Heads bowed in prayer? No - maybe thoughtful reverence. Part of this evening's audience at the Eliza Gilkyson concert in the Santa Fe bandstand series in the Plaza - how good to live some of the year somewhere that puts on a series of free summer concerts. It will have to stand in for all the pictures that I wish I could have taken, but was hardly in a position to. This sedate group doesn't begin to encapsulate the way in which half the crowd could have modeled for Richard Avedon - or inhabited a long-time Santa Fe novel. And I don't just mean the long grey pony tails (on both sexes) and turquoise jewelry; but the woman happily dancing with her dog; and the elderly weatherbeaten Latino standing in front of me with a former rattlesnake as a belt (seeing me staring at it, and guessing rightly that I wasn't staring at his crotch, he mimed how the snake had sunk its fangs into his wrist - I guess he'd got his revenge); or the homeless Navajo who was wearing a backwards baseball cap with the drawing of a lipstick kiss and the legend No Need for Mistletoe, who had a short dance and then retreated to a safe distance from which he could occasionally, and loudly, interject Praise the Lord. Or the people dragging on their cigarette substitute thingies, and the assortment of elderly broomstick skirts and tie die and - yes - even an apparently non ironic Che Guevera t-shirt. And Gilkyson was, indeed, such a good performer - even if she no longer lives in Santa Fe (she's been an Austin resident for some years), she still comes across very much as a local.
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