Events celebrate ‘soft-spoken’ ABQ poet/playwright
Tony Mares helped bring cultures together in NM
During his 76 years, Tony Mares sent words dancing with ideas, joy dancing with sorrow, and humans dancing with that bony-faced woman, Death.
Two years after the Albuquerque poet and playwright’s death, Teatro Paraguas will bring his words to life once again in “Rio del Corazon: The Magic of Tony Mares.” Readings of his poems and a performance of his short play, “Lola’s Last Dance,” will take place Jan. 19-21 at the group’s theater in Santa Fe and again Jan. 27-29 at the Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque.
Argos MacCallum, Teatro Paraguas executive director, described Mares as “a very soft-spoken, friendly guy,” but one with a muscular political and social conscience.
“He was very aware of race and ethnicity,” MacCallum said, noting that Mares grew up with Irish roots on his father’s side, but also a Hispanic lineage that traced to the 1700s. Growing up in Albuquerque, MacCallum said, Mares resisted the financial opportunities of caddying at the country club because he was disturbed when noticing that
all golfers were Anglo and all caddies were Hispanic.
He was an “anarchist/ socialist” who valued all cultures, but believed they would get along much better without the boundaries drawn by nation-states, according to MacCallum, who got to know Mares after he participated in a 2009 Teatro Paraguas tribute to Angel Gonzalez, a poet in Spain during the Franco era.
Noting that Mares often sprinkled both Spanish and English in his poems, MacCallum said he feels that Mares and bilingual poet Jim Sagel “did a lot to bring the cultures together here in New Mexico.”
Mares, who taught at the University of New Mexico, and other colleges in New Mexico, Arkansas, Texas and Colorado, studied history, but moved to literature because, according to MacCallum, “he felt the best way to communicate was through poetry... every word means so much,” and could open readers and listeners to a way of sharing the human experience.
A number of Mares’ poems mention his daughter, who died when she was only 21, according to MacCallum. Others can take on topics as diverse as flirting with death, Greek food in Albuquerque, a woman who was hanged in Las Vegas, N.M., for stabbing a brother-in-law after he made unwanted advances, and a visit to Mares’ 90-year-old aunt in a nursing home.
While bound to a wheelchair and bed, he imagines her dancing inside her self: “She is dancing toward the bright light./She is dancing toward Bethlehem/ Deep in the interior of the nursing home.”
And that fits handin-glove with the short play, “Lola’s Last Dance,” that was commissioned by La Companía de Albuquerque and produced in 1979. Its central character is an old prostitute, based on retired women of that profession whom Mares encountered growing up in Albuquerque’s Old Town, MacCallum said. “Albuquerque was a big railroad town,” he said of the ’20s and ’30s in the Duke City. “It had a considerable red light district.”
Lola, who will be played by Josefina Melinda “JoJo” Sena de Tarnoff, is a vital and irreverent character who recalls the various people she had known, who take life onstage from her doll collection. Those include a politician, a priest, a businessman and a rag-andbone man, the only one she truly loved, because he was the only man who was truly free of the artifice and role-playing that shackled the others.
Noting how other men, after a post-coital cuddle, lose that moment of love to return to their roles, Lola says, “Only the rare ones, los raros, the poets and the picaros, the rogues like Florinto and also the locos, the magnificent crazies of this world, have that sense of beauty and wonder forever.”
Even as she approaches death, she speaks of the urge for one last dance, incorporating all the sadness and joys, the vibrancy and music of life into magical motion:
“I want to die dancing. Everything dances. The stars dance. Bears dance. The light dances in the eyes of people when they are thinking of making love. The rain dances through the sky, driven by the wind, and the wind makes a whistling sound when it dances through the trees.”