hear from people that I should “socialize” Cholula by taking her around other dogs. I know that when Kevin works with dogs with aggression problems at his farm in Vermont (he writes about this in Your Dog is Your Mirror), he does do exercises that involve the dog interacting with other dogs, so it’s not like he doesn’t think that bringing the dog into contact with other dogs is not part of the puzzle. However, what he told me was that I needed to focus on softening Cholula, helping her release her energy through sniffing and pushing and biting food (and preferably a toy too, although she won’t) while walking with me, and that just as with her getting too much exercise only 1,000 times more intense, at this point, every time she encounters another dog on a walk, even when she doesn’t react aggressively (because many times she doesn’t) she’s building up that charge that she holds inside her until at a certain moment, something in another dog on a leash provokes her to let it out all at once in an attack.

So Kevin advised me to find a regular walk where we would run into as few dogs as possible and as few unpredictable circumstances as possible, and to do that walk with her every day, avoiding the dogs that came our way. For the most part, that’s what I’ve done since then. I don’t have a perfectly closed system—I usually take her for a longer jog once a week or so, and my husband and my father periodically take her out for longer walks as well. While I always try to keep a street between me and the other dogs we see (because we always see dogs, there is no walk in my neighborhood whereby we can completely avoid dogs), my husband and father do not cross the street—they let her approach other dogs and my father even occasionally takes her to the dog run, which I won’t do, although as it’s dogs on leashes that inspire her aggression, he’s never had a problem with her at the dog run.

But generally speaking, since I spoke to Kevin, Cholula has had considerably less variety in her daily walks and considerably less exercise. Is this working? I wish that, 4 months later, I could say with more certainty that it is. I know that, generally speaking, she is now more “with” me on walks – more relaxed, spends more time sniffing with her ears out to the side and less time anxiously scanning ahead, jaw locked and ears cocked directly over her forehead. Cholula’s ears are an absolute barometer of her stress level. As shown in the photos with this post, ears to the side, good. Ears drawn completely forward, bad (the “bad ears” photo occurred because as I was taking photos of her relaxed in the back yard, a dog barked out front). Kevin added to my barometer that sniffing is good—a sign that she is taking in input about other dogs in a relaxed manner, while scanning the vista with her eyes while she strains forward is bad—a sign she is stressed and looking for a menacing dog to unload it on.

In general, things seem somewhat better. We have had many fewer incidents of her lunging at other dogs recently (although that is partly because I always keep a street between us). I’m increasingly able to avoid there being any moment when she is straining against the leash to get to another dog because I’ve gotten her to push towards me instead before she sends all her energy out towards that dog she’s glimpsed across the street. However, there are still moments where my timing is off and I lose her attention to a dog, where it is only the collar and leash keeping her from a potential attack. My husband has had some good times with Cholula recently too, where they’ve run into other dogs and she’s been relatively relaxed around them. However, every now and then he comes back from a walk furious, and I know without asking that Cholula lunged, catching him by surprise.

I was hoping that by now she’d be better than she is. I was hoping that by now I would have been more successful at training her past this problem. But I do my best to accept that we are where we are and to work with where we are, because I know that getting frustrated doesn’t help either of us. On each walk, and for each training session in the back yard, I try to forget about the setbacks or progress that may have occurred the walk or training session before and to focus on how I can positively work with her energy in the now. In that, dog training is like so many of the more difficult, more worthwhile things in my life—child rearing, for one—each moment that you have with that other being is a chance to positively connect and move forward, and no matter how many chances have been blown in the past, the now always holds the potential to get it right.

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