‘90s-Themed Zozobra Brings Hella Crowd

An unfaithful boyfriend’s shirt. A bra from a breast cancer survivor. The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump. These were just a few of the items attendees at the 98th Burning of Will Shuster’s Zozobra brought to burn in the hours leading up to the annual conflagration of woe.

Many others arrived empty-handed but ready to put their glooms in writing on topics ranging from the personal—lost love, health woes, dearly departed friends, family and pets —to the more global issues of the war in Ukraine, wildfires and, as ever, COVID-19.

Pamela Harrison traveled from Las Cruces to attend her first Zozobra in the wake of her sister’s recent death.

“Nobody else wanted to come and I said, ‘I’m coming,’” she said. “Every day is a gift. I’m letting the past go and moving on and I’m here to party.”

William Powell came to work. A cameraman with Albuquerque-based db Production Services, Powell grew up watching Zozobra from his grandmother’s nearby home.

“We used to watch everything from her back porch,” Powell said. “That’s what our family did.” His grandmother passed away a few years ago. “So I’m going to put in some gloom for her because I think that she would be proud to see me here, doing this now,” he said.

City Councilor Sig Lindell said she had written down “let’s get rid of physical pain,” because her partner has been “suffering a lot of physical pain and I wish it to go away.”

Ramirez Thomas Elementary School fourth-grade teacher George Ossorgin delivered a pouch filled with his students’ glooms.

“One of the first things they get to do as fourth grade writers is they write something that I don’t get to see; their mom doesn’t get to see; only they get to see—they don’t even have to put their name on it,” Ossorgin said. “They just write that thing that’s been bothering them and then just fold it up, put it in the bag,” and wait for it to go up in smoke with Old Man Gloom.

So it was throughout the evening at the gloom table (where this writer works each year), as some attendees arrived with pre-written glooms, while others hunkered down and made a laundry list of compounded woe. Two young women scrawled their ex-boyfriends’ names before high-fiving each other and yelling “burn” simultaneously. A young boy bemoaned the loss of his pet rat; a woman burst into tears as she recorded the grief over losing her cat. One man mentioned his dental problems; another, her father’s cancer diagnosis.

Some arrived to the yearly incineration of misery with global suffering on their minds.

Musician Karina Wilson, who performed with Mariachi Sonidos Del Monte as part of the night’s entertainment, earlier in the year ran a crowd-funding campaign for friends—also musicians—living in Ukraine, raising $2,000 to send both funds and medical supplies. They were on her mind in the hours before Zozobra, as well as those suffering closer to home.

“I think a lot about the fire victims now,” in New Mexico, she said. “That Las Vegas still doesn’t have water. And they’re not getting any rain. I’ve been thinking about the people whose houses have gotten too much rain and their houses have been washed away and their livelihoods destroyed.”

Fire also topped US Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández’s gloom list. “My gloom is quite obvious,” the New Mexico Democrat said. “That the Forest Service started two fires,” she said, referencing the controlled burns that led to both the Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires. Leger Fernández co-sponsored the Hermit’s Peak Fire Assistance Act to compensate fire victims; the US House passed the bill in July.

While this year’s Zozobra was the first without restrictions since the pandemic began, its impact continues to reverberate.

State Health Department Communications Director Jodi McGinnis Porter wrote down a succinct expletive directed at COVID-19 and deposited it in one of the evening’s gloom box.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who recently contracted COVID-19, showed up masked after testing negative for several days.

“It’s good science,” she said of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s masking recommendation. She said she was excited to be attending. “This is as close to Zozobra as I’ve ever been in my whole life,” she told SFR in a brief interview above the field in the shadow of the giant puppet.

That being said, COVID-19 remained front of mind and at the top of her gloom list.

“COVID-anxiety, I need it lifted forever,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it goes away, but I need the anxiety lifted away.”

Mayor Alan Webber also referenced COVID-19 as his number one gloom for 2022.

“My gloom is the people we lost, trying to remember, get better, heal up and give people a chance to come back together,” he said.

Come together they did. Event organizers estimate just over 71,000 people attended this year’s Zozobra—a figure based on drone footage estimates, outpacing the record-setting 2019 pre-COVID burn when 63,000 people went.

Big crowds brought a visible police presence, with Santa Fe Police Department reporting close to 200 law enforcement personnel on site. Deputy Police Chief Matthew Champlin told SFR via email Saturday morning Zozobra was “overall a quiet night,” with “no arrests, no citations and no major incidents that I’m aware of.” Two 11-year-old girls were briefly lost by their mother during the “lights out” portion of the pre-burn performance, “but this was resolved within about 10-15 minutes and the two girls were located safely.” Earlier in the evening, at approximately 5 pm, “two protesters with signs utilized a bull horn” by the Scottish Rite Temple, but “this didn’t cause an issue and was allowed,” Champlin wrote.

The evening featured ‘90s-era music as part of event hosts Santa Fe Kiwanis Club’s Decades Project, with songs such as “What’s Up,” by 4 Non Blondes, “Creep” by Radiohead and “Baila Esta Cumbia” by Selena (plus a whole lot of other earworms). The Zozobra house band played a zippy “Come as You Are” by Nirvana as the fire dancing began.

Zozobra Event Chairman Ray Sandoval added his own personal touches to the 50-foot marionette, including tattooed sleeves and his first-ever comb-over. “He’s never had combed-over, messy hair,” Sandoval said.

Sandoval says he views The Decades Project, in which Zozobra morphs to reflect specific eras leading up to 2024′s 100th anniversary, as a continuation of the creativity that sparked artist Will Shuster and his peers to create the tradition in the first place.

“This was a group of artists that were experimenting and doing things,” Sandoval said, noting that when Shuster bequeathed Zozobra to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe in 1964, he provided a standardized formula for building the puppet because he saw, at the time, “a lack of artistic ability” in the club. That’s changed in the decades since. “Now as we’re going back to what he did in the ‘20s and the ‘30s and the ‘40s, people are getting a little uncomfortable because they think we’re messing with their tradition,” Sandoval noted, “but the way a tradition stays new is you have to breathe in new life. This is live theater. Zozobra is created from all the gloom from that year. He has to be relevant. And the way that he’s relevant is, he has to change and adapt.”

As for Sandoval’s gloom this year: “I’m tired of us seeing each other as labels. We don’t see each other as human beings anymore. Our political system is disaster… and both sides are responsible for that. I don’t agree with a lot of stuff on the right, but I think that we just need to understand that we’re all human beings. This is what this is all about…we cause gloom in ourselves…we cause and put gloom in the world. We all want to be loved. We all want to be cared for. I just wish we could get to a point where we could trust each other once again.”