Community and Catharsis

How do you sew a costume for a 50-foot marionette? Twenty feet at a time, this year’s Zozobra seamstresses said.

Jodi McGinnis Porter and Carol McGiffin worked weekends and two nights a week for approximately a month, ultimately employing 800 yards of thread to stitch 174 yards of waffle weave fabric Zozobra Event Chairman Ray Sandoval special-ordered from England that was shipped over in bolts.

“It was fun,” McGinnis Porter said. “It was a tricky fabric because of the stretch,” she noted, but McGiffin, a seasoned theater and costume professional—though a first-time Zozobra volunteer—”figured it out and I just did what she told me.”

The costume’s hem contained a special tribute this year. Zozobra Archivist Chair and soon-to-be Santa Fe Kiwanis President Ned Harris designated the spot for a sheaf of condolence cards he received from friends and loved ones after his wife Elizabeth Harris, Zozobra’s official seamstress, died in March 2022.

“I can think of no better way to send the cards to her,” Harris said early in the evening of Sept. 1, the 99th burning of Zozobra.

Conceived and first created by artist William Howard “Will” Shuster, Jr. in 1924 and bequeathed to the Santa Fe Kiwanis Club in 1964, Zozobra has grown in size—as has the audience who witnesses his demise—but the Kiwanis Club remains true to Shuster’s blueprints in constructing the giant effigy to gloom from wood, fabric and wire.

This year’s Construction Chairman Jacob Romero took on the job for the first time after many years of working on the giant puppet.

“It went very well,” he said of the construction, which began with just a small group of workers and a pile of lumber in a room at Santa Fe Place Mall last June. Transporting Zozobra out of the mall Friday morning and through the city to Fort Marcy Park “as stressful as it was,” he told SFR, “was a very smooth process. And now that he’s up, looking at me, I’m just ecstatic.”

Romero also participated in the tradition of writing down his gloom—health issues he’s going through—to burn inside of Zozobra—in his case, he wrote his gloom “on the two-by-fours that I cut.”

While many glooms come in paper form, this year’s gloom haul included two wedding dresses, both dropped off at this year’s ZoZoFest the week prior to the burning.

Zozobra Press Liaison Lisa Jaramillo spoke with both people who brought the dresses and shared their stories with SFR. In one recorded interview, the woman said she used part of her 2009 wedding dress for her daughter’s first Holy Communion gown after she divorced. “Now it’s time to get rid of the rest of it,” she said, “to move forward and enjoy my life now…it was a good time and a good marriage, but then it ended and now I’m moving forward.”

The other woman relayed to Jaramillo that she had been in an abusive relationship from which it took her seven years to extricate herself and she delivered the dress with a message for other survivors and victims of domestic abuse—which is they can find the strength to leave and support is available for them (find resources and a 24-hour crisis phone numbers on Esperanza Shelter’s website: esperanzashelter.org).

Throughout the evening as temperatures cooled and the crowds grew, attendees wrote down and dropped off glooms at the Gloom Table (where this writer volunteers each year), in advance of Zozobra’s fiery final exit.

Jen Perez, a security volunteer at this year’s event, stuffed the veterinarian’s bill from her cat Phoebe’s surgery into a gloom box. Phoebe had to have her leg amputated after it failed to heal properly from a fall. “It’s pretty sad, but she’s doing really well,” Perez said.

One young woman leaned on the table pondering her gloom before asking how to spell “insecurities.” Another deposited a traditional headdress worn by men in Saudi Arabia to represent the oppression of women, she said.

St. Michael’s High School teacher Lisa Blea-Ortiz brought a packet of glooms written by her middle-school students. “I always have my students write glooms and I bring them here,” she said, “because our emotional and mental health are so important…I really focus on that in my teaching, and on the history of Zozobra.”

Kiwanis celebrated that history over the last 10 years through the Decades Project, conceived by Sandoval as a way of paying tribute to Shuster’s enduring invention in a lead-up to next year’s 100th anniversary.

For this year’s commemoration of the 2000 and 2010s, Sandoval said organizers looked to the movies. “The movies gave us our inspiration, because Harry Potter covered almost the entire decade,” Sandoval told SFR. “And so what does our little monster show up as? An evil wizard. He is the Dark Lord of the arts.”

To that end, this year’s Zozobra held a wand in one hand and, indeed, the night held many magical moments leading up to the traditional Fire Dance following the battle between Good (Hogwarts-attired Torch Bearers) and Bad (the Gloomies). The Zozobra band accompanied the final show-down with a medley of hits from the aughts and originals.

Sandoval knows Zozobra’s changing appearance for the last 10 years has spawned some criticism—and he sees a bright side to those gripes.

“What I love about it is the Decades Project got people to be reengaged,” he said. “Even if you hated the Decades Project, you had an opinion, right? One of the things that we can never do is take our traditions for granted. And when you build the Zozobra, and you put the black tie on him and the same Gloomies come out and wave their arms, and they bow three times…at some point, the tradition loses its magic. And so in order to add magic back, I think the Decades Project was really a huge success.”

But for those yearning for a more traditional show, Sandoval says the 100th anniversary production next year will satisfy those urges.

“We’re still going to have a lot of fanfare, because it’s the 100th,” Sandoval said. “So, Zozobra will be dressed to the nines, but you’re going to see a more traditional Zozobra and you’re going to see a more traditional show as well.”

Share your Zozobra memories and photographs for the 100th anniversary here: burnzozobra.com/decades-project/