A heart filled with LOVE & CANDY Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Love was in the air, dangling by a rope from a crane, parked in the dirt lot next to the home of the most beloved woman in New Mexico and her king of hearts. For six months, this king — we know him as Lonnie Anderson — asked the kind folks at a South Valley candy store to help him carry out the first phase of his annual grand gesture of love for his wife of 18 years, Anne Bolger-Witherspoon.
The store, Karamelo Dulcería at 1548 Bridge SW, also sells piñatas, and Anderson commissioned one in the shape of a pink Sweetheart candy emblazoned with his wife’s first name.
Each day, he asked the dulcería to hang the pink piñata heart among the other piñatas displayed outside along the shop’s awning. Because the dulcería is on the route Anne takes to and from the family’s home, she saw her personalized piñata every day — and so did everybody else who passed by.
That’s an important thing to Anderson, this sharing of affection and joy, this public symbol not only of his love for his wife but for his South Valley community, for Albuquerque — heck, for the world.
“I have faith in humanity,” says Anderson, an affable man who speaks
in a series of laughs and excitement. “I have seen the most beautiful things.”
This year’s most beautiful thing for Anne was not just her daily drive past the pink piñata, but the reveal Tuesday of a giant 10-foot-tall pink piñata with her name on it, hoisted in the air.
For weeks, Anderson and his two daughters, Hawthorn, 15, and Cheyenne, 11, toiled away in a neighbor’s garage, fashioning the huge heart out of cardboard boxes used in shipping refrigerators to Baillio’s, tie-down straps and layers of papier-mâché made with 20 newspapers, flour and water.
An estimated 300 sheets of pink tissue paper were cut and applied, and “ANNE” was painted on the front of the heart in red.
In addition, Cheyenne created about 40 giant pieces of candy to fit inside the heart, using balloons and cellophane painted with remarkably accurate labels for Lemonheads, Hershey’s Miniatures, Dubble Bubble and Tootsie Rolls.
“As usual, this was 10 times harder than I thought it was going to be,” Anderson says with a chuckle. “Every time I do this, I think I’m in way over my head, something is going to go wrong, and yet it always comes out amazing.”
That, he said, is because of the help he gets from the community and beyond.
The working carousel he set up in their yard one year, for example, came about because the carousel’s owner’s wife loved the idea.
A poetry reading organized for another Valentine’s Day was a success because famed writers Rudolfo Anaya and Jimmy Santiago Baca volunteered.
One year, he asked people around the world to hold up “I Love Anne” signs and send the photos to her, and the photos came pouring in — including one from a young man who risked his life by standing with his sign on a hillside of war-torn Syria as two of his friends stood guard with rifles.
Anderson said he tried to discourage the young man from participating in the project because of the danger, but the young man replied: “The only thing worth risking your life for is true love.”
It happens like that every year. Whether it’s creating 30-foot-tall flowers out of butcher paper, a giant Sweetheart candy imprinted with Anne’s name painted on a building, an e.e. cummings poem spelled out in pebbles across a dirt lot or last year’s feat of using industrial-strength projectors to cast dozens of images of affection for Anne on the side of a three-story building Downtown, Anderson said he has found that people love to help because they love love.
“Every year, I think that people will think I’m the craziest person in the world,” he said. “And maybe they do, but they are always awesome.”
This year, for example, the Karamelo Dulcería manager agreed to hang up the Anne piñata each day because she found the idea romantic, he said. Baillio’s saved the refrigerator boxes for him. His neighbor cleared out his garage to make room for the construction of the giant piñata and came up with the idea of using tiedown straps to fortify the creation.
And Mountain States Crane agreed to lend for free the boom truck crane that lifted the humongous heart 10 feet in the air, high enough for Anne to pull a rope attached to a bottom hatch to release the candy.
The only cooperation Anderson lacked this year was from the weather. Nasty winds expected on Valentine’s Day are the reason the grand piñata reveal was moved up to Tuesday.
Anderson estimates that this year’s project, like every project before, cost him about the same as a fancy dinner for two and a bouquet of roses.
Which just goes to show you that love doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but with work, cooperation and creativity, the results can be priceless.